Bean-counters are ruining literary fiction

In The Observer, Robert McCrum argues that people with no concern for originality are ruining the publishing of literary fiction.

Ezra Pound's injunction to writers was "make it new". But if the dice are loaded, and the people who are calling the odds are not readers but marketing people, what hope for new fiction? In the circumstances, the Booker shortlist looks less like the renewal of fiction's lease, more an extraordinary miracle.