Popular and literary fiction interests readers, critics, publishers, booksellers and many others. It has an interesting history, bound up with cultural and social change. This new study takes as its starting point the benefits of looking at the field as a meeting place between the literary and the commercial, much as Bourdieu refers us to economic and cultural capital. It asks us to consider such fiction internationally and not to ignore two things beyond the text: the art‐work (which is interesting in itself and for its cultural iconography) and the context within which it is published, marketed and read.
In other words, the rather gauche title tries to reflect how all these factors meet up in the production and reception by readers and by researchers of such fiction. As chapter 2 tells us, marketing as such is central to the process, with its demographics and lifestyle analysis, its market segmentation and positioning. We can see links between product and consumer readily in genres such as fiction for young people (one chapter), lesbian fiction (another) and prize‐winners (two chapters, one on the Booker and another on the Australian Miles Franklin Award). More subtle are links between the art‐work and design of fiction for specific markets at particular times – the appeal in the nineteenth century of the Tauchnitz editions, the emergence of quality paperbacks from Penguin later and repackaging of Agatha Christie novels in the 1970s and 1980s for a new readership.
Underlying this approach is not only the need to approach books from a marketing perspective (this is done well enough by Baverstock and others) but to fuse marketing and literary and artistic approaches in an attempt to better represent and understand the ways in which all these factors affect each other. This takes us into the important area of text and image, and “paratext” (or peritext, the cover and the title page and other physical features of the book, and beyond that the cultural context and publishing/marketing context of the book). These structuralist terms come from Genette whose work on narrative discourse and on paratextual interpretation influence and underpin the approach of the book. The book also acknowledges and utilises inter‐textuality in examining cross‐overs and adaptations (books, media and posters).
The introduction suggests that traditional approaches to publishing and marketing and even to the history of the book need more communication theory, and this is part of that. Bourdieu's distinction between economic and cultural capital can usefully be applied to fiction as it can be to art and music as well, and this underwrites an interesting study of the Booker Prize (which seems to veer between one type of capital and the other by being popular at one point and literary at another, something that attracts debate and criticism). A well‐trodden issue but relevant in this context.
Another contribution explores John Carey's novels, such as The True History of the Kelly Gang, which had many incarnations in Australia, the USA and the UK, with different formats and imagery on the cover and book‐jacket. A comment on page 117 states that book covers can be seen as a doorway through which we glimpse the text. By connecting up the dots with Carey's work, we see that it was better publicised and sold because it won an award and had the strap‐line, design and cover illustration varied with different markets. Thus, we start to get a clearer impression of how and why these various elements, from design to marketing, can and should be seen as a unity.
Design both of text and cover of the book has always been critical to success. Publishers set out to create brand value through the style of their books, and through the look and feel of what they publish and market. This is echoed further down the supply chain by booksellers whose merchandising and display techniques often reinforce such ideas. Online, Smith and Amazon and others try to simulate the bookstore browsing experience readers get from holding the actual physical book, as well as adding value from “books like” and other features and functionalities. One chapter looks back to ethno‐graphic research into booksellers on how science fiction is displayed and sold, and how it has morphed into fantasy over recent years.
Television and film often triggers a change in cover and jacket design/imagery, as we find in Agatha Christie books after a series on Poirot appeared on UK television (another chapter). The ways in which film and book text are seen and read and understood leads one contributor to ask us to consider film theory and phenomenology (Husserl) and Barthes as we try to understand better the similarities and differences between modes of representation. This is a book mainly for students and teachers and users of academic libraries, and these are just passing references, as if to point out ways in which readers might go, rather than systematic analyses of these issues or full‐fledged applications of a research methodology.
At the heart of the book is the aim to demonstrate how, by using an interplay of text and image and paratext, a mix of cultural production and critical perspective, of pragmatic publishing and bookselling and marketing, and of social history and reader sociology, we can get an effective insight into fiction publishing. As a book it holds together as an idea, even though some parts are unconvincing and obvious.
All in all, there are lots of useful ideas for students – on changes in styles of lesbian fiction in parallel with changing perceptions of lesbian sexuality and power, on why publishers repackage fiction and how it varies in different cultures (two intriguing pieces on Algeria/Muslim fiction in France and on John Carey's novels), on why a French edition of Three Men in a Boat counter‐intuitively reproduced hostile blurbs on its cover, and on the balances and trade‐offs between the commercial/popular and the elitist/literary in winning awards. Familiar territory in a book rather thrown together, but one which raises topical issues, and challenges readers to factor in design and art‐work much more.
An irony is that publishing and bookselling studies, and literary studies, and marketing studies, really do not need to lean on communication theory to justify themselves. That, in fact, is the only pretentious dimension of the book. Most of the rest will survive intellectually for probably a couple of years before it is overtaken by events: all the chapters could well have been articles, some clearly started out as lectures, and the book will almost certainly be remaindered by end 2009. But by then the contributors – all Anglophone academics – will have by‐lined their way into the research assessment canon.
