Dealing with the Devil

From Planet 174

by Nicholas Murray

Recent changes in book publishing and book selling are having a severely negative effect on the freedom of writers and the choice of books available to readers.

It is a pleasant June evening in Athens. I am in the company of the two Greek translators of my biography of Franz Kafka, at the restaurant O Platanos (The Plane Tree) in the northern district of Patissia. Actually, we are beneath the broad, waxy green leaves of a mulberry tree which, as the evening wears on, will start to shower our table with small falling insects. The talk, understandably enough, has been of translation and the quiddities of language. Alexandros is translating from the original German my numerous quotations from Kafka and talks of the pleasure it gives him to see Kafka being reborn “in my language”. Xenophon is translating my English text. He recently translated Conrad’s A Shadow Line and explains that in modern Greek most of the terms still in use by sailors are derived from the days of occupation by the maritime empire of the Venetians. Earlier, on our way to the restaurant, walking through the streets of Patissia from the city bus, he says that my use of the word “recycling” to describe Kafka’s reworking of some earlier texts, doesn’t work in Greek although there is a word almost identical to it and meaning the same thing (a municipal dustcart obligingly groans past us at this point) so he has found a way round it, a periphrasis. Xenophon has the dry, sardonic intelligence so characteristic of the sophisticated Athenian which makes it all the more surprising when, briefly, he appears to lose his cool. His most recent translation, of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, was attacked by a Greek reviewer because he chose to deploy some unusual and recondite vocabulary. He raps the table and declares angrily: “It’s linguistic terrorism!” In solidarity I point out that a Welsh reviewer attacked my recent novel for using a French word. He nods solemnly. More evidence.

That sense of constraint, of the limiting of possibilities, of writers being forced into moulds by publishers, booksellers, agents, fashion-conscious reviewers and critics, may always have been present — who ever said being a writer was an easy option? — but it seems to me that there has been a rapid advance recently of the forces ranged against the contemporary writer. It is not a matter of censorship and repression, as it still can be in many countries of the world, but rather a growth in the power of conformity, in the narrowing of choice. And it is not just a matter of concern to writers, it is affecting — and will continue to do so in far more damaging ways — the people who matter most of all: readers.

The conditions in which books are produced and put before readers are always subject to change and innovation and this has often brought great benefits. Such high points for the modern reader as the launch of Penguin Books, the rise of public libraries, the spread of universal literacy, and more recently the possibility of searching and finding rare or difficult to acquire books on the Internet, have to be celebrated. But it seems to me that the changes we are witnessing just now are far less benign and are in danger of drastically limiting the range, originality and innovative quality of the books we read. It may not be terrorism but it certainly frightens me.

The recent capture of the high street bookselling chain, Ottakar’s, by the HMV group which owns Waterstone’s will, if the Office of Fair Trading eventually permits it, put Waterstone’s in firm control of nearly a quarter of all bookselling in Britain. When this chain was first launched by Tim Waterstone in the 1980s it was seen by many as a breath of fresh air. Here were big, stylish, comfortable shops with a huge range of books of real quality. I was one of those seduced. Sadly, after several changes of hands, this chain is far closer, (especially in the smaller shops which have, one by one, snuffed out the light of independent bookshops in many small and medium-sized towns in Britain) to the notorious W.H. Smith. Waterstone’s, with its powerful buying policies, its apparently total control over the publishing industry which must give it ever larger discounts, pay bribes to get its books displayed in the windows and the front of the shop, even submit its book jackets for approval, and with its supermarket-style “3 for 2” promotions of book “product”, is plainly a very powerful force.

What is perhaps less fully appreciated are the further ramifications of its power. Not merely do publishers have to kow-tow to the chain booksellers like Waterstone’s (while, as independent booksellers vanish, an oligopoly parallel to the supermarkets — of which more later — is slowly established) but their existence modifies the entire publishing universe. The Chairman of the Society of Authors, Antony Beevor, recently claimed in the pages of the Society’s magazine, The Author: “I have already heard editors say that marketing departments will not allow them even to consider a manuscript, unless without any work on it, they can guarantee it being accepted for a three-for-two promotion.” I sincerely hope he is wrong. He added that Waterstone’s had a new “ordering strategy” which warned staff against ordering more than one copy of any book which was not what it categorised as an “A-Grade” new title. If a book cannot be displayed or ordered in quantitites of more than one at a time what hope is there for the small publisher, the off-beat volume, the quirky, the innovative, the title that appeals to a serious minority only — what hope, in other words, for richness and variety and for the open-minded, inquisitive reader?

In these conditions of market conformity editors — who once ruled the roost in publishing — are no longer at the creative heart of the publishing process. Men and women with years of publishing experience are now routinely humiliated at commissioning meetings by sales and marketing people who tell them that their bright idea won’t sell — a famous formulation in publishing which takes the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they say a book won’t sell (“No one wants to read a boring Russian novel which ends with the heroine throwing herself in front of a train”) then that is precisely what will happen. Like a cancer, the dreary nostrums of sales and marketing eat their way into the innards of the book business. And it goes on. Literary agents, who exist to supply new work to publishers (most of whom now refuse to look at unsolicited manuscripts that don’t come from an agent) are also affected by the rules set by the bookselling chains. They will find themselves, consciously or not, assimilating the requirements of the chains when looking at new work that is presented to them. Selecting more of the same, the stuff that looks like the stuff that sold last week rather than the stuff that might surprise us next week, becomes the easiest option.