Tyler’s recent link to the news story about free downloads of the novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize caught my attention as another twist on the question of how literature will be produced and distributed in the digital age. What struck me most in that story was the confidence expressed by an executive at Jonathan Cape ??? publisher of this year’s Man Booker winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering ??? that this initiative won’t hurt sales. His confidence is probably justified: in the past, winning the Man Booker Prize has quadrupled sales for even the most challenging novels and given the author a worldwide audience. Free online distribution would cut into that figure, but the publisher might still come out ahead: the news report suggested that sales of The Gathering in Great Britain before the prize was announced totaled 3,687 copies in hardcover and paperback (although the publisher predictably claimed a larger figure than the public sales figures indicate). Even if they give Enright’s novel away online, the publisher will still see a substantial increase in its sales, and the publicity will help to build Enright’s international reputation, making any book that follows this “bleak Irish family saga” easier to sell.
So here’s my question: are literary prizes the new patronage?
In an earlier age, wealthy aristocratic patrons were an important part of the literary scene, authorizing the production of literary texts by offering economic support, political protection, and a stamp of cultural approval. With the rise of the novel as a mass market commodity, economic patronage became less crucial. (Political patronage also became less important, at least in Great Britain and the U.S., as the danger of being imprisoned or executed for what one wrote receded. But political patronage remains crucial in societies where that threat persists, and all it takes is a change in a nation’s political culture to bring it back into every writer’s list of reasons not to sleep at night.) I’ve been scolded recently for my economic ignorance, but it seems clear to me that the real challenge for any publisher of literary fiction in a market economy is publicity. Almost any book ??? no matter how challenging its style or subject matter ??? can become at least a modest commercial success if its publisher can find a way to get people talking about it. That’s what literary prizes do, identifying certain books as demanding our attention. I know several people who try to read all the books on the Man Booker shortlist every year, using it as a way to stay current on contemporary fiction. Only Oprah has a greater influence on the sales of literary fiction: no American literary prize, not even the Pulitzer, has as broad a cultural influence. That fact can partly be attributed to the Man Booker organization’s success in generating controversy over its choices every year. Bookies give odds on the winner in the weeks before the prize is announced, and while the popular favorite rarely wins, that gives Britain’s daily newspapers the chance to play their part by writing their annual outrage stories about the judges’ choices. Readers get to pick a side, and the happy result is that more novels get read.
This idea of literary prizes as a form of patronage isn’t new: poets know that the first-book prize is a crucial part of the economics of a literary life, since it credentials the starving poet for a tenure-track teaching job. Colleges and universities acted as the most important literary patrons during the second half of the 20th Century, and literary prizes became one way to make creative writing measurable to hiring and tenure committees. A literary prize, no matter how obscure, is the boldface on a CV, and so not surprisingly, many small prizes sprang up to supply the need.
But this idea of distributing the Man Booker short list online raises new questions about the role of literary prizes. Could the major literary prizes and their commercial sponsors in effect begin to subsidize the distribution of the books they consider important? At this point, there seems to be no discussion of direct payments to publishers or authors for this online distribution, but I’m sure negotiations are going on as we speak. And one might argue that the increased sales resulting from a book’s inclusion on the short list already constitutes a form of compensation. In a market economy, what’s more valuable than publicity? In fact, that’s exactly what the Man Booker Prize’s corporate sponsors are paying for when they fund the prize. And what’s the role of a literary patron, except to authorize a book for consumers? We have plenty of authors, most laboring in poverty and obscurity, but few authorities whose judgment readers trust to point out the books that demand our attention. Literary publishers and critics used to serve this purpose, but few commercial publishers can now take a book simply on quality, and even fewer serious critics can be found in our newspapers and magazines. It’s left to wealthy patrons ??? Oprah and the corporate sponsors of the literary prizes ??? to authorize what we read. When Oprah starts handing out Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels the way she hands out Pontiacs, then we’ll know that the age of the new patron has truly begun.