The Prostitution of the Publishing Business.

Twenty years ago I was working as a freelance landscape photographer. I made several trips to London, hawking my portfolio around the major publishing houses and trying to interest them in an idea I had for a book. Their response was frustrating. Five or six of them seemed enthusiastic at first, but then backed out. They all gave me the same reason: the editorial staff liked the idea and wanted to do the book; the design department liked the pictures and they, too, wanted to do the book. The problem was with the marketing people. They said they would need to sell around ten thousand copies to turn a profit, and they estimated they would only sell five to eight thousand in the first year. That wasn’t good enough; any book that didn’t make a profit in the first year was deemed a failure.

One of the senior editors at Weidenfeld and Nicholson apologised to me, expressing regret with the words ‘You must understand that we’re not publishers any more. We’re just booksellers now.’ He went on to explain that publishers had always regarded themselves as part of the creative process – operating by the simple expedient of having sufficient high-volume sellers in their catalogues to subsidise those worthy works that would be unlikely to make a quick profit, if profit they made at all. That had all changed during the yuppie-obsessed, Thatcher-blighted decade of the 1980’s. Publishing had become just another commercial business, in which the profit motive was the only guiding principle. They had taken up Mrs Thatcher’s edict: ‘There is no such thing as good literature and bad literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t’ – or words to that effect. A recent TV arts programme claimed that the situation has worsened further. It seems that mainstream publishers are no longer even in full control of what they publish; their choices are now largely dictated to them by the large retail chains. If it isn’t populist fiction, saleable children’s books, or celebrity biography, the chances of getting it published are remote. A question presents itself: in such a profit-inclined environment, how is the next generation of original, ground-breaking authors going to get published? Is the world facing at least a temporary hiatus in the availability of fresh, deep literature – the sort that makes people question their conditioned notions of life, the human condition, and the very meaning of reality?

It probably isn’t quite that bad. It seems there are still a few publishers who are prepared to take a risk, at least up to a point, although the window of opportunity is clearly very much smaller than it used to be. And, of course, there has been an explosion in the rise of small press publishers. The computer age and the development of print-on-demand technology has enabled anybody with a modicum of expertise to set themselves up as a publisher at very little cost. But so many of them seem to feel it necessary to follow the modus operandi of their mainstream role models, carefully identifying their ‘niche markets’ and selecting only appropriate titles in order to maximise sales. It’s all about being a successful entrepreneur, not about purveying something worthwhile. That’s sad, but it seems to be typical of the culture in which we now live. I remain optimistic, because I know that fads tend to be cyclical and I hope this will prove to be the case with publishing.

Meanwhile, where am I going to send my very strange novel when I’ve finished editing it?