Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

27

   

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

17  

Ibid p41

reshape notions of literary value and taste’

17

. Squires here suggests that 

our whole idea of what, today, is literary fiction is a function of publisher 

marketing in the first place. 

Outlets for publicity and reviews show a similarly mixed picture. Most 

publishers maintain in-house publicity departments and this remains an 

industry strength. Yet space devoted to reviews in the traditional media 

is under relentless pressure. The Guardian is the only broadsheet to 

maintain a dedicated literary review. In the US, major papers such as 

the LA Times famously closed their book sections. Publications such 

as the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books 

continue to be produced, but they can hardly be said to talk to a mass 

audience. Television and film’s engagement with literary fiction is 

limited, but powerful when it does occur. A film adaptation is sure to 

boost sales immensely and as the Hollywood dream factory runs out 

of ideas, books are turned to more and more as source material. This 

can only be a good thing for writers. Ironically, traditional publicity is still 

probably easier for literary fiction than more commercial genres: reviews 

pages are more likely to cover it and its writers are more likely to be 

interviewed on TV. 

Prizes are the other major source of sales for literary writing. They now 

form what the scholar James F. English calls an ‘economy of prestige’, 

whereby the cultural authority and imprimatur of a literary prize is a 

major source of cash revenue. An analysis of sales data around the 

leading British literary prize, the Man Booker, confirms this. 

In the years between 2002 and 2008 there were a series of ‘big’ 

winners of the Man Booker: Life of Pi, Vernon God Little, The Line 

of Beauty and The White Tiger. These books saw an average post-

Prize sales lift of 6,456 copies in the week after winning. However, 

more recently, and despite some of the books being seen as less 

commercial than these, there has been an average Prize-week sales lift 

of 12,031 copies, nearly double what it was in the mid-noughties. Two 

recent winners, Richard Flanagan and Marlon James, both of whom 

write relatively ‘difficult’ books, each saw around 10,000 additional 

sales in the week after winning. To put that in perspective, when Ian 

McEwan’s Amsterdam won in 1998 its weekly sale was 3,000; in 2001 

Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang was 4,000. Despite 

everything, and even adjusting for the positive anomaly that was the 

vast sales of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, the 

Man Booker is growing steadily more influential and more powerful as a 

sales engine. 

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