CONTEMPORARY PUBLISHING AND THE CULTURE OF BOOKS 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 marketing strategies are employed to promote and sell books. Chapters cover: • The standard university-course specifications of contemporary writing, offering an extensive picture of the social, economic, and cultural contexts of these literary genres • 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 • The practicalities and conventions of the publishing industry • 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. Alison Baverstock is Professor of Publishing within the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, UK. Richard Bradford is Professor of English and Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Ulster, Ireland. Madelena Gonzalez is Professor of English Literature at Avignon University, France. CONTEMPORARY PUBLISHING AND THE CULTURE OF BOOKS Edited by Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford, and Madelena Gonzalez First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford and Madelena Gonzalez; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford and Madelena Gonzalez to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baverstock, Alison, editor. | Bradford, Richard, 1957- editor. | Gonzalez, Madelena, editor. Title: Contemporary publishing and the culture of books / edited by Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford, and Madelena Gonzalez. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019040708 | ISBN 9780415750226 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367443153 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315778389 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Book industries and trade—Great Britain. | Publishers and publishing—Great Britain. | Books and reading—Great Britain. | Authors and publishers—Great Britain. Classification: LCC Z323 .C75 2020 | DDC 070.50941—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040708 ISBN: 978-0-415-75022-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-44315-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77838-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra CONTENTS List of contributors vii Introduction 1 Alison Baverstock 1 The structure and workings of a publishing house 22 David Barker 2 Types of publishing houses 46 Per Henningsgaard 3 The UK’s reading culture and consumers’ emotional response to books 58 Alison Lawson 4 Sunk treasure: can the traditional public library service survive in contemporary Britain? 77 Ellie Bowker and Clare Somerville 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 96 Alison Baverstock vi Contents 6 The review and the reviewer 117 Claire Squires 7 The fish and the stream: publishing, genre, and life-writing’s crisis of form 133 Robert Fraser 8 Creative writing courses and the pragmatics of publishing 152 R. Lyle Skains 9 The modern literary agent 170 Angus Phillips 10 The real new publishing: how interconnected ‘outsiders’ are setting the trends 185 Caroline Harris 11 Parallels between fiction and food writing 206 Amy Burns 12 The history and influence of travel writing 225 Peter Bolan 13 Understanding our place: publishing’s role in the reading ecosystem under neoliberal economics 237 Jasmin Kirkbride 14 The fourth format: how audiobooks have become a standard format for general publishers alongside hardback, paperback, and e-book 253 Nicholas W. N. Jones 15 French children’s literature and autism: a case for more children’s books on autism and for autistic children 278 Lucie Ducarre Index 319 CONTRIBUTORS David Barker is Senior Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Derby. Before this he worked in academic publishing for over 20 years – first at Cassell Academic, where he was Commissioning Editor for Business and Tourism books, and then at Continuum, where he was responsible for lists in Literary Studies, Film Studies, and Popular Culture. He was the founding editor of the 33 1/3 series of books about classic albums. He moved into managerial roles as Editorial Director (2006–2011) at Continuum Publishing in New York and then as Publishing Director (2011–2016) at Bloomsbury in London. He has been lecturing at the University of Derby since early 2017 and has been Programme Leader for MA Publishing since September 2018. His research interests focus on new areas for non-fiction publishing and on how publishers can better engage with adults who feel ignored by the publishing ecosystem. Alison Baverstock is Professor of Publishing at Kingston University, where she jointly founded MA Publishing in 2006. A former publisher and now a publishing consultant, she is a regular commentator on the industry and the author of several key books, including How to Market Books (Routledge, 6th edition, with Susannah Bowen of the University of Melbourne) and Is There a Book in You? (Bloomsbury). She has a particular commitment to encouraging reading for pleasure and is the founder of www.readingforce.org.uk – shared-reading to encourage good communication between Services families – and The Kingston University Big Read, which won a THE Award for Widening Participation/ Outreach (2017). She is a past winner of the Pandora Award and a National Teaching Fellow (2018). Peter Bolan is a Senior Lecturer and Course Director for International Travel and Tourism Management at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Dr. Bolan viii Contributors has published widely in the area of niche tourism and is a leading expert in film tourism. Peter’s research interests and consultancy specialisms include digital tourism, film- and media-induced tourism, golf tourism, and food tourism. Peter writes for a number of business and industry trade publications, and is a regular speaker