The phrase mid-list is industry shorthand. It refers to the stratum of literary fiction that occupies the middle ground between the lead titles that the imprints invest heavily in and the back-list filler that fills out the catalogue. Mid-list books used to receive moderate advances, modest marketing budgets, and the kind of patient cultivation across multiple titles that would, if the writer was good and persistent, produce a sustainable novelistic career over fifteen or twenty years. The mid-list was the economic ground on which a substantial portion of the serious novelistic work in English was produced for most of the postwar period.
The mid-list has been contracting for at least a decade and probably longer, and the contraction has accelerated in the past five years. The contraction is not invisible — the trade press has covered it intermittently — but the implications for the literature itself have been less well-examined than the economics warrant. The aim of this piece is to set out what has actually happened, why it has happened, and what it means for the kinds of books that the contemporary publishing apparatus is and is not now able to produce.
What the mid-list actually was
It is worth being specific about what the mid-list actually consisted of, because the term has come to be used loosely. A mid-list literary novel in, say, 1995 might receive an advance of between fifteen and forty thousand dollars in the American market or a similar order in sterling. It would receive a marketing budget that paid for a moderate review-copy mailing, a small allocation for trade press, and the editor's time to shepherd it through the publication cycle. It would not generally receive bookstore-front placement on its first day, but the publisher would expect it to find its readers gradually over six to twelve months, with the better mid-list books accumulating word-of-mouth attention and steady backlist sales.
The economic logic of the mid-list rested on two assumptions. The first was that the imprint could carry a portfolio of books at moderate margins, with the lead titles subsidising the slower-selling mid-list and the cumulative back-list providing a reliable revenue base. The second was that an author could be cultivated across multiple titles, with the third and fourth and fifth novels building on a readership that the first and second had begun to establish, even if the early books had not been commercially decisive.
Both assumptions have been substantially eroded by the structural changes in publishing over the past two decades. The imprint consolidations have produced units that are required to deliver higher per-title margins than the earlier portfolio logic allowed. The retail concentration — first through the chain bookstores, then through Amazon — has shifted the economics toward titles that can sell in the first weeks at high volume, and away from titles that build slowly. The marketing economies have shifted in directions that make the moderate-budget patient cultivation increasingly difficult to execute. The mid-list as it existed has become, in many imprints, an inefficient use of editorial and marketing capacity.
What has replaced it
What has replaced the mid-list, in practice, is a bifurcated structure that is now visible across most of the major literary imprints. At the top, the lead titles receive substantially larger advances than the comparable lead titles of twenty years ago, with the marketing budgets and the editorial attention concentrated on a smaller number of titles per season. At the bottom, the imprint will publish a substantial number of titles that receive minimal investment — small advances, almost no marketing, editorial work compressed into shorter cycles — with the assumption that most will not sell and that the investment in any single one cannot be substantial.
The middle ground that used to be the mid-list has largely disappeared. The books that would have occupied that ground now either receive disproportionate investment as lead titles, often with corresponding pressure to perform in ways the writers and books may not be able to support, or are pushed into the minimal-investment category, where they are published but not in any substantive sense edited or marketed in the way the mid-list once received. The bifurcation is the structural fact, and most of what is currently being said about contemporary publishing makes more sense once the bifurcation is acknowledged as the underlying condition.
What this means for the literature
The implications for the literature itself are, when one works through them, rather substantial. The mid-list was the economic infrastructure that supported a particular kind of writing — patient, slow-building, willing to follow a writer's sensibility across multiple books without each book being required to make the case for the whole career. The disappearance of that infrastructure has consequences for the kinds of books that can now be produced under publishing-industry conditions, and the consequences are not evenly distributed.
Books that benefit from the bifurcated structure — books that can plausibly succeed as lead titles, that fit cleanly into the genre or sub-genre categorisations that drive the marketing logic, that can be promoted through the contemporary platform economies — are produced in the contemporary apparatus more or less as they have been. These books include the best of contemporary commercial literary fiction and a smaller number of more ambitious works that nevertheless fit the lead-title pattern.
