Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
was the impact of other media, from box sets on Netflix to Twitter 
and Instagram. ‘Reading as an activity is falling due to the plethora 
of choices: streaming, box sets, games’, says writer Nell Leyshon. ‘I 
think there have only ever been so many “literary” readers, but they 
are increasingly distracted’ she says, although acknowledging this is 
anecdotal. Another suggestion is economic. The decline in books is 
noticeably coincident with the recession. One theory might be that 
discretionary consumer spending, of which books are clearly a part, took 
a hit over those years from which it has never fully recovered. When 
that happened at the same time as new, cheap, easy entertainments 
were being offered on a scale and at a convenience never before 
imagined, the results were never going to be pretty. In comparison with 
our smartphones, literary fiction is often ‘difficult’ and expensive: it isn’t 
free, and it requires more concentration than Facebook or Candy Crush. 
At the same time, some felt that because publishers were focusing 
their energies elsewhere – celebrity biographies, adult colouring books, 
cookery, genre and ‘commercial’ fiction – the market for print literary 
fiction was shrinking. Its prices were depressed. Author income was 
declining. What about publishers?
2. Publishers, Prizes and Marketing 
Even by the turbulent standards of publishing, the past decade has seen 
enormous changes to the structure of the industry, with clear knock-on 
effects for the support of literary writers. The question is, what do the 
changes mean? Are they good or bad? 
The most obvious change has been consolidation at the top of the 
market. From a diversified group of major- and middle-ranking publishers 
has emerged a clear Big Two: Penguin Random House (PRH) and 
the Hachette Group. Trailing them are HarperCollins, with publishers 
including Simon & Schuster, Pan Macmillan and Bloomsbury some 
way behind. PRH are a billion-dollar behemoth (global revenues of 
€
3.7bn/£3.29bn and profits of 
€
557m/£498m in 2015
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) with a reported 
250 imprints across the US and UK and an unrivalled backlist – such is 
the scale of their holdings that even if they were never to publish a new 
book they would remain an enormous company. 
Publisher consolidation has to be seen in the context of the sales 
picture presented above and the digital change below; it is a logical 
reaction to a shrinking market and the increasing power of online 
platforms. As with everything, it has positive and negative impacts for 
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https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/69731-penguin-random-house-re-
ports-record-profits-in-2015.html

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