In the first of a two-part interview, author and former publisher Dan Hind talks about his experiences in the publishing industry, and how powerful interests and structural forces skew the publishing agenda in ways that favour the status quo.
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 first of two parts, he discusses how his experience in publishing made him increasingly aware of the ways in which powerful interests and structural forces are able to skew the publishing agenda in ways that favour the status quo.
To begin with, how did you get into the publishing industry?
I started at Penguin – after a while doing work experience there and at Random House, in 1998.
I’d been working in computer games publishing – PCs, consoles, that kind of thing. After a couple of years doing that I realised that if I wanted to engage with more complicated ideas, I’d have work with more simple technology. And that’s how I ended up leaving the digital gold rush and heading for book publishing – a rare case of a rat joining a sinking ship.
So you weren’t particularly political at the time?
I wasn’t in any kind of ideological fervour, no. I wanted to learn more about how the world worked, wanted to carry on my education, in a way. It was really the experience of publishing that politicised me, I guess.
Can you describe the process by which your experiences in publishing made you increasingly critical about the industry, and presumably about other things too?
I was working for an imprint of Penguin called Allen Lane. Allen Lane published what it liked to call ‘serious non-fiction’ – history, biography, books about science, a few books about current affairs, that kind of thing.
I was working as an assistant to a publisher called Stuart Proffitt. Proffitt had been a publisher at Harper Collins for many years and is a very prominent figure in non-fiction publishing. Proffit had just started working at Penguin and, doubtless to his lasting regret, he hired me as his editorial assistant.
My first lesson in the political nature of the industry came through being involved in publishing the memoirs of a Russian defector called Vasili Mitrokhin. I was involved in a pretty lowly capacity – I seemed to spend most of my time garbling messages from Stuart to other people in Penguin.
Anyway, Mitrokhin had been a KGB archivist who’d left Russia with a vast cache of classified material. He’d been, I think the word is ‘exfiltrated’, by MI6 along with the material he’d collected.
Penguin commissioned two books, co-authored with a Cambridge academic called Christopher Andrew, which purported to be the contents of the Mitrokhin archive. It was the contents of the Mitrokhin archive as redacted and edited by MI6, and these publications were being used by MI6 to tell the world that the Russians were no longer an intelligence superpower, that MI6 had run away with the crown jewels and that it was game over for the Russians as serious players in intelligence. The archive was also, perhaps, a chance to settle scores and influence events elsewhere. The revelations made a big splash in Italy, for example.
So there was a sense in which Penguin was being used by MI6 to tell a particular story about Soviet operations in the West during the Cold War and about the current standing of the SVR, the KGB’s successor. Obviously Penguin was getting something out of it commercially – it had what it could present as this amazing insight into Russia’s espionage during the Cold War. People love the romance of espionage.
I suppose the thing that really struck me was sitting in a room with a group of journalists and publishers who were talking in quite lip-smacking terms about confronting an old woman called Melita Norwood, who had been a Soviet spy during the Second World War. She was this elderly woman who lived out in the countryside, and they were plotting about how best to use her to publicise the book – when to ‘doorstep’ her, spring out and ask her to comment on the fact that she’d been giving secrets to the Russians.
MI5 had known about all her in the ‘40s or the ‘50s and they’d decided to do nothing about it. She’d been pro-Soviet for ideological reasons – she wasn’t doing it for money or anything like that. The security services at the time thought it best to leave her alone – the Second World War was a pretty confusing and fraught time, lots of people did lots of things. But decades later MI6 calculated, I guess, that they wanted red meat to give the book a bit of publicity.
So they gave this old lady to the publishers, who then got all worked up about exposing her. There was this weird alloy of patriotism and excitement about book sales. I remember looking around at these publishers and journalists and seeing how animated they were – they were going to have a front-page picture of this grandmother, to pique interest in the book. And they were getting all self-righteous about exposing this enemy of the state …
It gave me the creeps at the time. Didn’t turn me into a foaming radical. But it made me a little less comfortable about publishing as a business. Afterwards I learnt more about the relationship between book publishing and security services. Some editors still provide what Hazlitt called ‘the fine link which connects literature with the police’. But that experience remained with me, this sense that making money and aligning oneself with powerful people and institutions were somehow related.
