LITERATURE, SMALL PUBLISHERS AND THE MARKET IN CULTURE

MARK DAVIS LOOKS AT THE PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS FOR INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING.

THERE'S been a fundamental change over the past few years in the way that Australian literary culture is understood and debated. No longer is literature something that magically falls into the arms of critics, teachers, the public. Instead, literary production is now widely understood as a commercially mediated process. Everyone, suddenly, seems to be talking about the publishing industry and the role it plays in producing literary and national culture. Newspapers are full of it and blogs are alive with it. Few have anything positive to say, to the point where the publishing industry of late has become something of a scandal. 
    Yet the terms of recent debate about literary publishing have so far been framed in ways that tend to forestall meaningful analysis. Some commentators are naïve about the primarily commercial objectives of most publishing companies. Others use the industry as a template on which to rehearse old ideological debates: for or against free markets; for or against cultural nationalism, protectionism and the literary canon. Some still seem to conceive its role in ways that recall the standard assumptions of traditional literary studies, as if publishing should offer a transparent conduit bringing works of cultural value before the public. Others have descended to personal attacks.
    In what follows I want to think through some possibilities for the reinvigoration of literary publishing that I tentatively pointed towards at the end of a previous essay, ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing’. In so doing I want to focus on the role of small publishers in the industry. While many see small publishers as beacons of hope in an industry dominated by global conglomerates, I want to suggest, without idealising them, that they also play a useful role in signalling the possibility of non-market cultures and values that undercut prevailing ideological assumptions about how free-market societies function. At the same time, I want to raise questions about how the relationship between literary culture and market culture has been understood in the debate so far.

Defences of literature and hostility to market culture have tended to go together in recent debate. An example is the article by Rosemary Neill published in the Australian in mid-2006 that assessed the effects of Nielsen BookScan on literary publishing. In what has been something of a trend in this debate thus far, the article personalised the argument. ‘Is This the Most Feared Man in Australian Literature?’ was the cover headline, emblazoned across a full-page photo of Nielsen’s Australian CEO, Michael Webster, looking suitably sinister. Amidst its discussion of Webster’s manner (“slightly refrigerated”) and its championing of literary publishing, which I support (disclosure: I provided several quotes for the article, and know Neill and Webster professionally), there was little real canvassing of the wider ideological pressures driving the marketisation of culture, or the commercial realities that affect the publishing industry. Hardly surprising, perhaps, in a newspaper feature article written for the Saturday morning breakfast table rather than the sociology seminar. But the way such articles reference certain ‘structures of belief’ says much about how cultural production is imagined and the limitations of the debates about it. Such articles are arguably less about providing substantial analysis of the way the publishing industry works than mobilising anxieties over the decline of national cultures.
    I know Neill well enough to vouch for her genuine passion for literature and sincere concern about the future of literary publishing. But such articles are framed by the contexts in which they appear. ‘Cultural disaster stories’ that reference the demise of some aspect of traditional culture highlight a standard paradox in the Murdoch press – and in radical conservatism generally – where support for the purest forms of laissez-faire sits alongside panics about the decline of national cultural values, and campaigns for their reimposition, without any recognition that one might ultimately corrode the other. Other examples include the Australian’s long-running campaign against ‘critical literacy’ in the teaching of English literature and in support of a return to ‘reverence’ for literature, or the ‘literature summit’ organised by Imre Salusinszky, the Australian’s state political correspondent and chair of the Australia Council’s Literature Board, to promote putting Australian literature back on the curriculum. Whether or not one is sympathetic to such causes, they tend to suffer from a blindness to the corrosive effects that markets have had on education. It’s the classic double-bind of modern authoritarian populism from Thatcher onwards: the pursuit of freedom via markets versus the paternalist enforcement of moral-cultural values.
