Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books

Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317696308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books is a comprehensive resource that builds bridges between the traditional focus and methodologies of literary studies and the actualities of modern and contemporary literature, including the realities of professional writing, the conventions and practicalities of the publishing world, and its connections between literary publishing and other media. Focusing on the relationship between modern literature and the publishing industry, the volume enables students and academics to extend the text-based framework of modules on contemporary writing into detailed expositions of the culture and industry which bring these texts into existence; it brings economic considerations into line alongside creative issues, and examines how employing marketing strategies are utilized to promote and sell books.

Sections cover:

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• The standard university-course specifications of contemporary writing, offering an extensive picture of the social, economic, and cultural contexts of these literary genres

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• The impact and status of non-literary writing, and how this compares with certain literary genres as an index to contemporary culture and a reflection of the state of the publishing industry

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• The practicalities and conventions of the publishing industry

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• Contextual aspects of literary culture and the book industry, visiting the broader spheres of publishing, promotion, bookselling, and literary culture

Carefully linked chapters allow readers to tie key elements of the publishing industry to the particular demands and features of contemporary literary genres and writing, offering a detailed guide to the ways in which the three core areas of culture, economics, and pragmatics intersect in the world of publishing.

Further to being a valuable resource for those studying English or Creative Writing, the volume is a key text for degrees in which Publishing is a component, and is relevant to those aspects of Media Studies that look at interactions between the media and literature/publishing.

1

The Structure and Workings of a Publishing House

David Barker

Introduction

The title of this essay, of course, implies that there exists, somewhere, such a thing as a standard publishing house. There doesn’t. Publishing houses (I’ll use that term throughout this essay, rather than the less precise ‘publishers’) vary tremendously. They can be enormous or tiny; profitable, loss-making, or not-for profit; they can be fully digital or almost entirely print-based; global in their reach or focussed on a very local market; and they can be run efficiently or in a state of near chaos. For the purposes of this essay, which is designed to outline briefly the structure and functions of a publishing house, let’s create our own.

We’ll call our publishing house, ‘The Ludlow Press’. Although founded in the Shropshire town of that name in the late nineteenth century, it long ago moved its headquarters to London and now has offices there as well as in New York, Sydney, and Toronto. The Ludlow Press prides itself on publishing a wide range of content. For much of the twentieth century it was seen as a slightly staid publisher of serious non-fiction but following an overhaul in the mid-1980s, the Press expanded into more commercial non-fiction as well as fiction, children’s books, and academic books and journals. Much of this growth came via acquisition.

As we near the end of the second decade of this century, The Ludlow Press is seen as a well-run business that has adapted nimbly to the shifts of recent years. As with all publishing houses it has its strengths and vulnerabilities, but it’s a Press that many authors would be happy to publish with and that a decent number of readers recognise.

In this essay, we’ll work through – in no particular order – the various departments and teams that can exist at a publishing house like ‘The Ludlow Press’. Bear in mind that other medium-sized or large publishing houses will not mirror these departments and structures exactly, and that at many small presses all of these functions are handled by just one or two staff members.

Senior Management

The Ludlow Press has a Board of Directors as well as a Senior Management team – it’s the latter we’ll concentrate on here. The team consists of seven people: the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) who is a descendant of the Press’s founder, and six other senior staff members. The make-up of those six is interesting: three occupy editorial positions (the heads of Trade, Children’s, and Academic publishing, respectively), while the other three are drawn from Sales, Production, and Finance. This imbalance in a senior team isn’t unusual: of the 16 members of Hachette Book Group’s US leadership team in 2017, for example, 8 have worked their way up through editorial careers (Hachette website, 2017) and reflects a belief system in the industry that very experienced, senior editorial staff are more likely to have a clear overview of the business and its strategic needs than senior staff who have risen through the ranks of other departments.

The key function of the Senior Management team at The Ludlow Press is to provide a strategic vision for the company – and to communicate that vision to all staff. On top of that, the team is responsible for setting overall (for the Press as a whole) and specific (for each Division of the Press) targets for each financial year. The team meets on a monthly basis to monitor progress against those targets, and to discuss longer-term projects or initiatives which could range from ideas for possible acquisitions (of other publishers or imprints) to plans for a major overhaul of the Press’s online presence.

