Creating trouble

Although it wasn’t first planned as a January title, Prince Harry’s memoir, with its close-on-half-a-million first-week print sale, has proved the New Year boost bookshops needed, as the rest of retail struggles with post-Christmas belt-tightening. These big event publications which see books dominate media headlines are not just a triumph for their individual publisher but also welcome for the industry at large—bringing buyers into the shops to (one hopes) discover other temptations, and underlining the influence of books in our culture. No doubt the other big-money memoir bagged this week—that of ex-prime minister Boris Johnson—will be just as controversial, equally headline-grabbing, and one may say, given Johnson’s record on manuscript delivery and personal organisation in general, equally hard to schedule a definite publication date for (acquirer HarperCollins hasn’t sketched one in yet).

This point about the heavyweight ability of books to defy tough economic times, as a symbol if you like of the wider economic power of the industry, was reflected this week in a report on the future of the creative industries from the House of Lords Communications & Digital Committee. The committee—which boasts Baroness Rebuck, non-executive director of Penguin Random House UK, among its members—did not mince its words on what it saw as the government’s failure to come up with a coherent approach to the creative industries, or policies that support them. Titled At Risk: Our Creative Future, it warned in frank terms that the future of the sector is actively theatened because the government is assuming its success is assured, rather than appreciating the constant effort required to keep it ahead of the game, with international competitors keen to move in on the territory. 

It can’t be said often enough that UK publishing is an economic success story, and its representatives deserve to be heard and heeded when they raise concerns

Having heard evidence from contributors such as the Publishers Association’s Dan Conway and Caroline Norbury of the Creative Industries Federation, the Lords committee robustly condemned proposed changes to intellectual property law including in text and data mining as “misguided”, saying they didn’t even command the support of media and data minister Julia Lopez, and should be put on pause at once. It was also very welcome to see the committee condemn the “lazy rhetoric” that has allowed the profile of arts education to be downgraded as “low value” in contrast to the government’s focus on STEM subjects; rhetoric which has supported the widespread cutting of university humanities courses.

It can’t be said often enough that UK publishing is an economic success story, and its representatives deserve to be heard and heeded when they raise concerns. It’s ironic that the leader who presided over the development of the government’s approach is likely—if he ever completes his memoir—to benefit from the best of British publishing, “world-beating”, even; but as the report points out, that’s a status the government shouldn’t take for granted.