Figure 1 Key resources of publishing firms
It is easy to see why publishers need economic capital: as the principal risk-taker in the publishing chain, publishers must be able to draw on their financial resources (or those of financial agents and institutions to which they are linked, such as banks or parent companies) at various stages in order to finance the production and publication of books and in order to build and expand the business. Early in the publishing cycle they must be prepared to pay an advance on royalties to an author or an author’s agent. At later stages publishers must invest in the production of the book, paying the bills of copy-editors, typesetters, designers, printers, etc., and tying up resources in stock which may or may not be sold, and they must invest in marketing and promoting the book. The larger the capital reserves of the publisher, the larger the advances they are able to offer in the highly competitive game of acquiring content, the more they are able to invest in marketing and promotion and the more they are able to spread the risks of publishing by investing in a larger number of projects in the hope that some will bear fruit.
It is also easy to see why publishers need human capital: like other organizations, publishing firms are only as good as their staff. A highly trained and highly motivated workforce is a vital resource for a publishing firm and in many ways the key to its success. This is true at all levels, but particularly true at the level of editorial staff, since this is the creative core of the publishing firm. The success of the firm depends crucially on the ability to attract and retain highly motivated editors who are able to identify and acquire the new projects that are likely to be successful and are able to work effectively with authors to maximize the potential of these projects. In the highly competitive field of trade publishing, an editor is as good, and only as good, as the track record of the books that he or she has acquired and published over the years: this record is his or her CV. Editors who have the right combination of judgement, taste, social flair and financial nous are highly valued assets, and their ability to spot successful books becomes vital to the overall success of the firm. But the other side of this equation is that an editor who greatly overpays for a book that flops, or who buys a string of books that perform below expectations, may come to be seen as more of a liability than an asset and may find that their judgement is called into question, their job is in danger and their career is at risk.
However, even the best editors do not work on their own: they need good contacts. Much of their time is spent cultivating relationships with agents on whom they are largely and increasingly dependent for the supply of new book projects: the famous publisher’s lunch is not just a pleasant perk of the job but a necessary condition of doing the job effectively, precisely because this is a field in which networks and relationships – i.e. social capital – is crucial. The importance of relationships applies to other sides of the business too. Publishing houses invest a great deal of time and effort in developing close relationships with suppliers and retailers and they work hard to manage and protect these relationships because they are vital to their success. And the larger the publisher is, the more they may be able to call on their business partners to do favours for them – for example, ask a printer to prioritize an important reprint and deliver it within three or four days, or call up the product manager at a major retailer and ask them to pay special attention to a book that the publisher regards as a key title.
Publishers possess another kind of resource that is vital to their success: intellectual capital (or what is often called intellectual property). The distinctive feature of the publishing firm is that it possesses the right to use and exploit intellectual content, to ‘publish’ or make available this content in forms that will generate a financial return. This right is regulated by the contracts it signs with authors or agents and other content-controlling sources, such as foreign publishers. Hence a publisher’s stock of contracts is potentially an extremely valuable resource, since it establishes legal entitlements to the content (or potential content) which the publisher is able to exploit. But the precise value of this resource depends on many things. The value of a contract for a particular book depends, for instance, on whether the book will actually be written and delivered in a suitable time period, how profitable the book will be (that is, what kind of revenue stream less costs, including advances, it is likely to generate) and what territorial and subsidiary rights it includes (whether it includes world rights in all languages or merely North American rights, for instance). A publisher’s stock of contracts represents the sum total of rights it possesses over the intellectual content that it seeks to develop and exploit. A contract can be a valuable resource but it can also be a liability, in the sense that it can commit the publisher to producing a book which, given the level of advance paid out and other costs incurred in producing and marketing the book, may turn out to be a loss-maker rather than a profitable proposition.
It is easy to see why publishers need economic, human, social and intellectual capital, but why do they need symbolic capital? Symbolic capital is best understood as the accumulated prestige, recognition and respect accorded to certain individuals or institutions.3 It is one of those intangible assets that is enormously important for publishing firms. For publishers are not just employers and financial risk-takers: they are also cultural mediators and arbitrators of quality and taste. Their imprint is a ‘brand’, a marker of distinction in a highly competitive field. Publishers seek to accumulate symbolic capital just as they seek to accumulate economic capital. It is important to them partly because it is important to their image, to the way they see themselves and want to be seen by others: most publishers see themselves and want to be seen by others as organizations that publish works of ‘quality’, however that might be defined (and there are many ways that it can be). No major publisher would willingly embrace the idea that their sole purpose in life is to publish schlock (even if they accept, as some do, that they need to publish some schlock in order to do other things). But it is also important to them for good organizational and financial reasons. It strengthens their hand in the struggle to acquire new content because it makes their organization more attractive in the eyes of authors and agents: many authors want to be published by houses that have established a high reputation in their particular genre of writing, whether it is literary fiction or crime novels or biography or history. It strengthens their position in the networks of cultural intermediaries – including booksellers, reviewers and media gatekeepers – whose decisions and actions can have a big impact on the success or otherwise of particular books. A publisher who has established a reputation for quality and reliability is a publisher that agents, retailers and even readers will be more inclined to trust. And it can also translate directly into financial success: a book that wins a major literary prize will very commonly experience a sharp upturn in sales, and may even lift the sales of other books by the same author.
While symbolic capital is of considerable importance to publishing firms, it is also important to see that other players in the field, including agents and authors, can and do accumulate symbolic capital of their own. Authors can become brands in their own right – most well-known writers, like Stephen King, John Grisham, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, etc., are brand-name authors in this sense. They have acquired large stocks of symbolic capital and are able to use this to their advantage. In the early stages of their writing career, a publishing firm may have invested in the building of their brand, but as they become better known and develop a fan base of regular readers, the author’s brand separates off from the publisher’s brand and becomes less and less dependent on