Laura Jones-Rivera

About Laura’s Research:

Small-to-medium enterprise (SME) book publishers are anecdotally valued as purveyors of diversity, praised as tastemakers through publishing marginalised writers, but there is insufficient data regarding SME operations to support this claim. SMEs experience crises of cost-of-living impacts, public funding precarity plus internal pressures of high retailer discounts and increased direct costs, so it is feared that SME publisher collapse causes regression in diversity and cultural value. This thesis questions how the “cathedral” of publishing studies theory and the “stock market” of institutional theories can combine to identify cultural policy and business sustainability improvements towards consistent, and therefore, diverse cultural output.