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Merchants of Culture, by John B. Thompson
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These are turbulent times in the world of book publishing. For nearly five centuries the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century the industry finds itself faced with perhaps the greatest challenges since Gutenberg. A combination of economic pressures and technological change is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the books in the digital age. In this book - the first major study of trade publishing for more than 30 years - Thompson situates the current challenges facing the industry in an historical context, analysing the transformation of trade publishing in the United States and Britain since the 1960s. He gives a detailed account of how the world of trade publishing really works, dissecting the roles of publishers, agents and booksellers and showing how their practices are shaped by a field that has a distinctive structure and dynamic. This new paperback edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of the most recent developments, including the dramatic increase in ebook sales and its implications for the publishing industry and its future.
- Sales Rank: #1309376 in Books
- Published on: 2010-09-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.50" w x 6.30" l, 1.77 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 440 pages
Review
"A fine-grained snapshot... of the terminal struggle of traditional publishers. [Thompson's] mordant picture of an industry in crisis gives publishers, writers and readers much to think about."
Jason Epstein, The New York Review of Books
"[Thompson] draws on valuable interviews and the mass of statistics that the field itself devours in search of success. He offers a calm, relatively sanguine account of contemporary publishing, a world dominated by the $6 million advance, the blockbuster and the buzz."
Times Literary Supplement
"Thompson bring forensic keeneness, acuity, breadth, depth and wit to this page-turning study of the book trade, its denizens, demons and deities. [Merchants of Culture] ought to be prescribed reading for publishers, booksellers, writers, authors, reporters, reviewers and critics."
Mail & Guardian, South Africa
"John B. Thompson's research has produced an excellent history and analysis; it's a wonderful book, highly recommended."
Australian Book Review
"The single most impressive fact to drive home about this remarkable book is that Thompson displays a rare gift, that of presenting a world of the most heart-stopping complexity in short, simple, inter-related steps ... This is a book to buy and use and keep on your shelf."
Tribune
"A superb history and analysis of publishing and bookselling, from the 1960s to the present, against the background of the rapidly expanding digital media. A salutary, scary read."
John Conwell for The New Statesman
"A thorough and thoughtful analysis of publishing as a relatively self-contained world - a 'field' obeying rules that are ultimately economic, but in ways refracted through maneuvers and conflicts that defy simple cost-benefit analysis. Anyone interested in publishing will want to read it."
Inside Higher Ed
"For some time to come, this is bound to be the definitive thing to read for anyone trying to understand the infrastructure of book culture - especially as it has taken shape over the past two or three decades."
The National
"This impressively comprehensive and revealing analysis of the structures and processes of modern publishing is timely as the industry faces its digital future."
Katharine Reeve, Times Higher Education Book of the Week
"Thompson's study is one of the most valuable studies on publishing in recent decades, and promises to be the new reference point for sociological research on the publishing industry."
Cultural Sociology
"A very valuable book that is likely to become the standard reference on the Anglo-American publishing industry for many years to come."
MedieKultur
"For the uninitiated, Merchants of Culture provides a very perceptive, thorough and in-depth view of how trade publishing really works in the English-speaking world today. For those of us in the business or for writers who are mystified by their publisher's behavior, it offers a penetrating account of our business by a very shrewd, analytical observer. This book is the only thing I've ever read about our industry that has really got it."
William Shinker, President and Publisher of Gotham Books and Avery Books, Penguin Group USA
"Thompson's analysis of UK and US trade publishing is extraordinarily acute and insightful. It should be required reading for new entrants to the industry - but it will also illuminate many things for old publishing hands."
Helen Fraser, Former Managing Director, Penguin Group UK
"This uncommonly perceptive and thorough study tells you all you need to know about the publishing industry at a time of momentous change."
Drake McFeely, Chairman and President, W.W. Norton & Company
"One of the most intelligent and accessible accounts of the curious business of trade book publishing I have read. Anyone interested in knowing more about how our industry works - and where it might be headed - will find this book invaluable."
Morgan Entrekin, CEO and Publisher, Grove Atlantic
"An eye-opening tour of both American and British trade publishing. Even veterans in the publishing world will learn a lot, and novices will feel welcome, in this behind-the-scenes examination of how book publishing works in an age of mass marketing and digitization. Thompson knows more about contemporary publishing than any other scholar. He asks just the right questions of his sources, and their responses offer unique and illuminating testimony from an array of publishing insiders. Theoretically sophisticated but not burdened by academic apparatus, this is a landmark work."
Michael Schudson, Columbia University
"Thompson's ground-breaking research into the world of consumer book publishing provides a fascinating insight into the high-risk culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Revealed is the world of agents and scouts, of auctions and deals, often with large sums of money paid out to authors, as publishers gamble in the hope of signing the next Harry Potter or Dan Brown. His work is of the highest quality and should be read by all those concerned about our literary culture and its future."
