Taste and/or big data?: post‐digital editorial selection

Abstract

Trade publishing has been transformed by the interventions of digital technologies in workflow, products, sales, marketing and distribution, placing the twenty-first century industry in a post-digital age. Editorial commissioning, however, remains a largely traditional process, in which the individual editor’s taste, judgement, and gut instinct combines with company behaviour and market environment in selection processes. Drawing on analyses of publishing’s gatekeeping processes, and a dataset of interviews with UK commissioning editors, the article argues that while, for the main, editorial selection does not currently incorporate big data and algorithmic processes, its reasons for so doing might reside in the need to retain the human within publishing processes, and an evasion of the ‘machine imitating human’

A sharper conversation: book publishers’ use of social media marketing in the age of the algorithm

“…As the above examples suggest, the publishing industry’s publicly characterises insights from analytics as helpful adjuncts to professional decision-making. This view has been mirrored in interviews conducted by publishing studies scholar Claire Squires (2017) with 19 commissioning editors working at British publishing’s coalface. ‘When I asked editors about how digital technologies might affect their commissioning decisions … their responses largely showed them to be operating using the same paradigms that were in place in the 1990s’ (32).…”

“…This study, while set against the context of the sweeping changes described above, is also grounded in the well-established professional discourses of book publishing, a highly traditional industry with an entrenched philosophy of the distinct roles of author, publisher and reader -notably the centrality of authors and publishers in determining the economic and symbolic value of the work, and the reader's correspondingly marginal status as bookshop customer. Over the past decade or so, the industry has been forced to amend its traditional charts of relations, and draw readers directly into the field of literary production as authors, tastemakers and direct customers (Driscoll, 2014;Kist, 2009;Lloyd, 2008;Purcell, 2011;Tian and Martin, 2010;Ray Murray and Squires, 2013;Squires, 2007Squires, , 2017. As this article shows, readers' labour has played an increasingly significant role in publishing operations, particularly in marketing.…”

Experiments with Book Festival People (Real and Imaginary)

“…This rhetoric places imagination, human connection, and emotion above a seemingly automated, quantitative culture of artificial intelligence, a stance not infrequently taken by the publishing industry but an awkward parallel to a discussion of terrorism. 30 The portentousness of statements about book festivals' central role in democracy and public discourse also sits uncomfortably alongside the often homogenous nature of their demographics: white, middle-class, male authors and female audiences largely populate the events. 31 The statements also downplay the lighter and absurdist nature of book festivals, the comedy of the encounters between writers and their peers and readers.…”

The Discourse and Value of Being an Independent Publisher

“…Independent publishers emphasize emotion over automation. In the current publishing environment-which has been called the post-digital age of publishing 96 or the late age of print 97 -the emotional artform of editorial judgement and intuition exists alongside algorithmic selection. 98 While, in the twenty-first century, both the intuitive curation and big-data-driven selection are part of publishing processes, the mission statements of this sample of independent publishers reveals the emphasis of independent publishers on the emotional side of the publishing business.…”