Before literature can reach the hands of the reader, there can be a host of individuals behind the scenes such as literary agents, commissioning editors and scouts who invest time and money in bringing what could be the next bestseller to the marketplace. In conjunction with the selling of subsidiary rights, marketing and promotions are being conducted, books are designed and edited by in-house staff and freelancers, all often toiling for weeks to showcase the best of a printed work. The process across businesses is somewhat similar, yet each business is different with their own personalities and quirks despite being governed by practices that are almost uniform across the publishing industry. So how did the different pieces of this centuries-old industry shift, break and grind against each to create the solid landscape that we see today? This is the question that Victorian Literary Businesses explores, to get further understanding of how practices were formed which influences how business is now done in the publishing industry. Victorian Literary Businesses explores the business practices of the British publishing industry, examining the period 1843â1900; the year the Macmillan publishing house was founded to the establishment (and now defunct) Net Book Agreement. This book offers a new approach to the study of one of Britainâs oldest creative industries providing links between social change in nineteenth-century Britain and how this affected the literary marketplace and the strategies of influential leaders who left a profound legacy on the industry such as the Macmillans, WH Smith and Charles Dickens.
Victorian Publishing
The nineteenth century was a time that saw a ârevolutionâ in publishing, as the industrial age brought down the cost of production and caused a rise in output. The mechanisation of book production and a shift in culture towards literacy and reading created a market for new material, and, with new distribution networks enabled by the railways, commercialism in books could be realised with more vigour. 1 In particular, the rise of literacy in adults and children allowed the market for books to grow rapidly due to the increasing demand for literature and educational titles. This factor makes the nineteenth century a particularly dynamic period for the study of this industry and its multiple forms of reading material, including newspapers, magazines and books, a trend that had been gradually emerging since the mid-eighteenth century. 2 The surge in the market can be seen through the publication data of the time. The sale of newspapers quadrupled in less than half a century, rising from 16 million a year in 1801 to over 78 million by 1849. Furthermore, the number of books published in the early 1800s rose from around 14,450 to around 60,850 by the 1890s. 3 With the sudden growth of the reading market in the early nineteenth century, the way literature was published also needed to develop as there was more opportunity for it to become a profitable commodity.
The nineteenth-century publishing industry saw many advances beyond the commercialisation of literature. This era was the age of the three-volume novel or the three-decker as it was commonly known, the form that dominated the bookshops and circulating libraries. Copyright law developed significantly which had an impact on how authors were able to negotiate contracts with publishers, and by the mid-nineteenth century, the phrase âauthor by professionâ had become part of the industry dialogue. 4 Furthermore, the culture of the industry saw women become bolder in their contribution to both fiction and non-fiction through the sale of novels, as well as periodicals and newspaper articles. In addition, by the late 1800s the different businesses in the industry each had their interests represented by formal associations, and their collective action helped reinforce specific practices in the industry. These business practices have been noted by book and publishing historians, yet an in-depth analysis of how these practices were formed has been neglected.
By the late nineteenth century, a distinct process could be identified of how literature is taken from the authorâs desk to the reader, which can be represented by the Shannon-Weave communication chain of source to transmitter to recipient. 5 Applied to the publishing industry, the process was from the author to the literary agent, who then licences the copyright to a buyer, normally the publisher, for the right to publish the work, or the copyright could be sold outright. The publisher then organises the production and marketing of the book and supplies the marketplace either directly or through a bookseller/retailer. The practices used by authors, literary agents and publishers govern how they interact with the other businesses in the communication chain, and this also has an impact on how literature is disseminated and sold to the reader. These practices were influenced by the structure and culture of the industry and also by the sociocultural factors of the wider society. Therefore, in conjunction with understanding how and why certain practices were accepted and legitimised, there needs to be an appreciation of the factors that constrained and enabled their practices.
Institutional Routines and the Victorian Publishing Industry
The cultures and behaviours within the contemporary publishing industry are not often challenged by practitioners or within academic research. Instead, these cultural norms and business practices are accepted. Textbooks on the industry outline specific ways of doing business or categorise the functions within publishing as homogenous, sometimes implying that they are the same in different organisations. 6 Although I do not dispute that there are elements of similarities between the operations of publishing businesses, there is scope to examine why the processes were legitimised, as it has become accepted as âthis is the way things are doneâ. This raises the question as to how and why these practices were legitimised to the point that normative behaviours are constantly reproduced, not only between organisations but by newcomers in the industry. Previous research is preoccupied with identifying and tracing major occurrences in the history of the publishing industry as opposed to questioning why certain practices were accepted and further legitimised. Victorian Literary Businesses draws on institutional theory as a framework to trace how the practices became part of the blueprint of the publishing industry.
Publishing as a creative and cultural industry has been frequently analysed, debated and discussed within the fields of book and publishing history, bibliography, media studies and literary studies. These are limited studies on the publishing industry which use the theories and methods from academic business research. In particular, studies have been confined to library and information sciences, although it has been recognised that scholarly research on publishing can be subjected to business research methods and can further knowledge regarding one of Britainâs strongest creative industries. 7 There has been a growing dialogue in research assessing whether studies about the creative industries can inform existing theories about management, highlighting how research on the creative industries can be subjected to the approaches and methods from management studies and can inform existing theories about management as it is an interdisciplinary blending of book and literary history and organisational history. 8
There has been an increased level of research surrounding how social actors within organisations make decisions and how these are constrained and enabled by external factors. However, researchers have commented that there is reliance to focus on the outcomes of processes. 9 Instead, there has been a call for research to explore the processes themselves in greater detail, a position this book takes as it analyses the motivation behind the formation of business practices within a creative industry. Victorian Literary Businesses explores this argument, asking how were business practices formed in the nineteenth-century publishing industry and why were they accepted and consequently legitimised? In addition, this book analyses the relationship between sociocultural factors and to what extent these influences had on the formation of business practices. Having a more in-depth understanding of how the nuanced threads between publishers, literary agents, authors and editors were formed provides valuable insight into the history of an industry worth ÂŁ5.7 billion in the UK. 10
There is an increasing dialogue regarding the influence of institutionalism in organisation studies, most noticeably in the works of Paul DiMaggio, Walter Powell, Roy Suddaby and Thomas Lawrence. There has been a call from these researchers to explore how cultural and societal norms are reflected in organisational fields and what conditions gave rise to rationalised formal structure in organisations. 11 Recently, researchers in this field have commented that there is an over-reliance to use the approach of new institutionalism to focus on large-scale inter-organisational and societal transformations, somewhat disregarding the experience of social actors and the connection between their lived experiences and how this structures institutional behaviour. 12 New institutionalism has become a dominant perspective in organisation studies, and studies are increasingly exploring the experiences of individuals and how their choices created new practices within historical research. 13 Victorian Literary Businesses as a historical study on the British publishing industry adds to this research area by analysing how individuals and organisations formed specific business pract...