some of the 280 interviews that I had conducted previously for Merchants of Culture. I am very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York, which funded the research from 2013 to 2019 (Grant 11300709) and enabled me to spend extended periods of time in the field, and grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, which funded the earlier research (RES-000-22-1292). I am also very grateful to the many organizations which opened their doors to me, gave me access to their staff and, in some cases, their data; most sources of data are acknowledged in the text, although there are instances where data were provided on condition that the source remains anonymous and, where this is the case, I have scrupulously honoured this commitment. Above all, I am deeply grateful to the many individuals who gave very generously of their time, allowing me to interview them, sometimes repeatedly over several years: I simply could not have written this book without their help. I have quoted directly from only a small proportion of these interviews, and only a fraction of the organizations I studied are used as case studies in the book, but every interview was invaluable in terms of deepening my understanding of a world in flux and the many players who are active, or were active, in it. Most of the individuals I interviewed remain anonymous and I often use pseudonyms when referring both to individuals and to companies. But there are occasions when the real names of interviewees and their companies are used, always with their consent, simply because their stories are so unique that it would be impossible to write about them with any degree of rigour and preserve anonymity. When the real name of an individual is used, the full name is given – first name plus surname – on the first occasion of use. When I use a pseudonym, by contrast, I use an invented first name only – Tom, Sarah, etc. – on the first and subsequent occasions. When I use a pseudonym for a company, I put the pseudonym in inverted commas on the first occasion of use – ‘Everest’, ‘Olympic’, etc. (Again, these conventions and the rationale are explained more fully in appendix 2.)
On those occasions where I quoted from interviews with individuals who are given their real names in the text, I subsequently wrote to these individuals, sent them the text I had written about them and/or their organization, and gave them the opportunity to comment on it: many did so, sometimes in considerable detail, and I took account of their comments in the final version of the text. I am very grateful to these individuals for their willingness to read these texts and provide me with feedback. I am also very grateful to Michael Cader, Angus Phillips and Michael Schudson who read the entire text, and to Jane Friedman and Michele Cobbs who read the chapters dealing with their areas of expertise (self-publishing and audiobooks, respectively): they provided me with many helpful comments and suggestions and saved me from numerous errors and oversights. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own. I am grateful to Leigh Mueller for her meticulous copyediting and to the many people at Polity – including Neil de Cort, Rachel Moore, Evie Deavall, Julia Davies, Clare Ansell, Sue Pope, Sarah Dobson, Breffni O’Connor, Adrienn Jelinek, Clara Ross, Madeline Sharaga, Emma Longstaff, Lydia Davis and Lucas Jones – who steered this book through the publication process. My thanks, finally, to Mirca and Alex, who displayed uncommon patience and understanding over the years when this book was in gestation and who endured a very cold winter in New York while some of the research was being done: this book is for them, small recompense for the many sacrifices they made while it was being written.
J. B. T., Cambridge
INTRODUCTION
Andy Weir couldn’t believe his luck. He always wanted to be a writer and he started writing fanfiction when he was 9. But, being a sensible young man, he doubted he could make a living as a writer, so he trained to be a software engineer and became a computer programmer instead. As a resident of Silicon Valley, this turned out to be a wise decision, and he had a successful career as a programmer for twenty-five years. But he never gave up his dream of being a writer and he continued to write stories in his spare time. He even had a go in the late 1980s at writing a book and trying to get it published, but no one was interested: ‘It was the standard struggling author’s story, couldn’t get any interest – publishers weren’t interested, no agent wanted to represent me, it just wasn’t meant to be.’ Undeterred, Andy continued to write in his spare time – writing was his hobby. As the internet became more prevalent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he set up a website and began posting his stories online. He had a mailing list that people could sign up to, and he sent them an email whenever he posted a new story. Over a period of ten years, he gradually built up a list of some 3,000 email addresses. Then he started writing serial fiction, posting a chapter at a time on his website and letting his readers know. One of these stories was about a manned space mission to Mars. Being a software engineer, Andy was interested in problem-solving, and he began to think, ‘OK, what if something goes wrong, how do we make sure the crew survives? What if two things go wrong, what do we do then? And suddenly I realized I had a story.’ He wrote in the evenings and at weekends, whenever he had spare time and felt the urge, and when he finished a chapter he posted it on his website. His readers became very engaged in the story and picked him up on some of the technical details about the physics or the chemistry or the maths of a manned mission to Mars, and he would go back and fix it. This active engagement with his readers spurred him on. Chapter by chapter, the story unfolded of an unfortunate astronaut, Mark Watney, who had been knocked unconscious by a violent dust storm shortly after arriving on Mars and woke up to discover that his crewmates had taken him for dead and made an emergency escape without him, leaving Mark alone to survive indefinitely on a remote planet with limited supplies of food and water and no way to communicate with Earth.
After the last chapter of The Martian had been posted on his website, Andy was ready to move on to another project, but he started getting emails from some of his readers saying, ‘Hey, I really love The Martian but I hate reading it in a web browser. Can you make an e-reader version?’ So Andy figured out how to do that – it wasn’t too hard for a software engineer – and he posted an ePub and a Mobi file on his website so that people could download it for free. Then he started getting emails from people saying, ‘Thanks, I really appreciate that you put up e-reader formats, but I’m not very technically savvy and I don’t know how to download a file from the internet and put it on my e-reader. Can you just put it up as a Kindle?’ So Andy did that too – filled in the form on Amazon, uploaded the file and, presto, there it was on the Amazon site, now available as a Kindle ebook. Andy wanted to give it away for free but Amazon require you to put a price on your ebook, so he chose the lowest price that Amazon allowed, 99¢. He sent an email out to his readers and said, ‘There you are everybody, you can read it for free on my website, you can download the free ePub or Mobi version from my website or you can pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you’, and to his surprise more people bought it from Amazon than downloaded it for free. The ebook swiftly moved up Amazon’s bestseller list, reaching number one in the sci-fi category and staying there for quite some time. Pretty soon the book was selling about 300 copies a day, but, having never published a book before, Andy had no idea whether this was good, bad or indifferent. He was just pleased that it was getting good customer reviews and lingering in the number one spot for sci-fi on Kindle.
Then something happened that he never expected. One day he got an email from an agent who said, ‘I think we could get your book into print and if you don’t have an agent, I’d like to represent you.’ Andy couldn’t believe it. Some years earlier, he had written to agents all over the country, begging them to represent him, and no one wanted to know. Now he gets an email out of the blue from an agent who is offering to represent him, and he didn’t even have to ask. ‘I’m like, wow.’
What Andy didn’t know at the time is that, 3,000 miles away in New York, a science-fiction editor at Crown, an imprint of Random House, had been browsing around some of his favourite internet sci-fi sites, as he did from time to time when things were a little slow, and he had come across several mentions of The Martian, so he decided to check it out. He noticed it was number one on the Kindle sci-fi bestseller list and it had lots of good customer reviews, so he bought a copy, dipped into it and liked what he read, though he wasn’t sure what to make of all the hard science. He had a phone call lined up with an agent friend of his and, in the course of the conversation, he mentioned