    The paradoxes of neoliberal understandings of cultural value versus market value were illustrated in a recent article by Salusinszky in the Australian which strongly criticised my earlier argument that the decline of literary publishing was an effect of neoliberal globalisation. According to Salusinszky, I had “donned the garb of a defender of literary tradition”, something he supposed was at odds with my Leftist “cultural studies” affiliations. Matthew Arnold and people like me, he says, made strange bedfellows. My error, he argued, is that I blame “the free enterprise society”, “economic rationalism” and “neoliberalism” for the state in which literature finds itself, when the real culprit is neo-Marxists and cultural studies types who have forsaken their role as “indispensable stewards of the literary and cultural heritage”.
    Frankly, even though I am an exponent of the dreaded cultural studies, I see no fundamental paradox in defending literature. I reject the opposition (dated, clichéd, a relic from the culture wars) that is the basis of Salusinszky’s thinking. But redux culture wars polemic aside, Salusinszky has no argument, no real explanation for the phenomenon I outlined, merely a determination to defend Arnoldian cultural value and markets in the same breath, and a fundamental paradox that he can’t overcome: in a technocratic society where the market is the measure of all things, there is little room for the values he espouses.
The same bias appeared in an article Salusinszky published after the literature summit, in which he again blames the decline of literary studies in schools on those who would politicise literature. He is unable to acknowledge that the pressures that produce overwrought, jargonistic curriculum ‘outcomes’ are precisely the pressures of market society to itemise, rank and tabulate educational processes, and turn the humanities into a proto-science that has quantifiable uses (‘generic skills’) in the market.
    Tom Ford, also writing in the Australian, displays a similar faith in free markets. Nevertheless, he highlights the paradoxes of Salusinszky’s position. Ford is critical of the Salusinszky-hosted literary round-table, not least because it resulted in a communiqué that argued for protectionism and the shielding of Australian literary classics from the open market. As Ford points out, this immediately raises difficult questions about which should or shouldn’t be included, and harks back to a crudely nationalistic conception of literature. Yet Ford’s proposed solution to the decline of literary publishing is to drop the GST, a simplistic idea that shows little curiosity about why people do or don’t buy literary texts: book sales in other categories haven’t been hurt by the GST. Cultural nationalism and state support, Ford can’t admit, have historically been indispensable to the success of literary publishing.
    But a more profound problem with his argument, as Nathan Hollier has pointed out, is its fallacious assumption that markets are value-neutral. Ford seems to think that an economic ‘level playing field’ will somehow cancel out all the cultural and social assumptions that otherwise underpin literary consumption and production – as if markets are natural and beyond politics, and not themselves a social construction.
    For Hollier, this embrace of market forces is of a piece with Ford’s anti-canon, anti-nationalist bent, all of which he derides. As he has argued elsewhere (in a foreshadowing of the communiqué from Salusinszky’s literary round-table, except from the Left), Hollier is an advocate of protectionism: not merely for Australian literary classics, but for literary publishing per se. Tariffs, grants, protection from imports, educational settings, even the reconfiguring of Nielsen BookScan as a mechanism for targeted state assistance, get a run: “The identification of a drop in sales of poetry could as easily be seen as a sign of the need for the government and publishers to invest in the production and reading of poetry than as a sign that poetry is rubbish and doesn’t deserve to survive.”
    There’s some merit in these ideas – local literary publishing can’t prosper without state support of some kind – but taken together as a blanket defence of protectionism, they are less convincing. One problem with arguments for protectionism – and you don’t need to be an apologist for economic reform to see it – is that the recent success of the Australian publishing industry refutes them. Fifty years ago there were only three Australian publishing houses producing more than ten titles per year: Angus & Robertson, Melbourne University Press and F.W. Cheshire. Among them A & R was so dominant that it exercised virtual monopoly power. Most Australian authors published overseas. British-based publishers dominated a trade that was heavily protected in their favour (especially in limiting the sales of rights) and saw Australia in narrowly colonial and crudely exploitative terms. Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the local industry grew partly on the back of government support (the book bounty, educational settings, sales tax exemption, grants), and some forms of protection (from parallel imports, for example) remain, but as most protections were stripped away through the 1990s and into the 2000s, local publishers thrived. Despite fears (which to some extent I share) that globalisation and cultural homogenisation amount to the same thing, in the case of book publishers the opposite has happened. The market share of Australian-originated books has increased to the point where they now hold 60 per cent of the market (compared to less than 10 per cent of music and 5 per cent of films). An industry that was worth $2 million in 1960 was worth $1.353 billion in 2003–04 (the most recently available figures); it published 8602 new titles per year, and sold an estimated 128.8 million books.
