Abstract
While leafing through a “Men’s Style” weekend magazine—men’s style is not something I pay a lot of attention to, I hasten to add (my husband, alas, pays even less)—I came upon a profile of an aggressive young literary agent (Wittmann 2014). Chris Parris-Lamb is clearly cool: he runs marathons, he and his wife have hyphenated their last names, they have a pit bull, they live in Brooklyn, check, check, check—but not every pit bull-owning gender-egalitarian runner gets profiled in style mags. This one did because he is an extremely successful example of what John Thompson calls a super-agent.
Super-agents are key players in the field of contemporary publishing. They are part of a system where agents jockey for huge advances, publishers hunt for spectacular books with media tie-ins, distribution is increasingly digital, and bookstores and libraries survive, even thrive, by radically changing their business models (Seelye 2014). In this field (while Thompson wears his Bourdieu lightly, he acknowledges that field theory and forms of capital offer the essential lens through which the industry should be seen), publishers are engaging in two forms of competition: they are competing for content, especially new work from a proven author, and they are competing for the attention of an increasingly distracted reading public. This evolution from gentlemen’s game to dog-eat-dog advantages a breed of hard-charging boundary spanners like Parris-Lamb.
The social change in what Thompson calls the “logic of the field” is parallel to, and to a large extent created by, changes in the publishing process. This “hidden revolution” involves the impact that digitization has had on publishers’ operating and managerial systems, content management (the “digital workflow,” whereby electronic files have replaced printed texts at many but not all points in the field; Contemporary Sociology reviews, for example, are submitted electronically but read, for the most part, in print), marketing (most readers are only too aware of how Amazon.com wants to stock our individual libraries), and of course content delivery via iPads, Kindles, and phones. While digitization has been especially revolutionary in the fields of scientific journals and reference books, which are essentially gone, Thompson envisions even trade publishers creating digital archives along the print-on-demand lines, though he notes that early moves in this direction make it clear that “it’s easy to screw it up.”
In Merchants of Culture, Thompson’s detailed analysis of how publishing actually works these days turns up a few surprises, even for those who pay attention to what’s going on in the book biz. For example, he describes “extreme publishing,” the books rushed into production late in the year to fill the gap between the publisher’s projections and the corporate CEO’s demands. He describes the polarization of publishing in which behemoths like Random House or Penguin do well because of the various efficiencies and economies of scale, but so do small publishers; these exist in a “parallel universe” to the giants in which entry into the field is low cost, suppliers and freelancers charge less or nothing (seeing the little guys as fellow travelers resisting corporate control), and relationships with independent bookstores are mutually supportive. It’s the medium-sized publishers that are imperiled.
Publishing is in crisis. Publishing is always in crisis, of course, which is why every quarter century or so seems to produce a couple of sociologically informed books that analyze the latest critical stage. The last round was Whiteside’s Blockbuster Complex and Coser, Kadushin, and Powell’s Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. Now in the early twenty-first century the key studies are Laura Miller’s Reluctant Capitalists and Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, originally published in 2010 and with a second edition, the subject of this review, in 2012. Although Thompson’s statistics necessarily have a short shelf life (many have not been updated for the second edition), this is not a problem since the reader can easily get the latest numbers. The overall picture he presents of publishing in the new millennium is one where the fundamental changes—digitization and the two competitions—have already taken place but where their impact on the “logic of the field” is still being worked out. This book is comprehensive, sober, and indispensable.