Bestselling author Agatha Christie's crime and mystery novels have been translated into over 100 languages. E.L. James's erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has been translated into 52 languages. Australian author Richard Flanagan's Booker award-winning Narrow Road to the Deep North has been published in 42 territories. Why do some novels 'travel'—as the bookindustry describes the global trade in publishing rights—better than others?
Conditions of Access is a data-driven, conceptually and methodologically innovative study of the structural and material factors that enable – and constrain – the circulation of novels through the trade in the rights to books in what the author introduces as the'global literary marketspace'. Significantly, it argues that no work can enter the space into which it might be considered 'world literature' without first entering this intermediate space– a space that has, until now, been overlooked by scholars.
Adapting an approach developed by the European sociology of translation school, employing digital literary cartography as a research method and using a new kind of bibliographic database, Conditions of Access uses the Australian literary field as a case study in the rights trade. This reveals a new narrative about genre, gender and its relationship to the international literary field, a new trading model that can be employed by practitioners – anduncovers a new story of how, and why, literature circulates globally.

Bestselling author Agatha Christie's crime and mystery novels have been translated into over 100 languages. E.L. James's erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has been translated into 52 languages. Australian author Richard Flanagan's Booker award-winning Narrow Road to the Deep North has been published in 42 territories, a term which captures both languages and national places of publication. Why do some novels circulate internationally, or 'travel'—as the publishing industry describes the global trade in publishing rights to books—more than others? Why do some not 'travel' at all?
In Conditions of Access new data is gathered and analysed and theories about international circulation are tested, leading to a new and illuminating picture of the complex factors that contribute to a book's value inthe global publishing trade. Publishing rights to novels are rarely sold, but instead are conditionally exchanged in a space introduced as the 'global literary marketspace'. To measure, map and understand the processes that facilitate the exchange of rights and, therefore, international circulation into and within this space – 'conditions of access' – the book takes a three-fold approach. Firstly, it draws on the constellation of information associated with these licences to gather comprehensive empirical data hosted in a new type of bibliographic database– a transaction database. Secondly, it employs cutting edge digital cartographic techniques to map and analyse this data. Thirdly, it introduces an innovative interpretive frame developed to capture the interplay of power, prestige and networks revealed by the data, and to accommodate a country's unique geographic, cultural and linguistic position.
Using this ground-breaking approach, Conditions of Access identifies the way in which the rights trade works from a structural perspective, introduces a model by which to trade rights and assess threats, and using Australia as a case study, provides a new account of one nation's literature on the international stage. Via this data-driven, sociological account of circulation, exploring the different 'routes' to access in the early twenty-first century,...