Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
in to safer choices. We see far less emphasis on pushing midlist and 
backlist’. There was a widespread perception that publishing was 
becoming more profit-centric and more risk-averse. One retail buyer 
we spoke to described getting marketing money for retail promotions 
as ‘like getting blood out of a stone’. They said publishers have been 
reluctant to spend marketing money for vital in-store placement. 
However, it has to be acknowledged that desire for marketing resource 
is always likely to outstrip supply. In the words of literary agent Lucy 
Luck, ‘I don’t remember a time when marketing resources were offered 
to titles without existing traction. To me it feels those campaigns are – 
as they always were – reserved for the few titles that can afford them, 
with some exceptions that might or might not work.’ Getting actual data 
from publishers on their marketing spend is impossible without detailed 
breakdowns of their budgets – which, unsurprisingly, they are unwilling 
to share. Many of our interviewees believed that marketing had grown 
more creative and more clever. As one senior manager at a mid-size UK 
firm told us: 
‘I would say there is more appetite for marketing resource than ever: 
that’s one of the boom areas of the industry. We are still seeing 
mainly title-led,campaign-by-campaign marketing, which spreads an 
already thin marketing budget ever thinner, but I think we will see the 
very best book publishers start to market better at an audience per 
se, gathering mailing lists and databases, to which they then market 
specific books and authors.’
Moreover, many large and mid sized publishers have invested heavily 
in social media and social media teams. Word of mouth was becoming 
better understood as a key driver of sales. Marketing teams were seen 
as more likely to be growing than shrinking. While there is a strong 
feeling that not enough marketing is done by publishers, it is difficult 
to quantify this with any certainty. Our survey respondents generally 
thought there wasn’t enough marketing – but at the same time believed 
Sales and Marketing departments had become too powerful. One thing 
almost everyone agrees on, though, is the importance of marketing 
to the trade today. Indeed the publishing scholar Claire Squires goes 
one step further and considers marketing central to the very category 
of literary writing today: ‘Marketing is effectively the making of 
contemporary writing,’ she writes
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. ‘In a very real sense [...] material 
conditions and acts of marketing profoundly determine the production, 
reception and interpretation of literature.’ She goes on: ‘marketing 
activity in its widest sense, including formats, packaging, imprints, 
branding, bookshop taxonomies and literary prizes construct and 
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p16 Squires, Claire, 
Marketing Literature
, Palgrave 2007

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