content acquisition and list-building. This is in many ways the key function of the publisher: to acquire and, indeed, help to create the content that will be turned into the books that comprise the publisher’s list. The publisher acts not just as a filter or gatekeeper but in many cases plays an active role in creating or conceiving a project, or in seeing the potential of something and helping the author bring it to fruition. Some of the best publishers are those who are able to come up with good ideas for books and find the right authors to write them, or who are able to turn what might be a rather inchoate idea in the mind of an author into something special, or who are simply able to see potential where others see only dross. There is a real skill here that involves a blending together of intellectual creativity and marketing nous, and that distinguishes outstanding editors and publishers from those who are run of the mill.
The second function is financial investment and risk-taking. The publisher acts as the banker who makes resources available up front, both to pay advances to authors and agents and to cover the costs of acquisition, development and production. In the entire publishing chain it is only the publisher, in the last analysis, who takes the real financial risks – everyone else gets paid (assuming that the author has received an advance on royalties and that the publisher has paid the bills). If the book fails to sell, it is the publisher who writes down any unsold stock and writes off any unearned advance. In the book publishing chain, the publisher is the creditor of last resort.
The third and fourth functions are content development and quality control. In some cases the content provided by an author is in excellent condition and needs very little input from the publisher, but in many areas of publishing this is the exception rather than the rule. Draft manuscripts are commonly revised and developed in the light of comments from editors and others. It is also the responsibility of the publisher to assess the quality of the text and to ensure that it meets certain standards. These standards will of course vary from one publisher to another and a variety of assessment procedures may be used, ranging from the judgement of in-house editors to evaluations by one or more external readers who are specialists in the field (although in trade publishing it is rare to go out of house). Quality control is important for the publisher because it is one of the key means by which they are able to build a distinctive profile and brand in the publishing field and thereby distinguish themselves from other houses.
The fifth function is what could be loosely described as management and coordination. This label describes a range of management activities that are an integral part of the publishing process, from the management of specific projects which may be exceptionally complex to the management of specific activities or phases in the life cycle of the book. For example, even if copy-editing is outsourced to freelancers, the freelancers must be given work and instructions, their terms of work must be agreed and they must be paid, and all of this requires management time and expertise; this is often handled by a dedicated in-house manuscript editor or desk editor. Similarly, even though typesetting, design and printing may be outsourced to specialized firms, the whole production process, from copy-edited manuscript to bound books, must be managed; this is usually done in-house by a production manager or controller. Decisions must be taken about prices and print runs, and stock must then be managed throughout the life cycle of the book. The copyright must also be managed through the sale of subsidiary rights (translations, reprints, serialization, etc.). All of these activities require a great deal of management time and expertise, and in most cases they are handled by in-house managers who have responsibility for specific sectors of the production and publishing process.
The sixth and final function is sales and marketing. I have bundled these activities together although they are in fact quite distinct. Marketing comprises a range of activities concerned with informing potential customers of the availability of a book and encouraging them to buy it. These activities include catalogue preparation and mailing, advertising, direct mail, sending out review copies and, more recently, various kinds of e-marketing. Most trade publishers also have a separate publicity manager and/or department whose task is to cultivate relations with the media and secure media coverage for a book – coverage that ranges from reviews, extracts and interviews in the printed press to radio and television appearances, book signings and author tours. Marketing and publicity have the same aim – namely, to make consumers/readers aware of books and persuade them to buy them; the only real difference is that the publisher pays for marketing, whereas publicity, if you can get it, is free. The task of the sales manager and the sales team is to call on the key accounts – which include the bookselling chains, independent booksellers, online booksellers, wholesalers and a variety of general retailers from supermarkets to warehouse stores – to inform them of the forthcoming books, solicit orders and manage the publisher’s relations with their key customers, with the aim of ensuring that books are stocked and available in bookstores for consumers to browse and buy.
These various sales and marketing activities are concerned not simply to bring a product to the marketplace and let retailers and consumers know that it is available: they seek, more fundamentally, to build a market for the book. To publish in the sense of making a book available to the public is easy – and never easier than it is today, when texts posted online could be said to be ‘published’ in some sense. But to publish in the sense of making a book known to the public, visible to them and attracting a sufficient quantum of their attention to encourage them to buy the book and perhaps even to read it, is extremely difficult – and never more difficult than it is today, when the sheer volume of content available to consumers and readers is enough to drown out even the most determined and well-resourced marketing effort. Good publishers – as one former publisher aptly put it – are market-makers in a world where it is attention, not content, that is scarce.
These six key functions of the publisher define the principal respects in which publishing firms ‘add value’. Whether these are functions that will always be performed by traditional publishing firms, or whether, in the changing information environment brought about by digitization and the internet, at least some of these functions will be eclipsed, marginalized, transformed or taken over by others, are questions to which there are, at this point in time, no clear answers. But before speculating about the imminent disintermediation of publishing firms, one would be well advised to reflect carefully on the functions actually performed by publishers in the cultural economy of the book, on which functions will continue to require fulfilment in the future and, if they do, on who will perform them and how.
What follows
There are three key developments that are crucial for understanding the logic of the field of trade publishing, and these will occupy our attention in the first three chapters: the growth of the retail chains and the broader and ongoing transformation of the retail environment of bookselling (chapter 1); the rise of the literary agent as a key power broker in the field of English-language trade publishing (chapter 2); and the emergence of transnational publishing corporations stemming from successive waves of mergers and acquisitions, beginning in the 1960s and continuing through to the present day (chapter 3). I will seek to show how these three key developments have created a field that is structured in certain ways, a field that shapes the ways in which agents and organizations can act and that has certain consequences; chapters 4–8 examine these consequences. Taken together, this analysis of the key developments and their consequences will lay bare what I’m calling the logic of the field of English-language trade publishing. Chapter 9 will examine the digital revolution and its implications for the book publishing industry, while chapter 10 will offer a more normative reflection on the world of trade publishing and its costs. The concluding remarks will briefly consider some of the challenges the publishing industry faces as it enters the second