at tourism industry events, conferences, and workshops. Ellie Bowker was born and raised in Cornwall, where she developed her obsession with stories, before moving to London. She has a degree in Publishing with English Literature from Kingston University, where she co-created Forgotten Female Voices, a series of eight books written by British women lost in history. She has researched and written about children’s literacy, public libraries, and social diversity in the publishing industry. She now works at Hachette UK as Group Contracts Assistant. This is her first publication. Richard Bradford is Research Professor at Ulster University and Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon. Previously, he held posts in Oxford; the University of Wales; and Trinity College, Dublin. He has published twenty academic monographs on topics as varied as stylistics, Russian Formalism, crime fiction, literary aesthetics, and eighteenth-century criticism. He has also published eight trade literary biographies, including on the lives of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, Martin Amis, and John Milton, and, most recently, The Man Who Wasn’t There: A Life of Ernest Hemingway (Tauris/Bloomsbury trade, 2019). His life of Orwell, Orwell: A Man of Our Time (Bloomsbury trade), will appear in January 2020 on the seventieth anniversary of the author’s death. He is founder and general editor of a new Blackwell/Wiley series of literary biographies called ‘The Life of the Author’, and his Blackwell Companion to Literary Biography (ed.) was published in 2018. Amy Burns completed a BSc in Nutritional Sciences at University College Cork (1996), MSc in Biomedical Sciences (1997), and a PhD at Ulster University (2001) before taking up a post in the Ulster Business School at the University of Ulster. Amy is the Course Director of the Consumer Management & Food Innovation programme and the Director of the Food and Consumer Sensory Testing Suite (FACTS). She is an expert in nutrition and sensory testing. She has published widely on aspects of nutrition and consumer issues. Her areas of expertise include nutrition, food innovation, and sensory science. Lucie Ducarre was born in France in 1991. After completing a Graduate Diploma in Academic English and International Studies at King’s College London, and a Master’s degree in Law at Paris II Panthéon-Assas University, she pursued an MA in Publishing at Kingston University. In 2018, she received the national prize for the best Masters dissertation, awarded by the Association for Publishing Education, for her dissertation on French children’s literature and autism. She had previously been awarded the 2013 Coordinators’ prize for best essay of the Contributors ix year at King’s College London for her essay on private-public partnerships and the crisis management of Hurricane Katrina. Her law Masters dissertation on the economic and cultural consequences of the funding of French cinema and series by television channels was also shortlisted for the 2015 ‘Law, media and Internet’ national prize, awarded by Lagardère Active, Microsoft, and TF1. Along with publishing, children’s rights, and autism, her main areas of study are the impact of socioeconomics and cultural factors, and the role played by the creative industries in the enforcement of laws and rights. She is currently working as a freelance writer. Robert Fraser’s life of the poet George Barker was a Spectator Book of the Year in 2002, and in May 2012 his life of the surrealist writer David Gascoyne topped the Independent’s chart of Best Ten New Biographies. He has also written books about Marcel Proust (1994), Sir James Frazer (1990), and international print history (2008). He has held academic posts in Ghana, Leeds, London, and Trinity College Cambridge, and is now Emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association, and the Royal Asiatic Society. His latest book, Ancient Biography and Its Afterlives: Plutarch & Co., will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Madelena Gonzalez studied at the universities of Birmingham, Aix- en-Provence, and Vienna before settling in France. She is currently Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University of Avignon and head of the multidisciplinary research group ICTT (‘Identité culturelle, textes et théâtralité’). She is also in charge of the Master’s programme in English Studies. She has published widely on Anglophone literature, theatre, and culture. Her most recent publications include Aesthetics and Ideology in Contemporary Literature and Drama and Minority Theatre on the Global Stage: Challenging Paradigms from the Margins. Caroline Harris has lectured on publishing for more than a decade, most recently as Course Leader for BA Publishing (Combined) course at Bath Spa University. With over 25 years’ experience in book publishing and journalism, she is co- founder and director, with Clive Wilson, of the book creation and consultancy business Harris + Wilson. The business works with world-leading publishers to propose and produce high-quality illustrated non-fiction titles, such as the popular Ella’s Kitchen cookbook series. She is also a published fiction and non- fiction author (Ms Harris’s Book of Green Household Management, John Murray 2009) and poet. Currently, she is studying for an interdisciplinary practice-based PhD in the English department at Royal Holloway, University of London. Per Henningsgaard is a lecturer in professional writing and publishing at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Prior to arriving in Perth, he was the director of the Master’s degree in book publishing at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. His most recent publications are ‘Not Your Average Reader: