Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

21

   

Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

was the impact of other media, from box sets on Netflix to Twitter 

and Instagram. ‘Reading as an activity is falling due to the plethora 

of choices: streaming, box sets, games’, says writer Nell Leyshon. ‘I 

think there have only ever been so many “literary” readers, but they 

are increasingly distracted’ she says, although acknowledging this is 

anecdotal. Another suggestion is economic. The decline in books is 

noticeably coincident with the recession. One theory might be that 

discretionary consumer spending, of which books are clearly a part, took 

a hit over those years from which it has never fully recovered. When 

that happened at the same time as new, cheap, easy entertainments 

were being offered on a scale and at a convenience never before 

imagined, the results were never going to be pretty. In comparison with 

our smartphones, literary fiction is often ‘difficult’ and expensive: it isn’t 

free, and it requires more concentration than Facebook or Candy Crush. 

At the same time, some felt that because publishers were focusing 

their energies elsewhere – celebrity biographies, adult colouring books, 

cookery, genre and ‘commercial’ fiction – the market for print literary 

fiction was shrinking. Its prices were depressed. Author income was 

declining. What about publishers?