The Making Of Contemporary Writing In Britain

By Author: Alex Lee
Total Articles: 366
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Now a discipline in respectably anxious middle age, until recently the history of the book had paid scant attention to contemporary publishing and marketing practice. Book historians had inter alia assumed that as all books had histories, only books with a preexisting historical record were worthy of serious scrutiny. Claire Squires' Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain, a detailed, thoroughly researched and cogently argued examination of the marketing and publishing of British fiction in the period from 1990 to the present, redresses this lack of a contemporary focus in book history and makes a strong and original contribution to Thomas Sabo the field.

Squires' study is divided into two halves. Part 1 surveys the contexts and theories for the publishing and marketing of contemporary fiction in Britain, while part 2 closely examines a number of case studies in contemporary publishing history. In positioning her study as an integrated examination of marketing in the space earlier termed by Robert Darnton as the 'communications circuit' Squires conceives ...
... of marketing as 'a form of representation and interpretation, situated in the spaces between the author and the reader but which authors and readers also take part in and surrounding the production, dissemination and reception of texts'. The first half of her study outlines both developments in the publishing industry (consolidation, vertical integration and the absorption of independent houses as imprints), and the implications changing market conditions have had for authorship, such as the disproportionate influence of escalating advance payments. In her analysis of literary categories here, Squires pointedly highlights the invagination of genre, by demonstrating the extent to which the literary novel is defined by and exists only in relation to other discreetly defined, segmented and targeted genres, such as crime fiction, 'chick-lit', children's literature, or romantic fiction. Cultural capital is in constant flux, and nowhere is this more evident than in the practice of per formative reviewing, where the review of a literary work both accrues and dispenses cultural capital because of its intermediate role between text and reader; as Squires notes, 'opinion formers' such as reviewers, have an 'advantaged capacity for communicating the book to other potential readers', thereby becoming integral to the 'representational processes of marketing'.

The second part of Marketing Literature provides a series of detailed, interlocking and highly informative case studies of the publishing histories of recent British bestsellers; these include Martin Amis' The Information, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991), Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels (1997-2007), amongst others. Squires' approach here is to interrogate the 'construction of the definition of the literary via the marketplace'by looking at the extent to which marketing contributed to both the recognition of literary merit and sales success in this period. In perhaps the most revealing analysis in the book, Squires examines the spectacular sales success of Louis de Bernieres' million volume selling Captain Corellfs Mandolin (1994), and deconstructs the myth that has accrued around the book, that is was the subject of Thomas Sabo Charms an uniquely effective 'word of mouth' publicity campaign spontaneously generated by its enthusiastic readers, seemingly operating independently of its publisher's marketing intentions.