    Paradoxically, while deregulation has meant consolidation at the top end of the industry, it has also benefited small publishers. Many have commented on the proliferation and recent successes of small to medium-sized independent publishers in Australia such as Text, Scribe, Hardie Grant, Melbourne University Publishing and Black Inc. Most tend not to realise the degree to which this is also due to deregulation, namely the 1991 Copyright Act and the introduction of the thirty-day rule which gives publishers thirty days from overseas publication of a title to publish a local edition before it becomes legal for anyone to import stock of the overseas edition. Scribe and Hardie Grant, for example, built their success on the back of rights buy-ins of US titles that would previously have been impossible, and others have copied the strategy. Similarly, Text exploited the changes to consolidate its literary list through strong overseas rights sales. This deregulation has by no means been the only factor in the recent success of small publishers – digitisation and changing economies of scale, and improved access to distribution networks are among other factors – but it remains true that the renaissance in Australian independent publishing can be dated more or less from the rule change.
    Straightforward protectionism, in other words, isn’t the answer. To reintroduce it would breach international treaty commitments and would almost certainly lead to retaliatory action against Australian books.
    But for all the differences between the positions taken in the debate about the future of Australian literary publishing, and the contradictions within them, perhaps the most revealing thing is an assumption that all share which bears crucially on the very project of ‘rescuing’ literary publishing. All fail to ask: “What is literature for?” Is it just a museum? Is it a middlebrow pastime of the leisured and self-consciously cultured? Is it simply a formation that academics defer to in order to sustain their research careers? Is it the stuff of cultural nostalgia, or the stuff of social reform? No-one (apart from Salusinszky, who has a half a crack at it) seems able or willing to say – or even to think it a question worth asking. In the recent debate about literary publishing, the term ‘literature’ has circulated as a given. Literature is valuable because it is literature; no more need be said.
    Nor has there been much room for ambivalence or complexity. The divisions, instead, are tribal, and tend to name-calling and type-casting rather than analysis or problem-solving in good faith: you’re either for literature, or against it. The reason for this, I think, maps onto the culture at large. For many opponents of market-driven economic ‘reform’, literature now functions primarily as an oppositional term for markets. Literature is all we stand for (culture, value, belief) and markets are all we stand against. Just about all the recent debate about literary publishing is a de facto debate about the role of markets in society. It rarely moves beyond regurgitating in crude forms the Arnoldian programmatic of literature as a binding social corrective against godlessness and markets. But, as the above points about protectionism suggest, the opposition between literature and markets can be misleading.
    Most contributions to the debate also share a cultural nostalgia. Revisiting the policies and practices of the past (protectionism, school settings, cultural nationalism) and abandoning the economic, business and educational practices of the present (the GST, quantitative sales measuring, ‘critical theory’) will, it is hoped, reanimate the past itself. There has been little serious thinking about how literary publishing might be affected by changes in reading practices, in the role of the education system and the expectations of students and parents, in the business and economic contexts in which publishers operate, or in the location and status of literature as a social and cultural practice.

Literature is a form that can be defended without needing to have recourse to cultural nationalism, high-culture snobbishness and class fetishism, or the idea that literature is some kind of secular religion. Literary texts offer a unique place to experiment with and take pleasure in linguistic form, and to raise new ideas and set agendas with a subtlety and power that eludes other media and other genres of written text. Literature can do things that no other medium or genre can – not cinema, not the web, not television, not onscreen gaming – because it offers the opportunity to play out (often very) complex ideas, metaphors, evocations of belief, states of being, narratives of events, people, places and selves, at length, in an accessible form that is relatively affordable to make and consume. Shared across time and space, literary texts are indispensable to the construction of social memory and meaning and, complexly, to a meta-narrative of meaning through which historical changes in belief systems, subjectivities, cultural assumptions, social practices and systems of social organisation can be tracked and extended. Texts tend to be designated as ‘literary’ in so far as they do this kind of work, and especially in so far as they do it self-consciously. Literature is a specific type of social information that performs a set of tasks that, taken together, no other genre performs.
