WEEK FIVE: CREATING BUZZ: MARKETING, PRIZES AND
FESTIVALS
PUBL90003
THE CONTEMPORARY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY 1
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Seminar Structure:
1. Student-Led Discussion
2. Publishing News?
3. Assignment Questions?
4. Literary Prizes
5. Literary Festivals
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Review
● Lecture:
○ Astrid Edwards
● Readings
○ Driscoll and Squires: “Book Buzz”
○ Dane: “Tote Bags and Contemporary Literary Festivals”
○ Parnell, Dane, Weber: “Author Care and the Invisibility of
Affective Labour”
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Institutional frameworks: literary prizes
Literary prizes: success or scandal?
• Are they really necessary?
• Do the ‘prestigious’ ones tend to repeat existing structures of
inequality?
• What is literary ‘prestige’ anyway?
• What work do they do? Who benefits?
It’s time to come up with a final answer!
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Exercise: All the prizes, ranked
List all the prizes you can.
Then rank them by prestige.
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Institutional frameworks: literary prizes
A proliferation of prizes:
Prizes are increasingly visible features of the literary landscape.
As of 2013, there were at least 190 major literary prizes in the
Anglophone literary field, and hundreds more minor, localized or
specialized awards (Driscoll 2014, 119).
Which includes, in Australia, The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards,
various State prizes (‘Premier’s literary awards’), The Miles Franklin,
The Stella, The Melbourne Prize, and lots of other smaller awards.
Major international prizes:
Nobel, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Booker, Pulitzer
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Institutional frameworks: literary prizes
What is the point of literary prizes?
Driscoll (119–20):
Literary awards are spectacular stages that draw together authors and
the public as stars and fans. Prizes offer spikes of adrenaline that
drive sales for the book industry. At the same time, prizes
declare themselves sober consecrators of genius, ignoring the
market-driven successes of bestsellers to honour outstanding
works of literature. In this collision of popular appeal and reverence
for high culture, we can discern a leading example of the new literary
middlebrow . . . (Driscoll 2014, 119–20)
Which interests do prizes serve, culture or commerce?
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Prizes, festivals, commerce and literary value
What cultural power do prizes have?
The power to consecrate (Driscoll 2014, 120)
Driscoll: ‘the act of consecration is a provocative act that invites
contestation’ (121).
Consecration has always been a function of cultural awards,
although the kinds of value they recognize has altered (120).
The multiple literary awards that exist at any given historical
moment comprise a field in which prizes compete to
monopolize the power of consecration. (121)
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Prizes, festivals, commerce and literary value
Two ways of thinking about literary production:
• The ‘literary field’ (Bourdieu 1993)
• The middlebrow reader
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Prizes, festivals, commerce and literary value
Two ways of thinking
about literary production:
•The ‘literary field’ (Bourdieu 1993)
•The middlebrow reader
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• The network of publishers,
agents, authors, editors, critics,
and so on that make up
publishing culture. Characterised
by struggles over non-
commercial value versus
commerce and what ‘matters’.
• A useful way of thinking about
the industry: not static; a site of
constant contestation and
jockeying for position and
prestige.
Prizes, festivals, commerce and literary value
Two ways of thinking
about literary production:
•The ‘literary field’ (Bourdieu 1993)
•The middlebrow reader
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• The network of publishers,
agents, authors, editors, critics,
and so on that make up
publishing culture. Characterised
by struggles over non-
commercial value versus
commerce and what ‘matters’.
• A useful way of thinking about
the industry: not static; a site of
constant contestation and
jockeying for position and
prestige.
• A useful way of thinking about audiences and tastes.
• Often female and overlooked, even disdained by the
literati.
• Literary sales success paradoxically requires
middlebrow readers. They buy and read lots of books!
Prizes, festivals, commerce and literary value
Who is the middlebrow reader?
Belongs to book clubs, goes to literary
festivals and events, reads the ‘latest novels’,
reads frequently, might have a Goodreads
account, is interested to know who wins literary
prizes, engages with and has reverence for the
elite and highbrow but on their own terms.
As might be obvious, the two are somewhat in tension: rareified
ideas of cultural value and ‘middlebrow’, don’t necessarily go
together. But middlebrow readers are the ones who through their
appetite for books make highbrow literary works successful . . .
