Writing Magazine March 2020

MARCH 2020 11

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http://www.writers-online.co.uk

I

t already feels like a lot longer than a month ago that Boris Johnson led

the Conservative Party to such a thumping victory over Labour – but

then Christmas is always a funny time of year, crammed as it is with so

much familial and emotional content.

Publishing’s response to the Conservative victory has been, it must

largely be said, to bury its head ever deeper in the sand.

Vast acres of time and effort have been expended in pursuit of greater

inclusivity and diversity in publishing, but as I have pointed out before,

that push for diversity is rather lopsided.

Where it chimes with the overwhelmingly liberal-left, metropolitan

groupthink of publishing it is enthusiastically taken up and pursued. And

please do not get me wrong: we should as an industry be doing more to

encourage people from diverse backgrounds into the business and working

very hard to grow the book market into the very significant sections of

the population who are of a BAME background. It is the right thing to be

doing, culturally and commercially.

Part of the difficulty with that though is that market is still nascent:

twenty percent of the country may identify as BAME; they do not yet

make up twenty percent of the book market. Getting to that point will

take time and it is hard not to fear that publishers are over-publishing

to it in their zeal to be seen to be doing something and that they will

drown it in cream.

The other is that publishing is looking so comprehensively in that one

direction: ever since the referendum it has been apparent that publishing

has a problem with the 52%. This problem is exacerbated if one considers

that the biggest – and with the highest disposable income – section of

the UK book market are the over-fifties. Given the way the referendum

also skewed according to age, the result is a publishing industry that to a

considerable degree feels contempt for the largest part of its market.

Commercially this has to be disastrous. However much publishers

might wish to tell themselves they are professional and doing fine – and

to a considerable degree that is true, there are a great many smart and

highly professional people in the business – the fact is that 21st-century

publishing is more than ever a collective activity, which works when a

large number of small things are done well – everything from jackets and

cover copy, PR and marketing. There are a host of small tasks and if they

are all performed well then the book itself stands a chance of doing well.

That’s why publishing bosses are so beholden to the idea of buy-in

• of only commissioning those books that everyone in the team loves –
  because it really does make a difference to their success. The difficulty
  with that is that it inevitably leads to group-think and biases. And that
  begins to look like a real problem when the bias is in effect against the
  biggest and most lucrative sector of the market.
  Publishing has, like so much of our cultural industries, been very
  caught up in a progressive conversation – and there is nothing wrong
  with that, unless it starts to become a conversation with itself. In the
  aftermath of a general election where there was such a clear thumping
  handed out to the progressive, metropolitan agenda, it will be interesting
  to see how publishing manages to come to terms with this and what
  if anything it will do to recognise that a very big chunk of the British
  public are at best indifferent to many of the causes the metropolitan left
  holds most dear.
  They may disapprove of this indifference (and they do) but it is a
  matter of commercial urgency that they come to terms with it.

The publishing industry must be aware of the commercial perils of ignoring some of its most

lucrative reader demographics, argues agent Piers Blofeld

From the AGENT OPINIONT I T L E

OTHE RSIDE

OF THE DESK

Feeling left out