    Yet literature is not somehow separate from markets. Literature doesn’t simply come into the world. It is produced and managed as a cultural formation by a range of institutions and their affiliate figures – publishers, editors, reviewers, academic critics – who are paid to think about it. The logic of genre, or the logic of taste and the accumulation of cultural capital, as Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated, aren’t so easily disentangled from the logic of markets as some assume, which isn’t to suggest that there is a simple deterministic relationship between the two. Publishing, in short, has always been a commercial business.
    To point to this complicity between literary production and markets isn’t necessarily to suggest that markets determine everything. Nor is it to believe that they pretend to some kind of perfect democracy that unproblematically reflects what people want – the charge that Hollier has made against me for daring to suggest that in the present era of neoliberal globalisation, multinationals publish less literature because they look to markets more than to a sense of cultural obligation and (dwindling) subsidies. It is, rather, an invitation to nuance and complexity that goes beyond the tribalism and ad hominem attacks that have characterised the debate thus far.
    But just because the arts and markets are hopelessly entangled doesn’t mean that the arts can’t also provide a space for the critique of markets. This is perhaps especially the case as traditional hierarchies of symbolic capital have begun to collapse and literature finds itself an outlier form. Often the sorts of things that literature does best don’t have much market value and, as literary production becomes ever more clearly a volunteer effort, the motivations that drive it tend not to include the accumulation of financial capital (though most don’t say no to a little cultural capital when they can get it). For example, as a report recently written by Kate Freeth for the Small Press Underground Networking Community (SPUNC) shows, many of the forty-six small and independent publishers she surveyed don’t expect to make a profit. They are motivated, rather, by social and cultural values that are pursued irrespective of their ultimate market worth. The wilful altruism of small publishers cuts across the belief, central to economic libertarianism, that people are motivated primarily by rational self-interest. As Ian Syson of Vulgar Press has said: “Whenever anyone asks me if they should set up a publisher, I tell them not to, but to do it anyway. It’s a form of madness, but it’s a lovely form of madness.”
    Small publishers, in other words, provide a useful example of how positions for critique and the articulation of non-market values and motivations remain possible even from within a commercial context. Literature might be a hopelessly market-bound form, but it isn’t necessarily just a market-bound form. It’s perhaps no accident that small publishers such as Text, Scribe, Black Inc. and Melbourne University Publishing have carved out a niche for themselves publishing self-consciously serious books with social agendas at a time when major publishers have become increasingly formulaic. Similarly, in Australia, independent booksellers have increased market share when conventional wisdom is that chains and discount department stores are preferred. The boom in independent publishing and bookselling, I suspect, is itself evidence of a desire for meaning on the parts of publishers and readers that isn’t canvassed in the market-centric publishing strategies of the majors.
    But if literary publishing is worth defending, then what might an enlightened, practical set of policies designed to support it look like? After all, if there’s actually no such thing as a truly free market, intervention and a policy framework of some sort will be required. Rather than blanket protectionism, what’s needed are strategic, closely targeted policies with clearly articulated objectives. One reason for the success of the 1991 amendments to the Copyright Act is that they fostered enterprise rather than simply rewarding business for maintaining the status quo. A carrot-and-stick arrangement, the thirty-day rule provided protection (exclusive local rights on overseas titles) for those willing to take commercial risks (buying rights and publishing early). Perhaps similar risk-taking can be encouraged by a system that would, say, underwrite grants for a given author should a publisher be willing to commit to them over three or more books. Text publisher Michael Heyward recently suggested a fund to train editors to work in the area of finding and developing new writers. The editors are already being trained (by courses such as the one I teach in), but why not fund them to work with new writers in conjunction with experienced mentors, in programs that could be sponsored either by government or industry? Such a program could extend on the biennial Elite Editorial Mentorship Program presently run by the Australian Publishers Association (APA) in conjunction with the Literature Board of the Australia Council.
