Abstract
Literature has long had a close yet difficult relationship to marketing. The publishing industry and other intermediary agencies involved in the transmission of reading matter work within a marketplace which, in addition to the demands of commerce, incorporates the values enshrined in cultural activity. This dual nature of the publishing industry is one that has led to the tension referred to by Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter W. Powell in their oft-quoted dictum in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (1982), to the effect that, ‘The industry remains perilously poised between the requirements and restraints of commerce and the responsibilities and obligations that it must bear as a prime guardian of the symbolic culture of the nation.’1 Marketing, if taken broadly as the activity by which literature is brought to the commercial marketplace, is the catalyst for much of this tension, and in the specific form of publishers’ and retailers’ promotional activities, it is frequently taken both to symbolise and actualise the shifting relationship of art to business.
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Notes
In ‘I Write Marketing Textbooks but I’m Really a Swill Guy’, Chris Hackley notes Dag Smith’s comment in Patrick Forsyth and Robin Birn, Marketing in Publishing (London: Routledge, 1997) to the effect that ‘book publishing is still product- rather than marketing-led but argues that this is rapidly changing, at least in the UK industry’. In Brown, ed., Consuming Books, 175–82, 178.
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Peregrine, 1979; first published in 1932), 32.
Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, 163. She refers to F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930).
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middle/Brow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982);
Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing the Marketing of Culture (London: Methuen, 2000), 12.
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), vii.
Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, 19; Geoffrey Faber, A Publisher Speaking (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 29.
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 193.
Hare, Penguin Portrait, 237; C. H. Rolph, ed., The Trial of Lady Chatterley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
Fredric Warburg, An Occupation for Gentlemen (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 118–19.
Doris Stockmann’s article ‘Free or Fixed Prices on Books — Patterns of Book Pricing in Europe’, Javnost The Public 11: 4 (2004), 49–64, explores European trends in book pricing and price fixing.
Andrew Wernick, ‘Authorship and the Supplement of Promotion’, in Maurice Biriotti and Nicola Miller, eds., What is an Author? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 85–103, 101–2.
Stephen Brown, Anne Marie Doherty and Bill Clarke’s self-reflexive Romancing the Market (London: Routledge, 1998) is one example. Brown’s Consuming Books has two chapters that look at books about marketing: Charles Chandler’s ‘No Experience Necessary (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Marketing)’, 167–74, and Chris Hackley’s ‘I Write Marketing Textbooks but I’m Really a Swill Guy’, 175–82.
Alison Baverstock, How to Market Books (London: Kogan Page, 2000; 3rd edn.);
Patrick Forsyth and Robin Birn, Marketing in Publishing (London: Routledge, 1997).
See, for example, Sally Dibb, Lyndon Simkin, William M. Pride and O. C. Ferrell, Marketing: Concepts and Strategies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001; 4th edn.), 9.
Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 107–35, 111. First published in Daedalus (Summer 1982), 65–83.
Book historians do legitimate their study with the claim that histories of the book are in fact histories of the world — or at least of a particular part of society in a given place and time. As Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker write in ‘A New Model for the Study of the Book’, in Nicolas Barker, ed., A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. The Clark Lectures 1986–1987. The British Library Studies in the History of the Book (London: The British Library, 1993), 5–43, 12, ‘for a period of roughly five hundred years the printed book reigned supreme, as a method of recording, communication and storing all that people put on paper: knowledge, ideas, persuasion (political or religious), diversions, etc. Its influence on one or more of these areas touched almost every aspect of what we call western civilization, in ways we still have to discover.’
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production’, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, translated by Randal Johnston (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 29–73. Originally published in Poetics 12/4–5 (1983), 311–56.
See, for example, Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited with an Introduction by J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).
Peter McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20.
For example, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001),
Radway’s A Feeling for Books and Elizabeth Long’s Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, 131. Darnton refers in a footnote to Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) and Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980),
Walter Ong, ‘The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction’, PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association of America) 90 (1975), 9–21,
and to Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman’s The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) for an overview of reader-response theorists.
Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, 131; Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Josué V. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (London: Methuen & Co, 1980; English translation first published in the US in 1979), 141–60.
Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, ‘Introduction’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, A History of Reading in the West, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999; first published in Italy in 1995), 1–36, 3.
The most passionate recent advocate of the traditional canon is Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).
Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
Including the work of Long’s Book Clubs and Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups and The Reading Groups Book 2002–2003 Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 2002).
Chris Fill, Marketing Communications: Contexts, Contents and Strategies (London: Prentice Hall, 1999; 2nd edn.), 1. In her essay ‘The Bridge from Text to Mind: Adapting Reader-Response Theory to Consumer Research’, in Journal of Consumer Research 21 (December 1994), 461–80, Linda M. Scott made an interesting attempt to bring together these two sets of discourse.
See Stephen Brown, Wizard! Harry Potter’s Brand Magic (London: Cyan Books, 2005), for an investigation of this.
P. R. Smith Marketing Communications: An Integrated Approach (London: Kogan Page, 1998; 2nd edn.), 509.
Claire Tomalin, Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades (London: Viking, 1999).
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© 2007 Claire Squires
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Squires, C. (2007). Literature and Marketing. In: Marketing Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593008_3
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