Claire Squires

A Common Ground? Book Prize Culture in Europe

Abstract This article argues that research into literary prizes can potentially be extremely pertinent in the understanding of the material and ideological conditions of the production and reception of literature and literary value. As such, the analysis of prizes awarded is similar to the wider project of book history and publishing studies, and in their fusion of cultural and economic capital, literary prizes are thus part of the larger environment in which books are produced, distributed and consumed. Through an examination of the impact of eligibility requirements and the reception of prize-winning books, particularly within the European context, this article examines the vital role of prizes in the creation of communities of writers and the development of communities of readers. The article considers a variety of methodologies for the study of literary prizes. It calls for an analysis both quantitative and qualitative, and that pays attention to both the histories and development of individual prizes, and the wider negotiations book prize culture makes with the publishing industries and culture in general, both on the “common ground” of European and global prize cultures, and in its regional and national differences.

Scotland and Slovenia

This article draws on a dataset of structured research interviews with publishers, authors, and others involved in the book industries in Scotland and Slovenia. It analyses a variety of differences in how publishing businesses are conducted in each country, explores the impact of language, export, and translation, and examines the inter-relationship between state and commercial companies. In its final part, it looks at the connections between book-related identity-forming processes, on the one hand, and the market forces that shape both countries’ book markets on the other. Comparing the efficiency of the Scottish and Slovene book industries, the article finds that market size and the ability to streamline business by outsourcing seem to have more weight than the ability to handle a variety of sales channels and achieve a high level of labour effectiveness per title. This advantages Scottish publishing, giving it a more extrovert identity than Slovenia’s industry. Nonetheless, undercapitalization and the gravitational pull of London for bestselling Scottish authors means that both markets are mainly populated with small publishers. Financial and marketing power represent a barrier almost as sizeable as language, regardless of the ability to outsource and streamline business operations. The research contributing to this article was supported by two Caledonian Research Foundation/Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) European Visiting Research Fellowships in 2013.

Book Marketing and the Booker Prize

‘Tension is as high in Bungay [the Suffolk town where Clays is based] as it is in the Guildhall on the night The Booker Prize winner is announced. Traditionally, the publisher of the winning book immediately rings the printer to arrange an instant reprint. In 1997, for example, the Clays Account Controller watched The Booker Prize presentation on television and at 9.59 pm saw that The God of Small Things had won. By 10 pm a 20,000 copy reprint had been confirmed and Clays went into overnight production. Within 24 hours the books were printed and on their way into bookshops all over the country. Sales were so strong that, three days later, HarperCollins placed an order for a second reprint of yet another 20,000 copies, this time with ‘Booker Prize Winner’ emblazoned on the cover’ (Clays 1998, 58).

Marionettes and Puppeteers? The Relationship between Book Club Readers and Publishers

The recognizable orange, white and black colour scheme catches the attention of patrons passing by the local library bulletin board for reading groups.1 The brochure’s headline, ‘PENGUIN READERS’ BOOK OF THE MONTH’, jumps out from the various pamphlets on display. The front text tells us that Penguin asked ‘hundreds of librarians nationwide’ (in the UK) to recommend contemporary novels that they believed would appeal to reading groups. Inside the brochure we find six Penguin titles for their 2005 ‘Book of the Month’ programme, ranging from Esther Freud’s The Sea House to The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. The programme, according to Penguin, includes novels that ‘appeal to each member of the wide-ranging library reading groups that they will be running and supporting for the next six months’.2

DIY peer review and monograph publishing in the arts and humanities

In order to explore monograph peer review in the arts and humanities, this article introduces and discusses an applied example, examining the route to publication of Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo’s Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture (2013). The book’s co-authors supplemented the traditional ‘blind’ peer-review system with a range of practices including the informal, DIY review of colleagues and ‘clever friends’, as well as using the feedback derived from grant applications, journal articles and book chapters. The article ‘explodes’ the book into a series of documents and non-linear processes to demonstrate the significance of the various forms of feedback to the development of Fuller and Rehberg Sedo’s monograph. The analysis reveals substantial differences between book and article peer-review processes, including an emphasis on marketing in review forms and the pressures to publish, which the co-authors navigated through the introduction of ‘clever friends’ to the review processes. These findings, drawing on science and technology studies, demonstrate how such a research methodology can identify how knowledge is constructed in the arts and humanities and potential implications for the valuation of research processes and collaborations.

