The second of a two-part interview with author and former publisher Dan Hind. Commissioning power should be stripped from unaccountable editors, Hind argues, and invested in the public.
Dan Hind was a publisher for more than ten years, working for, among others, Penguin and Random House. In 2009 he left the industry to develop a program of media reform. In The Return of the Public he argued for the democratisation of the media is a prerequisite for self-determinaton and rational political change. As he explained in an interview with New Left Project, “if we want to have an account of the world that is broadly accurate, and that can therefore provide a basis for rational decision-making, we need to create mechanisms in which each citizen has some commissioning power and some publishing power”.
I met up with Dan to talk about his time in the book publishing industry. In this, the second of two parts, he outlines the ways in which the industry is structurally biased, and argues that the solution is to strip commissioning power from unaccountable editors and invest it in the public.
Chomsky and Herman outlined a ‘propaganda model’ to explain patterns in media content in terms of the structural characteristics of media institutions. Do you think a similar model could be helpful in understanding the publishing industry, with some of the ‘filters’ changed?
Clearly there are plenty of filters in place. People in editorial processes tend to share similar backgrounds, they tend to be schooled in similar ways. They tend to have similar assumptions about their right to judge the quality of work. As a side-bar, the interesting thing about publishing is that it is fundamentally, on the editorial side, a literary business. Editors are often, though not always, English graduates. Their first love is the novel, and their decisions about books are, to some extent, driven by aesthetic considerations.
And that tends to effect their decisions about non-fiction as well as fiction. They’re interested in the well written. Going back to this point about subsidy: if you have three well-upholstered years in a think-tank with thick carpets and opportunities for sophisticated conversation, you’re much more likely to produce an elegant book than if you’re going slowly mad in a garret.
There’s a sense in which the literary qualities that editors look for play into the hands of those who can subsidise the process. Money generates experience, because it generates opportunities to meet people and to visit places, and those lead to more vivid writing. Editors are often calling on non-fiction writers to show rather than to tell. Well, showing people things is a costlier process than simply telling them.
Anyway, editors are seeking to publish books that will do well in the market as it exists, that will reflect well on them, and so on. They are looking for ways of reducing the risks of what they do and of findings things that will work. So they naturally gravitate towards certain kinds of things. One of the things to emphasise is that political non-fiction in book form is not a major part of what publishers do, commercially speaking. It can be incredibly influential – think of the impact of a book like Naomi Klein’s No Logo on general political debate, and similarly her follow-up The Shock Doctrine. These were important books. And equally, The End of History and the Last Man and The Clash of Civilizations – these are very important - you need to engage with them, if you want to understand not only the ‘90s but the period up to 2008.
So while this is not a hugely important commercial market, it has been for a long time a very important in ideological terms. But within that, editors are looking for things that will be widely reviewed and that will sell well. The commercial calculations don’t always stack up, as I say. It is complicated by the fact that large media corporations could afford to subsidise loss-making books that are ideologically important, if they wanted to – a process that individual editors wouldn’t have to know about in any great detail.
Nevertheless, you can see why people are drawn towards publishing books that fit within the prevailing consensus. You can earn plaudits for losing money on some kinds of books. You can make loads of money with other kinds and … not get so much positive feedback.
There’s something else to bear in mind. Going back to Philip Augar’s book about investment banks, The Greed Merchants – telling people that something is badly wrong can be a tough sell. The market is driven by individual, isolated buying decisions about what we want to hear, about the stories we want to be told. The rare moments when mainstream publishers put out material that flagged up the problems in the financial system, the books struggled to find a readership, which discouraged them from doing more, of course.
There were these isolated bubbles of informed pessimism, in a torrent of madcap optimism. The ‘marketplace of ideas’ is not very good at keeping the public well informed when there is so much well-produced and appealing tosh out there. That’s the problem with relying so heavily on market mechanisms.
So obviously, there are a number of things in play: the personnel involved have certain sorts of characteristics; certain kinds of material finds its way to their attention; they are constrained by the operations of the market as they find it and as they interpret it; and all those things lead to the kind of publishing that we see. And that publishing tends to favour a broadly conservative position. Editorial people do not usually identify themselves as conservative. But what emerges from the publishing industry – from the big commercial publishers, at any rate – tends to be broadly supportive of the status quo at any given time.
So, to answer your question, I think a lot of what Chomsky and Herman described applies to book publishing.
When Ann Pettifor published The Coming First World Debt Crisis in 2006 she wasn’t published by one of the majors. She was published by an academic press. Since then the majors have brought out books by Hank Paulson, by Gordon Brown, by Alan Greenspan – and why wouldn’t they? These are important people – their books will get coverage. They haven‘t published Ann Pettifor yet – and why should they? She’s just someone who was right when people like Paulson and Greenspan and Brown were wrong. There isn’t any great commercial value in being right as such, it seems.
I would put the emphasis on people’s structural predicament. You could replace every editor but the same constraints will apply to their replacements, about the kinds of material that is available, assumptions about what other media will notice, assumptions about what the market is interested in, and assumptions about what one’s role is as an editor. And those assumptions are inescapable.
You feel as an editor that it is your role to pick the things that are worth publishing – that’s why you do the job: to be an arbiter of people’s reading. That leads to certain assumptions about what kinds of things you want to be doing and also, crucially, about the validity of the structure. It is hard to disentangle self-love from your feelings about the structure that gives you power and influence. It took me a long time to realise that this structure, though it gave me a certain amount of power, was exactly what needed to be opened up to discussion.
And that’s the really core argument in my book [The Return of the Public]. There is obviously a temptation to think that wherever you are is the key vantage point – I remember reading an article by Umberto Eco in which he said that everything would be fine as long as we got better at semiology. If only people watching television deciphered the advertising and were more active spectators, then we wouldn’t have these problems of being ideologically hoodwinked.
So I know that there is a temptation to think that ‘my perspective is the one that explains everything’. But having said that, my perspective is the one that explains everything.
It’s at exactly that point of decision where you say ‘we’ll give material support to this person to go away and finish his research about this subject, and then we’ll print up their material and make it available, and introduce it to the circuits of publicity – we’ll get it reviewed, talked about on the radio, online’ – it’s that point of decision, and it is replicated in broadcasting and in journalism of course, which is where the action takes place. That’s the point where individual assumptions, class affiliations, power relations within the institution, relations of power with other institutions, assessments about what the market demands ... all these things come to a head in that decision. And an idea or a set of ideas will either reach a wider audience or it will be kept out of sight and out of mind, on the basis of decisions made by a relative handful of people – who are subject to all kinds of implicit and explicit pressure.
There is almost complete silence about this. Hardly anyone talks about the editorial process. For a long time, I held to a liberal model of editing, in a way. I figured that if I worked hard enough and was smart enough I would be able to publish commercially successful books that articulated a broadly accurate account of reality, and to hell with the propaganda model.
But in the end I had to realise that my job was part of the problem. It shouldn’t be up to a handful of people to exercise so much unaccountable power, even if I was one of them.
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The above is a short excerpt from a longer interview, which you can read on New Left Project. Part 1 of this interview is published here.
Dan Hind is the author of ‘The Return of the Public’, published by Verso. He can be found on twitter at @danhind and blogs at http://thereturnofthepublic.wordpress.com.