    The Vogel Prize has been one of the great success stories of Australian literary publishing. Why not emulate it with an award for young editors or publishers, with a prize in the form of a paid fellowship with an established publisher (that is, a locally focused version of the Beatrice Davis scholarship which sends an experienced author to New York each year)? The annual National Young Writers’ Festival in Newcastle, NSW has been a huge success since it was inaugurated in the late 1990s, not least because it is developing new audiences as well as new writers. Would it be possible to extend its model, to turn some of its energies into more concrete outcomes?
    The formation of the Australia Council by the Whitlam government in 1973 helped spark a boom in Australian literary writing, but its funding has recently stagnated. If literary publishing is to prosper, then specialised agencies will almost certainly be a primary vehicle for success. The Australia Council should be funded accordingly. Its approach might be extended, too, to supplement the existing grants model with new models for funding and development that work closely with established and emerging publishers, as well as creative writing and publishing courses, with the Council acting in a brokerage role to build more partnerships similar to the abovementioned mentorship program run in conjunction with the APA.
    Much of the energy for renewal will come from – is coming from – the grass roots. The SPUNC report itself shows the diversity and energy of small publishers. It also shows they face common problems, especially to do with marketing and the cost of distribution. The report recommends that presses collaborate to solve their marketing problems by producing shared catalogues, and also help address distribution problems through shared e-commerce sites. The formation of SPUNC as a representative body is itself a move towards addressing small publishers’ difficulties (most members don’t feel their needs are met by the APA), but the initiatives of small publishers deserve further support because of the special role they play in literary publishing. Although large publishers continue to publish literary novels, as the SPUNC report shows, when the large publishers shed risk it’s small publishers who increasingly do the work of discovering and nurturing new authors, who ensure that local content has a market presence, and who are largely responsible for the survival of the short story and poetry as literary forms. As one report respondent said, “Small and independent presses are crucial to the diverse life of any country’s culture.”
    They deserve support too, because the people who found them and volunteer to work in them will, as well as those they publish, become the authors, editors and publishers of the future. This was the great legacy of the small press boom of the 1970s, and will almost certainly be again. Again, rather than blanket protection, assistance could target those who take risks. Perhaps small publishers of promise could be given preference in tendering to publish some of the myriad one-off government and semi-government publications that appear each year. Special attention, in the form of a program of direct or indirect assistance, could go to those specialising in forms neglected by larger publishers. Those that rely on volunteer staff could be given tax breaks on the same basis as larger companies get concessions for staff training.
    But none of these ideas directly addresses an ongoing problem that is unlikely to go away, which is that literature is no longer a pre-eminent cultural form. Obviously it can still produce bestsellers and even ‘stars’ – Zadie Smith, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy – but it no longer has the cultural pre-eminence that it once did, and, for the reasons that I outlined in my earlier essay, is unlikely to regain it. Not only have the economic circumstances changed (which, as that essay concluded, isn’t to suggest that such changes are inevitable and can’t be reversed), but so have a range of social contexts that fostered literary production.
    The idea that literature is a secular religion was key to its emergence as a major form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but is unlikely to resonate again, any more than the idea that literature should be promoted for nationalist reasons. The Australianisation of school curriculums through the 1950s provided a vital springboard for literary production that, as Anne Galligan has said, “laid the crucial groundwork for the later nationalist stirrings of the 1960s, the creative output of the 1970s, and the professionalism of the 1980s, so often highlighted in surveys of Australian literary and publishing culture”, but it is unlikely to be repeated. The Australiana boom of the 1960s was pivotal to the financial growth of the local industry even as it helped underwrite cultural and literary nationalism. The Australian film resurgence of the 1970s and 1980s provided a pop-culture impetus for the parallel boom in ‘Ozlit’, and as Jenny Lee has said, it’s unlikely that one would have happened without the other.