Peer Review in Practice

The article was previously published in beta version (see https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/hub/publication/22749).

Conclusion Writing Beyond Marketing

Through its concentration on marketing as an act of representation, Marketing Literature has explored the processes that occur within the literary marketplace. These acts of marketing have — as this book has argued — been the making of contemporary writing, constructing the meaning of literature, representing it in the marketplace and influencing its reception. This exploration has been carried out by conscripting the communications circuit and marketing communications theory, and analysing the negotiation of cultural, economic and journalistic capital. The series of case studies in Part II demonstrate this fusion most fully, and in the case studies’ construction of the varying relationships between author, book and reader, and of the broader narratives of publishing history, they indicate the pre-eminent role of marketing in the making of literary fiction. It also confirms the inherent narratability of publishing history noted in the Introduction. This storytelling tendency is evident in the extremes of both the ‘lament school’ and the cultural optimists, and is intensified by the economic contexts of the 1990s and 2000s: the conglomeration of the publishing industry, the vast market share of a tiny handful of companies, and the money made available for advances and marketing. Publishing history and polemics are never far apart.

Publishing Contexts and Market Conditions

The twentieth century was a time of great reorganisation in the British publishing industry. During this period, the production of literature would be affected by great upheaval in terms of ownership, operation and competition. In the course of the century, the ideology and culture of publishing would also come to be re-evaluated. Although some book historians have argued that the last two hundred years of British publishing have shown at least as much continuity as they have change in terms of rising production figures, merchandising, the mass-market paperback, the knowledge economy, and the exploitation of intellectual property, there have nonetheless been profound shifts.1 This chapter details these shifts, and relates them to the specific market conditions of contemporary literary publishing.

Icons and Phenomenons

Part II of Marketing Literature addresses the publishing histories of a series of high-profile books from the 1990s and 2000s. The case studies are divided into three chapters, in which various different models of success, and aspects of the books’ marketing, are analysed in empirical detail, thus illustrating the contemporary literary marketplace, and the marketing activities by which that marketplace is constructed. The books contained within these chapters are all examples of books which have achieved a certain level of fame or notoriety in the marketplace, either through commercial or critical success, or by the discussion they have provoked in the media — their economic, cultural and journalistic capital. All of these books could also be designated to a greater or lesser degree as ‘literary’ titles, although some are very much situated as ‘crossover’ books, including the children’s and young adults’ books discussed in Chapter 6. The construction of the definition of the literary via the marketplace, though, is part of the argument of these chapters.

Genre in the Marketplace

Of the link between reading and writing in his communications circuit, Darnton put it that: The reader completes the circuit because he influences the author both before and after the act of composition. Authors are readers themselves. By reading and associating with other readers and writers, they form notions of genre and style and a general sense of the literary enterprise, which affects their texts.1 Genre, then, is a crucial component in the marketplace, as it is one of the primary means by which authors and readers communicate, and one of the methods by which both writing and reading can be studied in their publishing contexts. The philosopher Benedetto Croce, writing on aesthetics in 1902, refuted the theoretical separation of literature into genre categories, seeing the only use of such divisions as practical, indeed purely physical: The books in a library must be arranged in one way or another. This used generally to be done by a rough classification of subjects […]; they are now generally arranged by sizes or by publishers. Who can deny the necessity and the utility of such arrangements? But what should we say if someone began seriously to seek out the literary laws of […] those altogether arbitrary groupings whose sole object was their practical utility?