5 Media Corporations Enter, 4 Media Corporations Leave: Publishing Beyond Thunderdome
In November the literary world was not shocked to hear that the “Big 5”—the major New York publishing houses that dominate the book business—were becoming the “Big 4.” Simon & Schuster, previously the third largest of the Big 5 and owned by ViacomCBS, has been purchased by German media corporation Bertelsmann, owner of Penguin Random House—which was previously the biggest of the Big 5, and will now be the biggest, by far, of the Big 4 (assuming the deal goes through, as is expected). Publishers Weekly reports that Penguin Random House’s CEO is “very happy” and “does not expect any antitrust issues to arise.”
You can still find essays in still-useful anthologies, not old, that discuss the “Big 10.” This process of consolidation and massive corporatization has been the news in book publishing for a few decades. The prestige New York presses used to be independent; now they’re amalgamated into multinational media corporations. Anyone can make a joke about when it’s finally just “the Big 1.” Anyone can regret that in 2013 when Penguin and Random House merged, they went with “Penguin Random House,” not “Random Penguin.”
So how should this news feel? How does it matter when things become more like they are? How will the increased pressure of increased corporatization further express itself across the literary world, the book world, across American culture and life?
Even the New York Times, not generally a bastion of anti-corporate sentiment, has been running articles on the book business with headlines like “Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers.” This article, by Alexandra Alter and from September 2020, is about Madeline McIntosh, chief executive at Penguin Random House, the publisher that’s dominating the bestseller game these days, which over at the Big 5 is increasingly the only game these days. “More homogenization” awaits, as Dennis Johnson of indie press Melville House is quoted observing. Describing the situation before the most recent acquisition (Big 5 à Big 4), Alter writes:
Penguin Random House’s dominance represents the culmination of decades-long trends that have made the industry more profit focused, consolidated, undifferentiated and averse to risk.
Like Hollywood, which pours resources into universe-scale superhero franchises that are nearly guaranteed to get an audience, publishing has become increasingly reliant on blockbusters — a development that has left beginner and midlist authors struggling.…
The shift to online retail amplifies the trend. Amazon’s algorithms showcase books that are already selling well, so more people see those books and more people buy them. Publishers have less control over what readers see online than what they encounter in a store, so they funnel more marketing and advertising dollars into titles that are preordained successes.
The result is an algorithmic marketplace that serves up mostly the hits, driving a cycle so self-fulfilling it’s nearly tautological: Best sellers sell the best because they are best sellers.
Lately it seems like everything in bookselling and book publishing that had the potential to cultivate the long tail of cultural diversity and the decentralization of cultural power has instead achieved the opposite. (Long tail describes an opposite of the blockbuster model: a market in which buyers can readily purchase niche items, and sellers realize profits through the accumulation of low-volume sales of many different products.) Instead the blockbuster model has only intensified, and this tautological cycle gains ever more mass and inertia. More inequality and oligarchy, everywhere.
Amazon—with its ability to sell any book to anyone at any time, wildly diversifying the offerings of chain bookstores, its market predecessors—arose with talk of its power to serve the long tail. Yet, as Alter describes, its model has instead achieved the opposite: bigger blockbusters, less product diversity. Meanwhile its anti-union, anti-worker practices continue to deprive and endanger its growing workforce. The affordability of digital print technology that in recent decades allowed for a proliferation of independent and small presses helped those presses emerge, yet they increasingly struggle to survive, often sustained by infusions of contest fees, grant money, and/or private cash. Small presses are profoundly marginalized and kept precarious in the book business and cultural realm, with bookselling terms and means constantly remade to better serve corporations and the bestseller model, starving everything else out. Cultural publications and prizes, which rarely bother to think of the publishing industry in political terms, are disinclined to look past the Big 5 Big 4 books stacked on their doorsteps (after all, there’s little cultural power to be gained by doing so—no one talks about you when you talk about a book no one else is talking about).
Social media promised an alternative to traditional legacy media gatekeeping, and indeed is much more accessible: anyone may publish here. Yet its algorithms also consolidate and re-enforce popularity, inequity, and troublingly superficial forms of engagement. On social media, even opposition to a speech act is algorithmically transformed into a “rite of assent” to that speech’s visibility, significance, and reproduction (to borrow a phrase from Sacvan Bercovitch). This model allows, in an unendingly devastating example, leaders around the world who call for racist violence and ethnic cleansing to see their speech flourish and take root. Our newest media is not designed to serve a diverse, differentiating chorus of cultural voices; it’s designed to keep picking out the loudest voice, then amplifying it even more—whoever gets the most “engagement,” whether because they provide insightful commentary or because they stoke old familiar forms of hate.
In short, social media doesn’t mind what makes text popular. As long as you’re scrolling and clicking, they’re making money. The book business prefers some kinds of popularity to others—as long as they’re already popular.
So will we feel even smaller or less heard or less free in the world of the Big 4? As the NYT discusses, we can now expect from the publishing industry yet more aversion to risk, narrowing approaches to new investments, less interest in developing new writers and more interest in squeezing every last drop out of the moneymakers. As other commentators have noted, some percentage of debut writers and midlist writers who might have had a home among the Big 5 won’t find it among the Big 4. (Midlist is publishing-talk for intellectually and aesthetically accomplished writers, respected by their peers and with established readerships, whose books don’t sell as much as the blockbusters, don’t break through into the HBO adaptation, etc. Many of my own favorite “midlist” works offer critical understandings of American empire that seem hard for the mainstream to receive.) We’ll see more money for the winners, less for everyone else. The Big 5 are infrequently celebrated for their artistic risk-taking, but expect less from the Big 4. Editors at these houses will likely face even more internal sales-minded resistance to signing new writers who have written good books but don’t have an established brand and social-media following. Much of book publishing is already subservient to celebrity culture, where a book serves as just one of many products capitalizing on a larger brand or influencer status. Expect more of that even in the literary world—the book as supplement to the brand of writer established elsewhere in media. (Nothing wrong with that if one finds social media to be a rich alternative literary form, but what if it isn’t?)
