Abstract
This chapter examines the gatekeeping orientation, evaluative processes, and decision-making role of the publisher’s commissioning editor through a conceptual framework of sensing the novel, seeing the book, and selling the goods. This framework incorporates the affective, and often bodily processes, of reading novels (‘sensing’), alongside the matching of taste to communicative processes and an envisioning of the material book-as-product (‘seeing’), culminating in the commercial impetus of books-as-goods (‘selling’). Through semi-structured interviews, the chapter examines the sensory and passional ways in editors recount their experiences of commissioning as a lived, felt experience but also as a professional discourse and an economic practice. As such, the chapter argues that sensing-seeing-selling is a networked praxis in which aesthetic objects, individual professionalized readers, emotional labor, publishing processes, company formations, material embodiments, and market environments come together.
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Notes
- 1.
My acknowledgments are due to Rachel Noorda for transcription, funded by the University of Stirling Division of Literature & Languages. Ethics approval for the interviews was granted by the University of Stirling General University Ethics Panel. The interviewees are anonymized.
- 2.
Within the frame of publishing’s operations in a post-digital age, “Taste and/or Big Data?” (Squires 2017b) articulates how publishing nonetheless remains a largely traditional process, in which the individual editor’s taste, judgment, and gut instinct combines with company behavior and market environment, rather than via an incorporation of the big data of algorithmic processes.
- 3.
The learned aspects of using instincts and gut feelings are investigated further in Squires (2017b).
- 4.
The publisher’s “slush pile” is comprised of unagented manuscripts submitted to publishers; frequently also referred to as “unsolicited.”
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Squires, C. (2020). Sensing the Novel/Seeing the Book/Selling the Goods . In: Lanzendörfer, T., Norrick-Rühl, C. (eds) The Novel as Network. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_15
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