Abstract
It is through the interplay of economic and symbolic capital that book publishing and the literary industries have historically found traction, since to have money but no network is almost as unavailing as having a notable reputation but no money. As John B. Thompson explains in Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century: “For most trade publishers, the ‘value’ of a particular book or book project is understood in one of two ways: its sales [economic capital]…its quality [symbolic capital]” (Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, p. 10, 2010). This understanding correlates with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the field of cultural production, which situates creative outputs in the context of the social conditions of their production and consumption.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, this is evident in the publication of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf in 1929. Hogarth Press initially published the book at a price of five shillings, then went on to release a limited, special edition priced at two pounds and two shillings. As Vike Plock suggests, this shows that with this publication, the Hogarth Press was “hoping to [both] appeal to collectors and to consumers with more limited means” (Plock 2019, 142).
- 2.
Former journalist and publishing studies academic Susan Greenberg’s insightful edited collection of interviews in Editors Talk about Editing: Insights for Readers, Writers and Publishers (2015) romanticises the industry a little less, but this may be partly because some of the publishers referenced are from an academic publishing background rather than a trade publishing one.
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Kiernan, A. (2021). Writing Culture and Cultural Value. In: Writing Cultures and Literary Media. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75081-7_2
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