Angus Phillips, Director, Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies
"From now on whenever anyone asks me how they can get published or get a job in publishing I'm going to tell them to buy this book because it is simply perfect at summing up how the whole messy business works and explaining why it very frequently doesn't work. It teaches a careful reader as much as any three year degree course on the subject."
Andrew Crofts, author of The Freelance Writer's Handbook
Karen Ball, author of Starring Me as Third Donkey and several other children's books
About the Author
John B. Thompson is Professor of Sociology at Jesus College, University of Cambridge.
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Merchants 1, Culture 0
By B. Bennetts
An enormous amount has been written, both online and in print, about the publishing industry in recent years - some of it perceptive; a little (a very little) well-informed; much of it complete rubbish, ranging from the ignorant to the merely opinionated.
The vast majority of this body of commentary has one common factor: its authors have a relationship with the industry, whether as insiders (publishers, agents, authors, booksellers) or as outsiders (mostly self-published authors). That is to say, everyone has some kind of an angle to play, a stance or interest (vested, conflicted or otherwise) to defend, or in plenty of cases an axe to grind.
That stops here. John B. Thompson has written Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century from perhaps the only possible and credible disinterested perspective - that of the academic. He has examined publishing as a business phenomenon, and based his work not on opinion nor on wishful thinking, but on five years' systematic research, including some 280 interviews with industry insiders amounting to 500 hours of first-hand evidence.
Wisely, Professor Thompson has restricted himself to one field of publishing, and has clearly defined that field at the outset. The book focuses on English-language trade publishing in the USA and UK, i.e. general-interest publishing of both fiction and non-fiction, intended for a general readership and sold through the mainstream distribution network. He includes independent presses in his scope, along with print-on-demand and the e-book phenomenon, but excludes self-publishing; he includes Amazon and other online retailers, but excludes channels such as Lulu and Smashwords.
He also confines himself to commenting on the general fiction and non-fiction market, with only passing reference to academic, professional and scholarly publishing, and none at all to specific market sectors such as children's, young adult, science fiction, illustrated art books or self-help works. This scope is set out with admirable clarity in the introduction (pp. 12-13).
Thompson traces the rise and rise of today's publishing conglomerates, noting the three significant forces that have shaped the industry over the past decades: the rise of the major retail chains, the emergence of the literary agent, and the process of corporate acquisitions and mergers which began as early as the 1960s. It is not a story that makes for comforting reading - at least, not to the lover of good literature - as it is the story of the commercialisation and commoditisation of the written word.
He shows, for example, that the early (1960s and 1970s) corporate mergers and acquisitions saw book publishing as just another element of the media and entertainment industry - media conglomerates would buy up publishers in order to secure an ongoing source of film rights. The model failed to deliver, but we are still living with its legacy, for example, in terms of HMV's transformation of the Waterstone's chain into a media outlet after 1998 (see p. 54).
If the media conglomerates created the industry structure for the commoditisation of publishing, it was the literary agents who exploited that structure, and created the dynamic of exclusivity that has been a characteristic of mainstream publishing for the last three decades at least. At the end of the book, Thompson observes that the industry revolves around publishers, buyers and agents, with writers on the far periphery (p. 375).
But agents forge their relationships with the big publishers, not with the small independents. A telling comment comes from Chris, previously a publisher at a small independent house before becoming an editor with one of the large corporations. "When I was at [the small independent house] I always thought of agents as my enemies," he told Thompson; "now I see them as my friends" (p. 206). Thompson is even more forthright (and even less complimentary) about the role of agents in an online interview with Brooklyn Rail last November.
There is one seeming inconsistency in Thompson's thesis. In Chapter 3 he sets out five myths about publishing corporations (pp. 139ff). ("Myth 1: The corporations have no interest in publishing quality books. All they are interested in publishing is commercial bestsellers. ... Myth 4: In the large publishing corporations, editors have lost the power they once had in the traditional publishing houses. Sales directors, marketing directors and accountants are the new power brokers and they decide what gets published.")
He seems anxious to dispel these myths, but spends much of the next 250 pages proving that - despite occasional exceptions - they hold absolutely true, at least for the large corporate players that dominate the industry. Indeed, they define much of the structure of the industry. On page 192, a London agent quotes a recent conversation with an editor at one of the big publishers: 'I don't like having this conversation with you because I want to publish this book, I love the story but I know what's going to happen when I go to the acquisition meeting. They're going to say, "Why are we bothering with these little books that are going to breathe all this valuable oxygen both creatively and promotionally."'