Across the industry, Senior Management teams vary considerably in terms of how they convey their goals, vision, and corporate ethos to staff. In some publishing houses there is transparency around financial performance; in others, much less so. Some houses arrange regular ‘all staff’ meetings at which Senior Management teams offer short presentations on developments in their areas – others leave this up to individual teams. Either way, it’s imperative for staff morale that a publishing house’s Senior Management team is seen to be accessible, communicative, and strategically ambitious.

Audio

Given the steady rise in popularity of audiobooks and the increasing desire of publishing houses to fill their social media channels with high-quality, well-produced content, including book trailers and author interviews, there is a trend to invest in audio/video facilities. Such an investment is under consideration at The Ludlow Press. Currently, though, the Press makes do by licencing its content to specialist audiobook companies (see the section on Subsidiary Rights) and by asking staff (usually in Publicity or Marketing) to use phones or tablets to create other audio and video content in-house.

Marketing

Marketing plays a full role in the development of new projects, from coming up with new ideas and commenting on editors’ proposals to market testing new projects during their development. Marketing will also be involved in commenting on the book’s title (including any subtitle) and other textual elements to maximize search engine optimization (SEO) and discoverability; its genre or subject classification; cross-marketing opportunities with other titles; and the cover design and how it works with the target market.

Clark and Phillips, p. 227

The Marketing department is a core team in any publishing house. Put crudely, there’s no point in publishing a book unless you’re able to back it up with parallel activity designed to alert potential customers to that book’s existence. (Note the use of the word ‘customers’: in some types of academic publishing in particular, marketing efforts may be focussed upon institutions like libraries rather than on individual ‘readers’.)

For any Marketing team, the first job is to identify key audiences for a book and then to create appropriate communications to get the book ready presentation to those audiences, who can include: the Press’s own sales reps, booksellers, librarians, and individual consumers. Successful marketing develops collaborations and partnerships with a range of influencers and other brands, through paid placement (including advertising) and by getting books into non-traditional outlets.

Every publishing house is different, of course. At The Ludlow Press, the Marketing teams build and implement social media campaigns, while in other houses that’s the role of the Publicity team (see the section on Publicity). The work of marketers and publicists is connected in many ways – perhaps the simplest way of thinking about them is this: marketing is what publishing houses say about their books and authors, while publicity is what others say.

There are stark differences between how trade and academic sides of publishing conceive of and carry out marketing activities. On the trade side, the overall aim is to produce campaigns that will grab the attention of consumers, drive sales, and build upon an author’s profile. This means developing long-term strategies for existing brands and creating plans for newer authors and brands. Marketing activity doesn’t kick off around the time of publication, of course: often it starts months earlier with ‘pre-awareness’ campaigns designed to maximise sales in the first few days and weeks of a book’s published life.

In their study of publishing houses’ use of social media, Criswell and Canty observe just how early this marketing activity can begin. With regard to the Stephen King novel The Wind Through the Keyhole, for example, the first mention of the book was in 2009, while King’s UK publisher Hodder announced the book’s publication in June 2011, a full ten months before its publication date of April 2012.

The first mention of the book’s potential existence was on the 9th November 2009 on Twitter. From this point on Hodder & Stoughton methodically released pieces of information about the upcoming title, including extracts and information on the ‘StephenKingFaces’ campaign, whetting fans’ appetites right up to the publication date. This generated hype on social media, and influenced 2,457 tweets before the release of the Hardback on the 24th April 2012. This is an incredible achievement for Hodder & Stoughton, as they resurrected conversation about a finished series, and gathered a large, active social media audience awaiting the release of the book.

Criswell and Canty, p. 369

There is pressure on marketing staff to be innovative, given the noise that bombards consumers on a daily basis. Marketers are also expected to evaluate their campaigns to ascertain what has worked well and what hasn’t. (Although, of course, if it were that simple, publishing houses would execute successful marketing campaigns every time. They don’t.)

This leads to an intriguing question: who to blame when a book’s performance doesn’t meet expectations? The standard responses, in my experience, are for editorial staff to blame the marketing team (for failing to alert enough readers to a book’s existence) or the sales team (for failing to get a book into retail outlets in big enough quantities to be visible); while marketing and sales staff tend to blame the editorial team (because a book simply wasn’t good or distinctive enough, or for failing to provide good quality supporting information about the book in a timely manner, or for signing up an author who proved to be unhelpful in terms of promotional effort). If left unchecked, these attitudes can be problematic. It’s important, therefore, for a publishing house to run regular post-mortem exercises on key titles – at The Ludlow Press, this doesn’t happen, leading to occasional flare-ups between the teams.

