The Romance of the Book Deal

Signing a book deal for a novel was the main ambition of my adolescence and early adulthood. It was what Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries wanted and it was what I wanted too. Like a lot of young, middle-class women my experiences of school and university had left me with a privileged, Hermione-Granger-like attachment to elite institutions and the idea of meritocracy. I had hated every institution I'd ever been a part of, but still I defined success on their terms. I couldn’t imagine anything else.


Signing a book deal in my mid-twenties felt like proof that I was a good writer, and therefore a good human. When I wrote, and when I read novels, the means of their production were  invisible to me or — at most — vague, fuzzy and in the distance. I understood book deals in terms of romance and the individual, not of labour and the means of production. Publishers were bestowers of book deals, divining rods for good writing and self-worth, custodians of a thing I loved. Here was the promise of a life lived in proximity to Literature with a capital L! My feelings, I believe, were not unlike the feelings many people have when they get their so-called ‘dream job’ in publishing; after so much graft, and against the odds, there is a relief in having ‘made it’.

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That was five years ago. I’ve now published two novels with a mainstream publisher and am much more familiar with the industry. I’ve got to know many other writers, as well as salaried workers across the publishing industry. I can no longer read a novel, particularly a contemporary one, without an acute awareness of the circumstances of its production: how underpaid and overworked the workers who made the book are, how big or small the author’s advance was, what marketing gimmicks have been used, and what parent company owns their imprint. I am no longer naive to the means of production of the novel. 

At the same time, I have also noticed how similar a lot of novels being published in the UK are. I am often sent early copies of novels before publication. No doubt, this is a privilege. However, as a result I have now read approximately one hundred first chapters of psychologically realist fiction about the lives of university-educated, Anglophone young people. There must be some element of selection bias – this is what publicists assume I want to read – but the homogeneity of the identities of the novelists, their subjects and style has struck me deeply. Where people with marginalised identities are published and depicted, the form is rarely experimental, the style often similar to what came the year before. These novels are often marketed on the basis of the identity of the writer, their quality and value argued for in terms of representation alone. I adopted this approach in the very first interview I ever gave about my writing, declaring that I hoped my novel would ‘make the Latin American population of the UK more visible’. I thought the best argument for my work was not what I was saying or how, but who I was writing about. 

Everyone reading this will have different ideas about what makes a good novel and good contemporary literature. But something we might all agree on is that the production of a homogenous literature is bad, and the production of a diverse – in as many ways as possible – range of novels is good. This gives whatever it is that each of us thinks is good literature a chance.

Here’s the rub: the publishing industry is not built for the pursuit of newness and difference, it is built to return a profit to shareholders. The profit motive incentivises conservatism, as publishers seek more of what made them money last year so that they can make the same money this year. The result is trend-chasing and not trend-making, selling to established audiences not seeking new ones, and the concentration of resources around a few ‘sure bet’ novels a year. The industry, as it is currently structured, is built for homogeneity. Loving literature is not enough; all of us who want diverse novels must understand, and pay attention to, the means of their production.

The structure of the industry rarely features in campaigns or discussions about diversity in publishing. Our demands have tended to focus on convincing industry power holders of the worthiness of diversity, ignoring — and passively accepting — the very structures that give so few people so much power in the first place. Perhaps we are so used to romanticising the industry that we forget to notice it, finding ourselves unable to imagine another way of making novels. It might also be that in situations of precarity, we end up fighting for scraps, more willing to promote ourselves within the industry rather than disavow or criticise it. 

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To understand how the publishing industry is structured, we have to talk about consolidation. Consolidation is when a few companies dominate a market. It often happens when big companies gobble up their smaller competitors. Most imprints in the UK are owned by the same few companies. In consolidated industries the quality of products is lower, as firms face less competition for consumers. Similarly, as workers have fewer employers to choose from, salaries and working conditions worsen. I remember the first meeting I ever had with my editor at the huge glass company building on the banks of the river Thames. Each floor bore the logo of imprints that I had previously assumed were separate companies. As the lift moved up and up, we passed several other imprints to which my manuscript had been submitted.

Consolidation in the publishing industry is well-documented, particularly in the US, where a proposed merger between Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House – two of the largest publishing houses in the US – was blocked following action by the Department of Justice this year, citing lower advances for authors as one of the harms of the merger. Penguin Random House itself is, of course, also the result of a merger between two giant companies. 

In theory, according to the rules of the ‘free’ market, if one, or indeed several, publishers were to underestimate demand for diverse literature in the way I have described, another, competing publisher would provide the desired products. This, in turn, would damage the profits of the other publishers, incentivising them to produce more diverse work, raising the overall quality of the product (literature) available in the market. In practice, in a consolidated market, it is very hard for a small publisher to compete.  

Nevertheless, it does happen – to an extent. Independent publishers have produced widely successful novels recently, such as Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula Press), Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (Influx Press), Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press), Shola Von Reinhold’s Lote (Jacaranda), Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (Rough Trade), Annie Ernaux’s whole body of work (Fitzcarraldo) and Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (Tilted Axis Press). However, nearly all of these break-through moments were created by prizes, which is to say, too dependent on luck. Prize juries often reward the same big (and usually American) novels already dominating the market. They’re not a powerful or reliable enough antidote to a consolidated industry with conservative tendencies. 

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What could be powerful enough? It is useful to think of power and the publishing industry in terms of capital (the publishers) and labour (workers, including salaried employees, authors and freelancers). Where consolidation is high, capital is highly organised. There are two ways to counter this. The first is through government action to break up consolidated firms, so that capital is no longer organised and its power deconcentrated. The second is by organising labour, so that it can concentrate its own power and act as a counterweight to capital. In this sense, the publishing industry is no different to other sectors: our best chance at improving our working conditions and of producing work we are proud of is by unionising. Only when workers in publishing are unionised  at high rates within and across publishing houses – and willing to take industrial action – will we have the power to negotiate with publishing houses and win. Otherwise we’re just appealing to the moral decency of the bosses, with very little real leverage, and no evidence they have any.

The last five years stripped me of the idea that getting a book deal meant I could write or that I was a good person. I am still susceptible to the romantic pull of literature, the desire to create beauty on the page and to share that with others. But the publishing industry no longer represents this promise to me. I see myself as one of many workers in the publishing industry trying their best to produce good, courageous, diverse literature despite the industry. A book deal means money to live off for a bit and the chance to collaborate with workers I respect, albeit within annoying parameters. The publishing industry exists to make a profit for shareholders. This is what drives the industry; ultimately, this is why book deals are made. There is no romance in it.

Today, we should unionise, and demand the break up of large publishers; this is the only way to stand up to capital and achieve true diversity or better working conditions. But we must dream beyond this too, of an industry where workers own the means of production, where presses are run by editors, writers, production editors, publishers and booksellers together. Presses that aren’t afraid of difference and newness, full of all kinds of writers and writing, where no one is exploited. This, I think, is a romance worth believing in.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in South London. She has written two novels — Stubborn Archivist and there are more things.

Stubborn Archivist was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020 and the Desmond Elliot Prize 2019. Yara was named one of The Observer’s ‘hottest-tipped’ debut novelists of 2019 and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019.

there are more things was nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022 and Goldsmiths Prize 2022. As a work in progress, there are more things received the John C Lawrence Award from the Society of Authors and was shortlisted for the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award 2019. It was one of the Sunday Times, BBC Culture and New Statesman’s books of the Year. Yara was named one of Granta's 'Best Young British Novelists' in 2023.

Yara also works as a climate justice organiser.