Books that depended on the mid-list pattern have a more difficult contemporary route to publication and to readership. These include, importantly, the kinds of mid-career novels that build incrementally on a writer's previous work — the third or fourth or fifth book of a long, patient career, the kind of book that twenty years ago would have been published with moderate expectation and would have found its readers over time. Such books are now under pressure either to perform as lead titles, which most of them are not equipped to do, or to be published into the minimal-investment category, which is not what their writers and editors had imagined for them.
The visible consequences
The visible consequences include phenomena that the trade press has noticed but has not always connected to the structural cause. Mid-career writers who once would have been protected by the mid-list infrastructure now find themselves under pressure to produce books that conform to lead-title templates. Editors who once would have cultivated a writer across multiple books are now under pressure to deliver lead titles or accept the minimal-investment category. Agents have shifted their submission practices toward properties that fit the bifurcated structure, with consequences that propagate back through what writers attempt to write.
The consequences for first novels are also substantial. The first novel that twenty years ago might have been published in the mid-list is now, in many cases, either pushed into a competitive lead-title slot it cannot support or rejected at the agent stage because it does not fit the template the agents are now working with. The first-novel landscape, when one looks at it carefully, has narrowed in directions that do not correspond to what most readers would say they want from contemporary literary fiction.
The consequences for the mid-career writer who does not fit the lead-title template are perhaps the most acute. Such writers — and they make up a substantial portion of the serious contemporary novelistic activity — find themselves either pushed into smaller and less-resourced presses, or producing under conditions that did not previously exist for writers at their stage of career. The shift toward smaller presses has been the more visible consequence; many of the most-interesting contemporary mid-career novels are now appearing from independent presses that operate outside the bifurcated economics of the major imprints.
What the smaller presses have done
The smaller-press response has been, in many respects, the most heartening aspect of the contemporary publishing landscape. New York Review Books, NYRB Originals, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Tilted Axis, And Other Stories, the literary publishers within Coffee House and Graywolf — these have absorbed a substantial portion of the writing that the major-imprint bifurcation has not been able to accommodate. The editorial work that the smaller presses are doing is, in many cases, the editorial work that the mid-list editors used to do at the larger imprints. The marketing economies are different and the readership is smaller, but the work continues.
The smaller-press solution is not, however, a complete solution. The economics of independent publishing remain fragile, and the dependence on grant funding, on small-scale subscription readerships, and on individual editorial labour means that the capacity is constrained in ways that the major-imprint infrastructure was not. The smaller presses can and do publish remarkable books, but they cannot absorb the full quantum of mid-list writing that the contraction has displaced. The contraction is, on net, a contraction, and the smaller presses' admirable response does not eliminate the underlying problem.
What might be done
The structural causes of the contraction are durable, and the prospects of reversing the contraction in the near term are limited. The imprint consolidations are unlikely to be unwound. The retail concentration is unlikely to be reversed. The marketing economies are unlikely to shift in directions that favour the patient cultivation of the moderate-budget book. What might plausibly be done is more modest — strengthening the smaller-press infrastructure through institutional support, attending more carefully in the trade press to the books that the major-imprint apparatus is no longer in a position to produce well, and creating, where one can, the kind of attentive critical infrastructure that supports the books the mass-market apparatus does not.
This site is, in part, an attempt at the last of these — at an attentive critical infrastructure that takes the books on their own terms, at the length the books require, with the seriousness that the contraction has made it harder to produce in the venues where most readers will encounter contemporary fiction. The contraction is real, the consequences are large, and the response, where it can be made, has to be made through an accumulation of small efforts rather than through a structural reversal that is not on offer. The mid-list, in its old form, is gone. Some of what it produced may still be possible, but only if the surrounding infrastructure is built and maintained deliberately, and only if the readers who care about the writing it once supported are willing to support the writers, the smaller presses, and the criticism through which the writing is now mostly produced.