    Since then, parents’ and students’ expectations of the education system have changed. In the current technocratic environment, more want concrete job skills rather than the generalised vocational skills that a literary degree brings. Literature now competes with a range of other media, and as the tastes of cultural consumers have become more horizontally stratified, so the class system that naturalised its status as a ‘superior’ form has to some extent broken down. Everywhere it is surveyed, literary reading is in decline.
    One possibility often floated for the renaissance of literary publishing is school settings. I’m enough of a traditionalist to believe that the teaching of Australian literature should be encouraged in schools and universities, but it’s doubtful that it is the literary panacea that some seem to imagine. Many of us who were force-fed My Brother Jack in Year Eleven steered clear of Australian literature for the next decade or so. There appears to be little ripple effect from educational settings, even for a given author. School settings can keep some texts in print and function as a de facto state subsidy, in that those titles that are set and sell strongly because of it subsidise those that aren’t. But there’s no evidence that they’ll lead to a widespread resurgence of literary reading.
    The problem is one of building readerships and creating markets, and a fundamental factor is a lack of institutional support. Governments, universities, large publishing houses – all have to some extent abandoned the programmatic backing for literature that’s always been necessary to its survival. And it’s for this reason that literary publishing is slipping out of the hands of profit-makers and into the hands of enthusiasts.
    Literature, to gain readers, undoubtedly needs to resonate and be relevant. The best-selling local literary authors of the past few years – Kate Grenville, Richard Flanagan – have produced books that do that. But literary texts need to gain institutional purchase as well, and a reason for being taught, being funded, being published, that goes beyond mere cultural obligation. This again will no doubt involve state support, not merely by sticking a few old books on reading lists and hoping that state-subsidised literary nationalism will work its magic once again. Rather, literature needs a new sense of its social role and official backing for that role. Is it too optimistic to suggest this as a not so remote possibility in an era of ‘new humanisms’ where people are looking for alternatives to and critiques of the ideas and language of market culture, where there is a desire for meaning and content that reaches beyond the glib, or where histories and their narratives increasingly clash and search for ‘working through’ and resolution, or where the idea of ‘craft’ (to take Richard Sennett’s meaning of the term, as a set of practices that disturb the logic of the new capitalism) has growing cultural resonance?
    Nostalgia for past institutional structures won’t work any more than the uncritical embrace of markets. The task, rather, is to critique the idea that markets are the measure of all things. As I’ve suggested above, the very existence of small and independent publishers itself undercuts the presumptions of free-market economic ideology. Such publishers represent precisely the sort of selflessness and civic purpose that aren’t explained by those who see rational self-interest as the fundamental human motivation. Nor can they be dismissed as ‘rent seekers’ who want to live off state subsidies as an alternative to chasing profits (most, according to the SPUNC survey, don’t even bother to seek subsidies).
    In saying this I don’t mean to romanticise independent publishers, nor to suggest that they are somehow non-market – any independent who says they don’t want to make money is probably being less than honest – nor to imply all over again that meaningful cultural production and markets are in eternal opposition to each other. What I do mean to say is that the very existence of independent publishing shows that there’s more to culture than markets can anticipate.
    Obviously the stakes in all this rise far above the publishing industry. They bear on the broader question of the relationship between markets and cultural values per se. But if what’s at issue is the necessity of human agency and intervention in market logic, then we face some thorny questions. Who should decide what such culture is? How should it be funded?
    There’s no real sign that any of these questions will be answered by those who occupy the largely balkanised positions sketched out above. Nor do any current ideological models, Left or Right, have the potential to do so. All, in their own way, oversimplify and seek to dodge difficult issues about the relationship between markets and culture. But still, collectively, as a society and a culture, if the pursuit of non-market values is important, we do have to answer these questions.

Mark Davis is a writer of popular non-fiction. He is the author of Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. Since 2004 he has taught at the University of Melbourne.

© Mark Davis

Overland 190–autumn 2008, pp. 4–11

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