Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson

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INTRODUCTION

      Imagine for a moment that you are in the office of a scout in New York. It’s a sunny afternoon in November 2007; the sky is a brilliant blue and the air has the chill of late autumn. The office block is an old building, dating from the late nineteenth century; the offices have been tastefully redeveloped, with bright walls and polished wooden floors. Out of the window you can see several water tanks standing on the roofs of buildings, a common sight from upper-floor offices in this part of midtown Manhattan. A scout is a talent-spotter. She (usually they are female) generally works on a retainer for publishers in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Scandinavia and elsewhere, looking for books that would be suitable for their clients to translate and publish in their own countries and languages. Scouts are the eyes and ears of foreign publishers in the heartlands of Anglo-American publishing. They are most commonly based in New York or London, working for publishers based in Rome, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Rio, São Paulo, Tokyo and elsewhere; rarely does the direction of reporting go the other way. The scout you are talking to today – let’s call her Hanne – is telling you about how she finds out about the new book projects that are out on submission to the New York houses and are likely to be published in the next year or so, and in the course of her account she mentions a proposal for a book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. ‘Who is Randy Pausch?’ you ask. ‘You don’t know who Randy Pausch is?’ she replies, a tone of mild astonishment in her voice. ‘No, never heard of him. Who is he and what is the book?’ And so she begins to tell you the story of Randy Pausch and The Last Lecture.

Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (now the story must be told in the past tense, though in 2007 Hanne used the present tense). He was a specialist on computer–human interfaces and had published numerous technical papers on aspects of programming, virtual reality and software design. But in September 2007 Pausch’s career suddenly took an unusual turn. He had been invited to give a lecture at Carnegie Mellon in a series called ‘The Last Lecture’ – a series in which professors are asked to think about what matters most to them and sum up the wisdom they would like to pass on to their students in a single lecture, as if it were their last. By a tragic twist of fate, this was, in all likelihood, one of the last lectures that Randy Pausch would be giving: this 46-year-old father of three was dying from a terminal form of pancreatic cancer. The lecture, on the subject of ‘really achieving your childhood dreams’, was delivered to an audience of some 400 students and staff on 18 September 2007; the hour-long lecture was videoed so that his children could watch it when they were older. In the audience was a columnist from the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Zaslow, who had heard about the lecture on the grapevine and driven down from Detroit to attend. Like many who were there, Zaslow was deeply moved by the occasion, and he wrote a short article about it for his column in the Wall Street Journal. The article appeared on 20 September with a link to a short five-minute clip of highlights from the lecture. ABC’s Good Morning America TV show saw the article in the Journal and invited Pausch on to the show the following morning. Media interest grew and Pausch was invited to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show in October. In the meantime, the lecture video was posted on YouTube and millions of people watched either the short clip or the full-length version.

Shortly after the article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, publishers in New York began emailing Pausch to see if he would be interested in writing a book based on it. ‘I found this laughable,’ explained Pausch, ‘since at the time the palliative chemo was not yet working, and I thought I was down to about six weeks of good health.’ But after some reflection he agreed to do it, on the understanding that he would co-author the book with Jeff Zaslow and that Jeff would actually write it. Jeff contacted his agent in New York and the agency took charge of preparing a proposal and submitting it to publishers. The agency turned down a pre-emptive bid and sent out a short, 15-page proposal to numerous New York publishing houses in October. Within two weeks they had done a deal. ‘So how much did it go for?’ you ask Hanne. ‘$6.75 million,’ she replies. ‘$6.75 million?! You must be joking!’ ‘No, seriously, it was bought by Hyperion for $6.75 million,’ she explains. ‘They closed the deal a couple of weeks ago. It will be a short book, about 180 pages, and they’re planning to publish it next April.’ You can’t quite believe what you’ve just heard. Why would anyone pay $6.75 million for a book called The Last Lecture by a professor of computer science with no track record as a successful author? Maybe $40,000 or $50,000, you think, or perhaps even a modest six-figure sum if you were feeling particularly bullish. But $6.75 million? How could a publishing company talk itself into laying down this kind of money on what would seem like a wild bet? To an outside observer this seems amazing, surprising, utterly bizarre. Even Pausch himself confessed to being astonished by the size of the advance (‘the book getting a large advance-on-royalties took us both by surprise’). How can we make sense of this seemingly bizarre behaviour? To many it will seem like another example of the ‘irrational exuberance’ of markets, but is it really as irrational as it seems?

      To answer these questions properly we will need to step back from the details of our story and make a detour. We will need to understand something about how the world of trade publishing has changed over the last 40–50 years and how it is organized today – who the key players are, what pressures they face and what resources they have at their disposal. We will also need to introduce some concepts that will help us make sense of this world, and help us to see how the actions of each key player are conditioned by the actions of others. For these players are not acting on their own: they are always acting in a particular context or what I shall call a ‘field’, in which the actions of any agent are conditioned by, and in turn condition, the actions of others.

Publishing fields

What is a field? I borrow this term from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and freely adapt it for my own purposes.¹ A field is a structured СКАЧАТЬ