Despite our reputation as a nation of writers, the state of our indigenous book-publishing industry is in peril, with many of our best writers attracted to the money and prestige of British publishing houses, writes Tony Farmar
We are proud of our writers. We have four Nobel Prizes for literature, and a world renown for many of our authors - but we also have a book-publishing industry that is suffering from severe market pressures from overseas. The National Development Plan 2007-2013 has allocated more than €1.1 billion to culture, but very little of this will help the one art form in which the Republic of Ireland has consistently punched above its weight.
The general impression is that there are plenty of books, even too many, but in fact very few of them are published here. The average European country publishes four times as many titles per head as we do. In terms of titles per million of population, Ireland is actually the weakest performer in the whole expanded EU, with the possible exception of Luxembourg. We publish fewer titles per head, even, than much poorer countries such as Estonia, Greece, Latvia and Slovakia.
Our bookshops, along with Austria's, are the most thoroughly and effectively penetrated by foreign publications in the whole EU. Unprotected either by language or distance from Britain, fewer than one in five literary and general books sold here are Irish-published. As far as books are concerned, Ireland is still part of the British Empire.
This is a sad performance for a country that boasts of its writers.
There are four historical and structural reasons for this situation. The first is the powerful British publishing industry, one of the most effective in the world, which publishes more than 125,000 titles every year. The Irish market is attractive to predatory British publishers as a source of both sales and authors. With honed marketing skills and deep pockets, they dominate local bookshops. As a result, even on home territory, Irish publishers find it difficult to gain an equal footing.
The second problem is that Irish authors find British publishers difficult to resist. This drastically reduces the talent pool for Irish publishers. For individual authors, there are obvious advantages to being published in England (basically money, but the professionalism and the prestige are attractive too). That so many should do so impoverishes us all. Declan Kiberd wrote of the last century (in a book published in London): "English publishing houses and English tastes largely determined what books by Irish authors got into print." No change there, then. There is, of course, no knowing what unconscious Anglicisations are necessary to make Irish writings attractive to English tastes.
The third obstacle faced by publishers is the radical shift of the terms of trade in favour of retailers. The situation now is that bookshops take at least 42 per cent of the amount paid by the consumer. Consequently, retailers now pocket at least four times what the author gets for each book sold. A few weeks ago this newspaper was exclaiming at the high margins pharmacists take; book publishers would be delighted if booksellers would go back to marking up by only 50 per cent.
Finally, despite hype to the contrary, the Irish are reluctant book readers. As Yeats put it more than a century ago: "people in Ireland respect literature, but do not read. They honour poets and thinkers, but do not buy their books." A recent Eurostat survey reported that more than half of Irish adults had not read a book in the previous 12 months (though virtually all had read newspapers and magazines). The newspapers and magazines are generally produced here; seven-eighths of the books are imported. Perhaps this explains the difference.
SO WHAT CAN be done? The ideal structure of a viable publishing house is one that synergises the skills, interests and risks of different types of publishing. The hectic life of a Christmas best-seller sustains the long-term risk of "high art" literary publishing. This is not merely a financial exchange. The skills learned with one form of publishing dynamise and enrich others. This is the model of the great English houses such as Faber, where TS Eliot's world-famous poetry list partnered his colleagues' books on piano tuition and chess. Closer to home, the success of Alice Taylor helped Brandon continue its literary list. As recent research has shown, Irish publishers are keen to develop more literary publishing, but this has to be done in the context of a healthily balanced set of activities.
Although the stories we tell ourselves in high literature are important, they are by no means the only way in which people's understandings and social capital are fostered. Not everyone has the mental stamina for John Banville or Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Less refined, more mediated books spread culture in its widest sense to a bigger audience. Books on such topics as local history, political issues such as "Boston versus Berlin", having a baby here, Celtic prayer, GAA, folk music, and our experience of cancer, are the "long thoughts" of a nation, for which locally published books are the uniquely appropriate medium.
_The recent National Economic and Social Forum report on the arts, social capital and social cohesiveness has highlighted culture as the sum of values, conventions, practices and aspirations in the community we are building. The arts contribute strongly to this sum, quite apart from their well-documented economic benefits. It is in this context that local book publishing has a unique role, which will be lost if something is not done.
Books of all sorts are produced by writers, and writers need publishers just as dramatists need theatres and orchestras need concert halls. The promotion of a vigorous service by local publishers to local writers would seem to be an obvious responsibility of the Arts Council. However, the Arts Council's remit is to "literature", and it is unlikely that any possible widening of that term could include publications on looking after an elderly parent or proportional representation, however culturally useful they may be.
We therefore need - as has been evolved in Canada, for instance - an approach to supporting publishing because of its wider contribution. Recently, Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist and poet perhaps best known for his novel The English Patient, has acknowledged the "dedicated nurturing" that Canadian publishers, supported by their Book Publishing Industry Development Program against a similarly "over-mighty neighbour", were able to give him and authors such as Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, Carol Shields and Rohinton Mistry.
Such a programme would provide help to Irish book publishers as businesses (helping with overseas markets, making capital available, new technology initiatives, and so on), without making the number employed a criterion. And there are numerous specific possibilities, for instance: extending the film industry's section 481 to publishing; establishing a special book post to encourage off-web sales; and privileging Irish-published books in public libraries and other institutions. The EU rightly sees books as the backbone of national cultural identity, and is prepared to allow otherwise iron rules, for instance in competition law, to be waived in their favour.
AS IT HAPPENS, a publishing turnaround has been successfully executed in Ireland before. In the 1890s, educational publishing in this country was almost entirely by British-based firms (the influential history texts by Carty, for instance, were published by Macmillan). By dint of government pressure, preferences of buyers, and adroitly placed local influence, almost all education books sold here are now Irish-published.
To be sure, Irish general book publishing has come on remarkably since the 1930s, when Daniel Corkery wrote that "a bookseller's window in Dublin or Cork is a sad sight. There may be hundreds of books in it; yet not a dozen of them will have been written for or about Ireland". But there is an uphill struggle to hold that gain, let alone develop it so that Irish writers will be provided with a proper platform, and that the long thoughts of Irish culture in the widest sense are sustained.
Tony Farmar has just completed a two-year term as president of Clé - the Irish Book Publishers' Association. The views expressed are his own