In scholarly and professional publishing, marketing activities need to be more precisely defined. In the Academic Division of The Ludlow Press, for example, much of this focus stems from a database of customer contacts which has been built up over several years and requires considerable maintenance to ensure its currency. The names, email addresses, and subject specialisms of tens of thousands of scholars around the world are stored, enabling marketing staff to alert academics to the publication of a new book or series in their field. Some academic publishing houses are more aggressive in their pursuit of new contacts, using data-mining techniques (either in-house or freelanced out) to add scholars to their databases. (The vast majority of academics display this information on their institution’s website so the data is not hard to find.) Other publishing houses are more careful – wary of data protection laws – and ask people to ‘opt in’ to mailing lists via pop-ups on their website and via conversations at conferences or on campus.

Two other key tasks for marketing staff in academic publishing are to send books out for review and to attend specialist scholarly conferences. Finding suitable review outlets for academic books can be challenging – textbooks, for example, rarely get reviewed anywhere. While there are potentially dozens of journals in any given subject area, there are still more books being published than can be reviewed, and even when a review is assigned by a journal it can often be a year or two before it’s published. (By which time everyone at the publishing house has moved on to hundreds of newer titles.) Academic books with higher-profile authors do get reviewed though, and a positive review in the New York Review of Books or Times Literary Supplement can drive sales, so marketing staff work hard to foster good relationships with such outlets. In terms of academic conferences, these can range from very small affairs with just a couple of hundred attendees to huge meetings at which 10,000 scholars converge on a city to network, present papers, and browse the book exhibit. It’s the role of marketing staff (and sometimes editorial colleagues too) to work on the publishing house’s booth selling books, meeting with scholars, developing contacts, and listening to book ideas, and to be seen as a serious publisher in that field.

Publicity

Media outlets need content, and books, authors and writing provides good copy and material for book and culture programmes. Small publishers often fail to take advantage of this, or don’t know how to exploit it, while big publishers have departments dedicated to chasing down every promotional opportunity.

Guthrie, p. 177

The goal of the Publicity team is to persuade people outside of the publishing house to generate noise about its books and authors – and ideally to modulate that noise so it conveys an upbeat and positive message. (The old adage ‘all publicity is good publicity’ may well be true, but negative publicity is never good for an author’s ego.) Publicity staff, either in-house or external – there are a large number of talented and experienced freelance book publicists who do a lot of work for smaller and medium-sized houses – set up author events at bookshops and other venues including libraries, museums, and book festivals. They send out – either physically or electronically – advance proof copies, letters, and lists of talking points to print, online, and broadcast media. There is a great deal of follow-up work involved. Publicists must strike a difficult balance, being dogged and thorough without irritating their media contacts.

Publicity staff need good social skills. They organise lunches and parties where media contacts can meet authors, and sometimes set up drinks to tal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Structure and Workings of a Publishing House
• 2 Types of Publishing Houses
• 3 The UK’s Reading Culture and Consumers’ Emotional Response to Books
• 4 Sunk Treasure: Can the traditional public library service survive in contemporary Britain?
• 5 How Can Shared-Reading Create A Community? What The Kingston University Big Read and The University of Mississippi Common Reading Experience have in common, and learned from each other
• 6 The Review and the Reviewer
• 7 The Fish and the Stream: Publishing, genre, and life-writing’s crisis of form
• 8 Creative Writing Courses and the Pragmatics of Publishing
• 9 The Modern Literary Agent
• 10 The Real New Publishing: How interconnected ‘outsiders’ are setting the trends
• 11 Parallels Between Fiction and Food Writing
• 12 The History and Influence of Travel Writing
• 13 Understanding Our Place: Publishing’s role in the reading ecosystem under neoliberal economics
• 14 The Fourth Format: How audiobooks have become a standard format for general publishers alongside hardback, paperback, and e-book
• 15 French Children’s Literature and Autism: A case for more children’s books on autism and for autistic children
• Index