Tom Campbell, a friend of BOP's and the former cultural strategy manager for the Mayor of London, had his first novel, Fold, published earlier this year. In this guest post he reflects on what the experience has taught him.
“Nobody knows anything” is the famous Hollywood refrain, but is it true? Is everyone in the creative industries really, as is often claimed, blindly working away at the whim of the unknowable vagaries of the market? Having been a policy researcher and funder in the sector for some years, and having also recently experienced the publishing industry close up, I am now prepared to be slightly less nihilistic – it seems there are actually some people who know quite a lot.
These people are not the writers, artists or creative producers themselves, who tend to have only the dimmest conception of what audiences and readers want. Rather, those that actually make the market function are the sector intermediaries. It is these people, the editors and agents, who are skilled at anticipating market trends, spotting creative opportunities and refining a work so that it has the greatest chance of success. As such, ‘the suits vs creatives’ dichotomy is a false one. The editors, agents, commissioners, and often also the marketing executives, are not simply the business people who come along at the end of the creative process. Rather, they are the creative process. Small wonder that the one universal piece of advice given to aspiring writers is "get a good agent".
Of course, none of these intermediaries is infallible, and every creative sector will have its surprise hits and its expensive disappointments. But if you are looking for a reason as to why the UK is a global leader for publishing, or has grown so impressively in the international contemporary art market, then it almost certainly has more to do with our world-class editors, curators and agents than with our writers and artists.
This is something often overlooked by digital economy commentators and self-publishing enthusiasts, who eagerly anticipate an era in which technologies ‘disintermediate’ or bypass established industry roles, enabling authors and others to make and sell creative products directly to consumers. Such a vision fails to capture the value that such intermediaries bring. They are far more than quality assurance filters or ‘market makers’, though they do of course perform these functions. Rather, and certainly in my experience, they are critical in developing the actual product, in shaping and improving creative work. In many cases, even the initial idea may well have been theirs as well.
Given all of this, it is striking just how little editors, agents and others feature in government initiatives and policy discussions around the creative industries. Ministers and numerous industry awards celebrate artists, actors, writers and filmmakers, while in the ongoing debates around skills, access to finance, innovation et al, it is the unhelpful notion of ‘talent’ that dominates, as if this were the sole preserve of the artist. As a consequence, across the country there are writers’ centres, Fine Art courses, universities teaching film and television production. But where is the UK’s ‘School for Creative Agents’? What is actually needed is far better support, profile raising and training in editing, curating, critiquing and commissioning. For if we really want to grow the creative economy, then our efforts should be focused not on building the next generation of artists and authors, but on our creative intermediaries.