Another thing that sticks in my mind as a sort of ‘a-ha!’ moment happened in, I guess, the summer of 2001, when I was given responsibility for the business books that Penguin did. It sounds quite grand, but Penguin wasn’t really doing any business books. They had some titles they needed looking after, to keep ticking over. It was something for me to do – I was putting new covers on things, writing blurbs, and editing new editions of stuff – but it meant that I got a lot of proposals, particularly from American publishers who didn’t know that Penguin wasn’t really in the business books sector.
This summer I got three or four proposals about this miraculous new company in the States that was changing the whole way that people thought about, and did, business. It wasn’t just that I was getting so many proposals, although it was striking that there were three or four about the same company in a very short period of time. It was also the incredulity of the editors in America who were selling them that I wouldn’t be keen to buy these books. It was almost like a fervour about how great this company was and how much it told us about the future of business. The company was called Enron. It was only a few months before it collapsed.
As Enron began to implode, even though I’m not the sharpest knife in the box, I couldn’t help but see a connection between the fact that I was being inundated with proposals and the fact that the company turned out to be a gigantic criminal conspiracy. Maybe criminality like that depends on controlling the information environment. You want to manage the way in which you’re perceived, and maybe buying books about you was a cheap way of doing that. So maybe you would want to subsidise writers in the same way that you would fund politicians’ campaigns, pay people consultancy fees and so on.
Enron was key to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. It was the darling of business publishing. It was also this vast criminal enterprise.
And that made me think about how companies and other powerful institutions could work to influence the climate of opinion.
This was a time when the consensus on globalization was under serious intellectual attack, when you had people rioting at WTO meetings and summits and things like that. And you had people writing online and for small magazines and so on, outlining the flaws in the mainstream view of the global economy. This stuff was pretty good, I remember. And it was, you know, correct.
Now some books were being published by major publishers at the time that were sensible and interesting – Alastair Rolfe, who was a senior publisher at Penguin, was publishing a fair number of them – books like Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and Peter Warburton’s Debt and Delusion, say.
But it seemed that the consensus view – that history was over, that the IMF and the World Bank knew what they were doing – was pretty much indestructible. And that resilience had something to do, I think, with how money was being spent to support certain points of view, and with how money and prestige work their way through into the field of things that are widely publicised.
The biggest book about globalization in 1999 – the year of Seattle – the biggest book that year was probably Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It was like this love letter to the idea that there was no alternative to what Clinton and Blair were selling.
Until No Logo comes out in, I think, 2000, the serious arguments against Clinton-Blair globalization aren’t really reaching large numbers of people via the big publishers. Later on you have people like Joseph Stiglitz saying, basically, yeah, the protesters are right. But being right wasn’t enough to get you published by a major publisher. It isn’t enough now. Doesn’t matter if you have a track record of being right.
The radical critique of globalization, which was substantially correct, didn’t really exist in the mainstream media for years, unless maybe you glimpsed a placard at an anti-WTO meeting on the evening news, you know, through the teargas. Big ticket publishers were much keener on Friedman, stuff like that. It is difficult to recall that now – but the sense that the media weren’t doing their job was palpable to me at the time.
So tell me a little more about this idea of subsidy. People are being subsidised to write books, you think?
More or less, yes.
If you are a powerful institution you can subsidise the production of information about you in lots of ways. You’re in a position where you can say to people, ‘come and look at what we do, all expenses paid, we’ll take care of you and introduce you to everyone’.
You might get a useful article out of it, you might get some favourable coverage, and sometimes you might get something more substantial. There is no doubt that there were clever people in Enron doing interesting things, after all – it’s just that the thing as a whole was a ticking bomb. Still, if you are a powerful institution you can relatively cheaply influence the climate of ideas that surrounds you. And the point generalises – collectively powerful industries can do a lot to shape how they are perceived. We even have a name for it now, we call it ‘embedding’. And that’s what we saw in finance, most spectacularly.
