Media Threads
June 8, 2009We get all sorts of ‘trade’ news feeds - mostly from free-to-receive e-newsletters such as BookBrunch or The Bookseller – others bits we pick up from the literature pages of the national press online. News like this – like all news – is hard to piece together into any sort of a ‘whole’. But sometimes I get a curious satisfaction from just juxtaposing different bits and pieces.
So, following on from Salt Publishing’s recent meltdown, despite heavy Arts Council England funding (and their open and very persistent plea for everyone to ’save a publisher – buy a book’ – which is a marketing strategy we have half considered once or twice - but thankfully only half considered) we read this week about Quercus posting losses of £280K. Not that Quercus can’t weather it – this is venture capital-funded big business – but it is interesting to see even the big guys currently paying out more than they can sell their books for. And, on the other hand, is this from today’s BookBrunch:
Arts Council England has announced awards to four publishers to promote literature in translation.
Bitter Lemon Press, the specialist in foreign crime fiction, wins £22,640 to go towards the publication of four titles and the digitisation of its list. Banipal Publishing gets £18,080 for marketing and rebranding its magazine, which translates contemporary Arab fiction and poetry. Peter Owen gets £17,934 towards the publication of new titles and ones from the Peter Owen Modern Classics range. And Pushkin Press receives £25,000 to subsidise three titles.
Grant, anyone?
What’s my point? Only that this pair of news items shows the ‘pulled-in-both-directions’ issue of being a publisher and, consequently, of funding for publishing. Is a publisher just another business driven by market forces and finances - or is a publisher on a par with other artists and the public provision of arts? Clearly there are publishers who are almost entirely one or the other – but a great number of us lie somewhere uncomfortably in the middle of the two extremes. The aim for TRP – stated publicly on Day 1 – was never to compromise on the art, but still to make a profit. We were warned that this was an impossible feat – and that may well prove to be the case. But what is also clearly the case (as Scotland’s politicians still consult their latest committee on funding for publishing) is that not only is a small literary publisher in Scotland fighting against market forces – but that we are also fighting against a funding regime south of the border which heavily subsidises our competitors.
David
Much as I’d love to have some funding, and much as I have valued the funded projects I have worked on in the past, I do think public arts funding leads to some very strange distortions. Some of the distortions are as follows:
A handfull of publishers are funded – and thus have an unfair commercial advantage over the unfunded ones.
Artists/writers are told what themes are going to be funded and thus distort their work in directions that might benefit. (Thus, for example, we are going to get a rash of sports themed literature projects as 2012 comes ever closer).
We have the horrible reality that administrators and politicians end up deciding which arts are more valid than others.
How about they get rid of all public arts funding and use the mountain cash freed up to adopt the Irish policy of making creative artists’ incomes tax free? Just a suggestion.
Aye, we often go around the loop of wondering if it would be better if nobody got public funding to publish. We think we would do better than some of our competitors in literary publishing because we are so ‘low-overhead’ and lean. But we then suspect that purely market forces would drive the whole publishing industry further down the mass-market-or-bust route to homogeneity and mediocrity. It would be nice to think that ‘the reader’ would eventually insist on some quality and innovation. And no doubt many would. But likely not enough of them – and who would they ‘insist’ to?
Perhaps what is actually happening now, with a little public funding, is that good readers and good publishers are in some sort of upwards feedback-loop. Creating and demanding new literary markets together. The publisher as market-builder and ground-breaker (as opposed to just a business producing books) is what I’m thinking about. Giving more money to writers – we are all in favour of that – but strangle the good publishers to do it? The writers had better get used to the idea of taking on the job that publishers do now. And I’m not convinced that many people, writers or otherwise, clearly understand exactly what that job is. (We’ll continue to try to understand it better ourselves!)