take a look and let him know what he thought. He did, loved it (‘I was just blown away by it’ – the hard science appealed to his geeky nature), got in touch with Andy and signed him up. This was an agent who was accustomed to finding new authors online, sometimes by reading an interesting article on the internet and getting in touch with the author, sometimes by coming across a self-published book on Amazon that looked interesting, so he knew how to navigate this terrain. Out of courtesy to the editor who had called this book to his attention, the agent got back in touch with him and gave him a little time to consider it as an exclusive. The editor sent it around to a few of his colleagues at Crown and asked them to look at it over the weekend; they liked it too, and on Monday they made a generous offer to pre-empt the book and take it off the table. Andy was thrilled and the deal was done. ‘It was a no-brainer’, said Andy; ‘it was more money than I make in a year in my current job, and that was just the advance.’
At around the same time, a small film production company had also spotted The Martian on the Kindle bestseller list and got in touch with Andy, who put them in touch with his new agent. The agent contacted his film co-agent and they used the interest of the small production company to pique the interest of Fox, who snapped up the film rights and announced that the movie would be directed by Ridley Scott with Matt Damon in the lead. With publishing rights now sold to Random House and a Hollywood blockbuster in the works, the scouts began to work their magic with foreign publishers. The buzz machine was spinning and it ramped up quickly. Before long, rights were sold in thirty-one international territories and Andy’s substantial advance was earned out before the book was even published.
To Andy, who was oblivious to these distant conversations, the sudden interest in his book seemed somewhat unreal. He was at work the week that the deals with Random House and Fox were done, in his programming cubicle as usual, and he had to go to a conference room to take a call about the movie deal. ‘It’s like, hey, out of nowhere, all of your dreams are going to come true. It was so unbelievable that I literally didn’t believe it. I hadn’t actually met any of these people, it was all just emails and phone calls, and in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “This might just be a scam.”’ It only hit home when the contract finally arrived and the return address was Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY, and then the cheque for the advance arrived. ‘I thought, “If this is a scam, they’re very bad at it.”’
Once the deal with Random House was done, Andy was asked to take down the Kindle edition, which he did. The text was lightly edited and then sent out to various prominent authors for pre-publication blurbs – the responses were amazing. An array of well-known sci-fi authors raved about this new addition to their genre. All of this helped the editor to get people talking about the book, generate excitement inside the house and encourage the sales reps to get behind the book and push it when they met with the buyers at the major retail outlets – critical factors in the attempt to make a book stand out from the thousands of new titles that are published every week. The Random House edition of The Martian was eventually published as a hardcover and ebook in February 2014 and went straight onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for six weeks. A glowing review in the Wall Street Journal described it as ‘utterly compelling … This is techno sci-fi at a level even Arthur Clarke never achieved.’ The paperback edition was released in October 2014 and again went quickly onto the New York Times bestseller list, reaching the number one spot and remaining on the list well into 2015.
There was something remarkable and unprecedented about Andy’s success: through a series of metamorphoses, a text that started life as a blog on someone’s personal website ended up as an international bestseller and a blockbuster film and, with it, a life and a career were transformed. A generation earlier, none of this would have been possible and a talent like Andy’s might well have gone undiscovered. That was one of the many upsides of the digital revolution in publishing: thanks to the internet, talent could be discovered in new ways and a writer who had been beavering away in relative obscurity could suddenly be catapulted into international stardom. Everyone gains – writer, publisher, millions of readers all over the world. But, remarkable though Andy’s success was, this was only one side of the story. The very changes that had enabled Andy to realize his childhood dream were wreaking havoc in an industry that had operated in pretty much the same way for as long as anyone could remember. The industry by which Andy was so pleased to be embraced had, largely unbeknown to Andy, become a battleground where powerful new players were disrupting traditional practices and challenging accepted ways of doing things, all facilitated by a technological revolution that was as profound as anything the industry had experienced in the five centuries since Gutenberg. The astonishing success of The Martian – from blog to bestseller – epitomizes the paradox of the digital revolution in publishing: unprecedented new opportunities are opened up, both for individuals and for organizations, while beneath the surface the tectonic plates of the industry are shifting. Understanding how these two movements can happen simultaneously, and why they take the form that they do, is the key to understanding the digital revolution in publishing.
The digital revolution first began to make itself felt in the book publishing industry in the 1980s. At this time, the world of Anglo-American trade publishing was dominated by three sets of players that had become increasingly powerful in the period since the 1960s: the retail chains, the literary agents and the publishing corporations.1 The rise of the retail chains began in the US in the late 1960s with the emergence of B. Dalton Booksellers and Waldenbooks, two bookselling chains that took root in the suburban shopping malls that were becoming increasingly prevalent at that time, as the middle classes moved out of city centres into the expanding suburbs. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, these mall-based bookstores were eclipsed and eventually absorbed by the so-called book superstore chains, especially Barnes & Noble and Borders, which competed ferociously with one another throughout the 1980s and 1990s as they rolled out their superstores across America. Unlike the mall-based bookstores, these book superstore chains located their stores in prime city locations with large floor areas to maximize stock-holding capacity. The stores were designed as attractive retail spaces that would be welcoming and unthreatening to individuals who were not accustomed to going into a traditional bookstore – clean, spacious, well-lit spaces with sofas and coffee shops, areas to relax and read and no need to check in bags as you entered or left the store. Similar developments occurred in the UK with the rise of Dillons and Waterstones, two book retail chains that competed with one another and with WH Smith, the general high-street newsagent and stationer, in the 1980s and 1990s, until Dillons was eventually absorbed into Waterstones.
The result of these and similar developments (such as the increasing role of mass merchandisers and supermarkets as retail outlets for books) was that, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, a substantial proportion of books published by trade publishers were being sold through retail chains that, between them, controlled a large and growing share of the market. The market share of the retail chains put them in a very strong position when it came to negotiating terms with publishers, as the scale of their commitment to a book, and whether they were willing to feature it in front-of-store displays and at what cost, could make a big difference to the visibility and success of a title. The independent bookstores, by contrast, experienced a steep decline. Hundreds were forced into bankruptcy during the 1990s, unable to compete with the extensive stock range and aggressive discounting of the large retail chains. That was the retail setting of the book trade when a small internet start-up called Amazon opened for business from a suburban garage in Seattle in July 1995.
The second key development that shaped the field of Anglo-American trade publishing in the late twentieth century was the growing power of literary agents. Of course, literary agents were not new – they had been around since the late nineteenth century. But for much of the first century of their existence, literary agents had understood their role as intermediaries who were bringing together authors and publishers and negotiating deals that both parties would regard as fair and reasonable. This self-conception of the literary agent began to change in the 1970s and early 1980s as a new breed of agent – what I call the super-agent – began to appear in the publishing field. Unlike most agents, many of whom had previously worked in publishing houses, the new super-agents were outsiders in the world
