Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
29

Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
Overall the picture is conflicted. Writers have access to more individual 
opportunities through smaller presses and more prizes. On the 
other hand, the formation of super-large publishers also represents 
a drop in competition; however, the new generation of super-large 
publishers have resources to match their scale. Despite the reality on 
the ground, writers feel their books are not supported effectively, and 
media coverage of literary fiction is, if anything, in decline. All of this 
produces what Cambridge University academic John Thompson calls, 
in an exhaustive study of modern publishing, ‘the logic of the field’. It 
favours big literary agents and big books. It is about a concentration 
of resource at the top of the pyramid. This is reflected in the structure 
of big publishers and big prizes (the more imprints a publisher has, 
for example, the more books it can nominate for the Booker). The 
same logic, though, results in an array of opportunities outside the 
mainstream: principally the flourishing of smaller independent publishers 
who don’t need to find the next ‘big book’ to thrive. 
Even absent the digital transformation, there is a lot going on.
3. Ebooks and Digital Technology 
The Christmases of 2010 and 2011 changed British writing and 
publishing forever. Prior to this, there had been much hype and 
discussion of ebooks dating back to the late 1990s. In truth, it had never 
taken off, although a Sony and Waterstones partnership in 2008 was a 
valiant effort. Instead it was when Amazon put serious muscle behind 
its UK Kindle, and those devices became the Christmas present of 
choice, that ebooks really started to move. Their impact on the structure 
of the UK market was far reaching. 
Amazon, of course, had been a presence in the British book trade for 
many years prior to the launch of the Kindle. Their market share had 
been growing steadily, but the Kindle gave it rocket boosters. Although 
there were many other entrants to the ebook market at the same time 
as Amazon, notably Apple iBooks, Kobo, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, 
Sony and Google Books, all the available data shows that Kindle was by 
some distance the biggest single retailer of ebooks with between 75% 
and 90% of the market. Many had expressed scepticism that ebooks 
would take off, but in the years after 2010 ebooks came to be a larger 
and larger proportion of the market. When we look at print sales figures 
in the period 2010–2016 therefore, part of the reason numbers have 
remained so depressed appears to be because readers have migrated to 
ebooks. This helps to explain both the ongoing depression despite the 
general economic recovery, and how publishers have maintained and 
even increased profitability over those years. 

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