These two "myths" are further validated again and again throughout the book. Of the 5,000-6,000 new titles published each year by the main US houses, Thompson reveals the alarming fact (p. 189) that only 25% will receive any serious attention from the publishers' own sales teams. The impact of this kind of industry polarisation towards the bestseller is shown in Chapter 10, where he shows the number of titles selling between 10,000 and 40,000 copies declining by one third, whilst the (much smaller) number of titles selling over 200,000 copies more than doubled in the same period. The causal link is not hard to infer.
In the same chapter Thompson puts a human face on this phenomenon. He tells the story of Joanne, a moderately successful mid-list author, who first discovered that her publisher was spending nothing on her marketing, and was then dropped altogether, despite a track record of nearly twenty years, six books, good critical reception and even winning prizes. The mainstream publishing industry is a hostile place to the writer - as another author puts it, "everything in publishing is disempowering for a writer" (p. 384).
It can be a pretty hostile place for the reader, too. Thompson devotes much of the last 50 pages of the book to a discussion of "the fundamental short-termism of the industry" (p. 386); this takes several forms, one of which is a distinction between "diversity of output" and "diversity of marketplace ... the diversity of the books that are noticed, purchased and read" (p. 389). It is a crucial distinction, usually overlooked; the lack of diversity in the marketplace strikes at the very heart of our cultural health.
Thompson takes a refreshingly cautious view of e-books, noting that "the world is often much more complicated than the technological determinist would like us to think" (p. 333). He voices concern over the devaluation caused by the e-book revolution, based on the experience of the music industry: he quotes one publisher as saying (p. 362), "Why are songs 99 cents? Because Apple says so. Can the music industry make money at 99 cents? No. But now what does everyone think a song should be worth? 99 cents." It is a lesson that self-publishers would do well to think about: as Thompson observes (p. 368), "a major devaluing of intellectual property is unlikely to lead to an overall increase in the quality of content over time". (Not that three decades of commoditisation have done wonders for the quality of content, mind you.)
Though there are some rays of hope among small independent imprints, in general this book offers neither easy answers nor false comfort. Those who believe or who wish to believe, rightly or wrongly, that corporate mainstream publishing is on its deathbed - culturally hidebound, intellectually moribund, at risk of self-strangulation by an unsustainable commercial model - will find plenty here to reinforce their opinion.
But those who dismiss or ignore mainstream publishing are missing the point. For whether we love the Big Five or loathe them, these are the organisations that have shaped our cultural landscape, our reading habits and expectations, for two generations or more. And Professor Thompson's great achievement, at this time of tumult in the publishing industry, is to offer a comprehensive and dispassionate view of the forces that have shaped and continue to shape these organisations. Anyone who is interested in our shared cultural well-being ignores the implications of his work at their peril.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A must-read for anyone who cares about books
By John T. T. Intera
I came to this book after the book industry newsletter Publishing Trends recommended it. I had just finished two other books about the book business, 'The Times of Their Lives' by Al Silverman and 'The Late Age of Print' by Ted Striphas. Of the three books, 'Merchants of Culture' provides the best overview of where the industry stands today. I have worked in this sometimes crazy business for nearly twenty years and John Thompson 'gets it' better than any other writer I have encountered. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there and Thompson has nearly perfect-pitch when recounting where the lines of power lie and why things happen the way they do. For his part, Ted Striphas actually takes a deeper dive than Thompson and his book is more profound in many ways. Still, Thompson provides a better starting point and many will find that they need go no further than 'Merchants' to satisfy their curiosity.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Essential reading for members of the publishing industry (including authors and book reviewers!)
By Midwest Book Review
From cuneiform tablets to papyrus reeds to the early centuries of movable type, publishing was a power in the world and aimed at the needs and necessities of the cultural elite. But then in the 19th century literacy began to spread down to the growing middle classes and address the interests of ordinary people. But it was up until the invention of desktop publishing in the later decades of the 20th century that ordinary people had access to publishing. The rapid technological advances of the 21st century thus far have continued to compel the publishing industry into new modes of production, distribution, and fiscal survival with the coming of such innovations and electronic publishing and Kindle readers. "Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business In The Twenty-First Century" by John B. Thompson provides an informed and informative history and description of how trade publishing operates, as well as the contributions and responsibilities of key components of the publishing industry including agents and booksellers, as well as the publishers themselves. Of particular interest is Thompson's analysis of how digital publishing is beginning to dramatically affect and alter trade publishing. Superbly researched and presented, "Merchants of Culture " is a seminal addition for academic library collections and essential reading for members of the publishing industry (including authors and book reviewers!) seeking to adapt to the constantly changing influences of modern technologies upon the art and economics of trade publishing.
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