I think this touches on a more general point about the publishing industry, which is not something that sits terribly comfortably with people in it.
The support is about more than money. Authors borrow prestige from the organizations that recognise them – from Ivy League Universities, from Oxford and Cambridge, from think tanks, even, God help us. People who come from powerful institutions – whether they’re academic institutions, government institutions, whatever – come with a degree of ‘publishability’ that people from outside those institutions do not have. On top of that they will have had an opportunity to sit and to think, to assess, to interview, to have access, and so on, that will all add to their marketability. Money helps writers write better. A point often overlooked.
As I started to think about it more, I realised that, whatever the composition of the people in the editorial decision-making process was, no matter what their personal views were, the kinds of things that they understood to be publishable were determined to some extent by powerful institutions elsewhere.
A very good example of this is Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man. In the ‘Acknowledgements’ he thanks the head of the RAND Corporation in California for giving him an office, as though it was a generous thing that someone might do for a friend. Now, having an office in the RAND Corporation, having access to all these experts, would have been pleasant and useful to Fukuyama and it would have encouraged him to think that he was on the right track. It would have helped to shape the way that he was thinking. And Fukuyama ended up providing a template for Clintonian ideas about globalisation, about how there was no alternative to what was in reality a very weird and dangerous way of organizing the world economy.
There’s an interesting article about RAND in the period just after the end of the Cold War. It’s in the Washington Post, I think, by E.J. Dionne. RAND is an organization that had done a lot of the intellectual work around deterrence, research for the Pentagon and the US air force, stuff like that. In the early nineties they are talking about what to do next. There’s an argument for saying that The End of History and the Last Man was the most influential thing that RAND did next.
Now, the people in the editorial rooms who saw that proposal come in would have seen that Fukuyama had a stellar academic record, they would have seen that he was very well-connected to powerful institutions, they would have seen that his article about the end of history had been very widely discussed among the circles of decision. That would have given them enough confidence to back the book.
If Fukuyama had woken up one morning in his bedsit, in good romantic fashion, and cried out, “Nietzsche was right! It’s the end of history! ”, he would have sold Nietzschean numbers of books. He would have been just another crank who thought he was Friedrich Nietzsche. But the fact is he was embedded in a set of institutions that gave him credibility, that, as it were, bought credibility for him by providing him with access and material support, and by providing him with an entree into the wider circuits of publicity.
If you look at bestsellers in the kind of politically charged non-fiction that interests me, the bestsellers are to a very large degree the beneficiaries of subsidies of various kinds. And it’s not just subsidy, of course – it’s prestige. And I think that’s one of the key things that people need to register. Editorial decision-makers are picking their ‘winners’, picking the things they want to gamble on, from a field that has already been subject to various kinds of pressures.
The things that are obvious candidates for publication are often – not always, but often – supportive of the prevailing order. And that is hardly surprising, since the prevailing order has often – not always, but often - supported them.
And you can see how individuals who are uncomfortable with the way things are will struggle to reach an audience via mainstream publishing. Those who are welcomed into the circles of prestige are not likely to think there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that, after all, has the good sense to recognise their merit.
Book publishing is interesting because it’s not advertisement-led. Editors don’t have to worry about pleasing advertisers – they don’t have those sorts of relationships. In theory, they just want to sell books. Certainly I didn’t experience people directly saying to me, ‘we don’t want to do this book, it’s too leftwing, it will annoy x or y’.
That never happened. So it wasn’t an ideological block in that simple way. But as I say, the kind of material that was up for review – what was available as a possible thing to publish – had already been, to some extent, edited or, to use a term from Herman and Chomsky, filtered.
This is only an excerpt - you can read the rest of this interview here.
Part 2 will be published at New Left Project tomorrow.
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.