Writing at Arcade, Andrew Goldstone has a post on the apparent lack of connection between the study of literature and the study of book publishing. The post consists of a summary of the central arguments from John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, which I’ve not read, as framed by Goldstone’s bemusement.
Thus, literary scholars “are much more used to making arguments about the product than the process. And Thompson’s attention to publishing turns out not to require much specificity about the products—that is, the texts of books, or even the way readers read books.” Thompson writes about literary agents, publishers, and retailers, not about writers much less those creatures of mystery, readers:
Thompson repeatedly emphasizes that one of the distinguishing traits of publishing as a business is the unpredictability of the success of any given book. Selling books is not like selling widgets, because readers’ taste remains, in the view even of the sales executives and marketing managers of big publishing corporations, very hard to predict. Only top author “brands” and certain very well-defined genres have any predictability of reader response, but these domains of lesser uncertainty are not enough to sustain the big publishers’ business.
In that respect, the book business is like the movie business, as Robert De Vany has demonstrated in Hollywood Economics. The people whose business depends on the sale of books, or movie admissions, don’t know how to predict behavior in their marketplace. It’s opaque to them.
The upshot of this is that Goldstone finds himself fascinated by Thompson’s analysis, but
emphatically at sea about how to appropriate his work for literary scholarship.... The questions are: What can we say about the books that are produced, and the ways those books are appropriated, when we know what Thompson and other analysts have to tell us about the logic of publishing? Or, better yet: how would literary scholarship have to change in order to analyze intelligibly the relation between the field of publishing and the literary field? What are the questions to which the answers would include both arguments and data from Thompson’s repertoire and arguments and data from the literary-historical repertoire?
My basic response to those questions was: But why WOULD you think that the field of publishing and the literary field have anything to do with one another?
In posing that question I am assuming that the logic of book publishing is more or less transparent to the forces governing the circulation of literary texts in a society. Whatever those forces are, book publishing does not resist them. Rather, it channels them and extracts a fee from them for the service.
In a similar way, printing is transparent to book publishing. Paper doesn’t care what’s impressed on it, printing plates don’t care what’s engraved on them, and printers don’t care what they print as long as the bill is paid. That’s what I mean by transparency.
But, is book publishing really transparent to literary forces in that way? That’s a tricky question.
One case that I’d considered was that of samizdat publishing in the former Soviet bloc nations. Government censorship created a situation where people wanted to read materials that couldn’t be legitimately published. So people surreptitiously copied texts by hand or by various mechanical means and distributed them in secret.
One might argue, however, that censorship is not inherent in publishing, but is rather an external constraint on publishing. Well . . . Censorship is certainly not inherent in the logic of printing, but publishing is different from printing. Publishing requires judgment over that materials to publishing, and censorship can be thought of as a constraint on that judgment.
But such judgments can be complex and subtle. It is not difficult to imagine, at least in the abstract, that agents, editors, and retailers, might offer unfavorable judgments on texts for which there would, in fact, be a market and therefore an opportunity to make money. And making money, after all, is what’s at the heart of book publishing. The dollar you make from a book that’s not to your taste has the same value as one you make from a book you like but it is, I suspect, rather difficult to make judgments about a taste that is alien to your own.
To the extent that the population of judgment-makers within publishing is different from the book-reading public, that public is likely to be poorly served. But would you study this? And how do you account for the fact that sometimes people don’t know they want something until it becomes available to them? Who knew that they wanted to read book about juvenile wizards-in-training until Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published?
That book, of course, became a best-seller, but getting it off the ground was not easy. It was a surprise best-seller, one of those fortunate accidents the economist Nassim Taleb calls a Black Swan.
But I’m interested is something more mundane. Why do publishers like books that sell lots of copies? It’s not simply that they bring in lots of money. If the books are sold at the same price each, the sale of a million copies of one title doesn’t bring in any more money than the sale of 10,000 copies of each of 100 titles. But, the production costs of 100 titles are higher than those of a single title. Roughly speaking, it costs the same to acquire and manage a title whether it sells 100 copies or 100,000 copies; and set-up costs for the printer are the same. But it’s difficult to amortize those fixed costs over sales of 100 copies while they all but vanish in sales of 100,000 copies. Thus it is more profitable to sell many copies each of a few titles than a few copies each of many titles.
It is thus not surprising that Goldstone reports Thompson as saying that publishers are increasing their emphasis on producing best sellers. That follows from the internal logic of the business. But that logic’s always been there. The trick is to spot the manuscripts with the potential to become best-sellers. No one’s reduced that to a formula, nor, I suspect, will that ever be possible.
A final thought: To the extent that the marketplace is opaque to the publishing industry, that industry will be transparent to forces animating literary culture. As long as the marketplace is opaque, publishers have to take chances, and those chances are opportunities for literary culture.
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