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‘Middlebrow’
1. Middle class
2. Reverential
3. Commercial
4. Mediated
5. Feminised
6. Emotional
7. Recreational
8. Earnest
(Driscoll, 17–43)
Institutional frameworks: literary prizes
What commercial work do prizes do?
● Attract attention to the industry/‘booktalk’ in media & social
media
● Attract attention to sponsors
● Used by publishers to promote books through rolling waves of
publicity (longlist announced, shortlist announced, winner
announced)
● Used by booksellers to sell books, via in-store displays, etc
So a complex, intertangled relationship here between culture and
commerce
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So, you didn’t win a prize. What else is there?
Support frameworks for writers and writing: scholarships, bursaries,
residencies, funding, philanthropy, etc.
Does culture have a national benefit? IE: should government be involved
in supporting writers and writing?
● Note: new National Cultural Policy
The principle behind most support frameworks is to support writers, not
publishers:
● The Australia Council (the main grants provider)
● Creative Victoria, Create NSW, Arts SA, Arts Queensland (and other
state bodies)
● The Wheeler Centre, Writers Victoria, The Readings Foundation (and
many other independent and semi-govt bodies)
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Institutional frameworks: literary festivals
What about literary festivals? Who attends?
A quote to ponder:
Festivals are the visible and public manifestations of an art
form that is largely invisible and private. For that very reason,
they are greatly loved by the media, publishers, governments and
other funding bodies. Frequently promoted as ‘celebrations’ of
writers and their work, they serve a marketing function at the same
time as they are seen to provide ‘proof’ of the public and cultural
value of literature, thus justifying the expenditure of taxpayers’
(and other) money for its support. (Ommundsen 2009, 21–2)
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Institutional frameworks: literary festivals
So, another perfect blend of art and commerce . . . that relies on the support
of the (often maligned) middlebrow reader:
In an age obsessed by spectacle, they provide the least spectacular of all
art forms with an opportunity to strut its wares in public, to testify to the
existence of a literary ‘community’, to put on display its creators and turn
them into celebrities in rituals of public homage and adulation. For the
same reasons, festivals are routinely mocked and berated by literary
professionals (journalists, academics, and often by the writers
themselves) who regard them as light-weight, commercially driven and
culturally backward. In particular, they delight in pouring scorn on the
‘ordinary’ readers who make up the festival audience. . . . that festival
audiences are predominantly middle-class, middlebrow, middle-
aged and female is perceived as a problem, a threat to the status of
literature as an art form. (Ommundsen 2009, 22)
Literary festivals and tote bags
Festivals allow audiences to display their cultural credentials:
“Book fairs and literary festivals are performance spaces…A
simple canvas tote bag that prominently displays the branding
of a particular publisher or bookstore or gallery or museum
can, especially when carried at events like a literary festival,
denote a sense of literariness or even sophistication. Moreover,
when observed en masse at a literary festival, these totes not only
tell us about the collective cultural capital of the literary festival
audience, but also the kinds of institutions that, in the eyes of the
literary middlebrow, are considered prestigious and valuable”
(Dane, 2020).
Do you carry ‘cultural’ tote bags? Which ones? Do you notice
other people’s tote bags at events? Is there a tote bag you covet?
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BREAK
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Exercise: Design-A-Fest
As a group, choose one of the below:
● A small town on the north east coast of Scotland
● Melbourne CBD
● The neighborhood where you grew up
● A community library in New Zealand
● A street in London populated by travel books stores
● An underground bar in New York
● A field in the Welsh countryside
● A shut down arthouse cinema in Hobart
● A series of canal boats in the heart of Amsterdam
And choose another one of the below:
● Literary fiction
● Romance fiction
● Pulp horror fiction
● Memoir
● Sci fi
● Fantasy
● Poetry
● Creative nonfiction
● Graphic novels
● Children’s picture books
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Create a festival based on your choices from 1
and 2. Is it a pulp horror fiction festival on the north
east coast of Scotland? Or a dedicated romance
readers festival in the Melbourne CBD? What is the
name of your festival? Is it open to primarily readers,
writers, or both? How big is it? Who attends? What
can your festival offer to patrons? Do you announce
the winner/s of a prestigious prize at your festival?
Who and/or what are the draw cards for your
festival? What can stakeholders gain from your
festival?
You should write a short proposal for your
festival, taking into account the questions above,
and design a tote bag to be sold (or given away,
oOOoo!) at your festival.
Have fun!