As Alter notes, discussing how the bestseller model keeps reinvesting in a handful of books as profit leaders, “the trend is worrying. Every dollar plowed into printing and marketing older titles comes at the expense of discovering and promoting new writers, causing a sort of slow stagnation of literary culture.” You could take a risk on an exciting new writer doing challenging cultural work, or you could just rely on selling another 10,000 copies of The Great Gatsby. Or another 100,000 of one of the Obama memoirs. Those memoirs got a $65 million advance, so the company is a bit more invested there than in your debut novel, but good luck to you, cream rises to the top, I’m sure you’ll find an agent who can give you the representation you deserve, etc.
As word spread that Simon & Schuster was up for sale, I spotted a tweet by Naomi Klein expressing anxiety that Rupert Murdoch was bidding (he was beat out by Bertelsmann). Murdoch owns the second-largest of the Big 4, HarperCollins. Yes, this means the new Essential Muriel Rukeyser, introduced by Natasha Tretheway, is coming out from the company that owns Fox News. As just one example. Check out the HarperCollins website for more. (As with most Big 5/4/etc. publishers, it’s a terrible website—they don’t think people think of them as a publisher, they think people think of books as individual products, so the website is barely navigable. They are “too big to read.”) Klein has published two books with Simon & Schuster, This Changes Everything and On Fire. She has been a vital voice urging action on climate crisis and opposing corporate profiteering for decades. She tweeted against the Murdoch bid because she didn’t want Rupert Murdoch—immensely powerful propagandistic climate change skeptic and right-wing media magnate—to own her publisher and profit off her books. She’d probably have to switch publishers, which means losing your editor, your collaborators and team. Of course she’d oppose that. It’s right to.
But how much better is it that Penguin Random House beat Murdoch out? Are we reduced to just rooting for one massive corporation over another, because it seems, like, a little better? Does American culture have to be just lesser of two evils all the way down? Do I have to vote for Joe Biden every day of my life?
No.
In its coverage of the Simon & Schuster sale, CNN highlights the “Trump tell-all books” that the press published this year—Bob Woodward, Mary Trump. It describes Penguin Random House as the publishers of Barack Obama’s new memoir. The tone seems to be: this is working, things are going well, liberal forces prevail. Opposing Trump is good business and business is good, see? Yet Penguin Random House also published, and of course continues to sell, Trump’s 1987 The Art of the Deal, the bestseller that helped establish Trump nationally. CNN doesn’t happen to mention this. Alongside leftist voices like Klein, Simon & Schuster publishes conservative bestsellers like Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch series and Vince Flynn’s “counterterrorism” fantasia, the Mitch Rapp novels (both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are reportedly fans!).
None of these corporations “oppose” Trump. Their politics are profit.
Last week, the NYT published an impressively comprehensive study of the lack of racial diversity in the US book industry: “Just How White Is the Book Industry?” Recent research on diversity in publishing (or the lack thereof—as Chris Jackson of Oneworld has pithily said, “I’m often asked to speak about a thing that doesn’t actually exist: diversity in publishing”) has tended to focus on its workforce, not on the authorship of books published—see recent surveys by Lee & Low and Publishers Weekly, for example. This is in large part for the reasons this NYT study required time and labor to address: the need to research thousands of books and their authors’ identities. The study concludes with the stark figure that, of the books included, covering the years 1950 to 2018, “95 percent were written by white people.” Disturbing evidence of the scope of the problem.
Yet this study is noticeably less than complete, if not in its methodology than at least in its presentation (I would argue, in both). Tautological logic is at work here, too. The study only includes the “most prolific publishing houses during the period of our analysis: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Doubleday (a major publisher before it merged with Random House in 1998), HarperCollins and Macmillan.” A footnote acknowledges this choice as a limitation: “Our analysis is limited by its focus on the best-known major publishers, omitting decades of important work by publishers such as Quinto Sol Publications and Broadside Press.” (Broadside was an independent, Black-owned, Detroit-based publisher of Black literature; this link, which appears in the original article, is to the obituary of Dudley Randall, founder and publisher.) Throughout the decades this study covers, enormously important literary works by Black writers and writers of color were being published at small and independent presses. Those presses nourished radical culture-making and allowed writers, aesthetics, and leftist politics excluded from the “major” houses a home, a means to publish, a way to exist and be read, a way to incite future writing, a way to create the literature that is ours by this grace today. Poets like Audre Lorde and Gwendolyn Brooks (both Broadside authors!) deliberately published with both major houses and small presses. Lorde ran a small press—Kitchen Table Press, with Barbara Smith. Brooks “[left] major publisher Harper & Row in favor of fledgling Black publishing companies” (see the Poetry Foundation biography).
This alternative history is not alternative. It is the history that allows for the future. I understand that the NYT study wants to show us (and does!) the scope of the racist exclusion practiced by the cultural center. Yet when a major study like this one relegates independent and small-press publishing to a footnote, it is erasing the exact cultural work it claims we lack, the exact work that it’s arguing these larger institutions need to do. It is reinscribing the same erasure and self-fulfilling logic those institutions have relied on to maintain their exclusionary power: that they are the only literature, that they are the major publishers because… they are the major publishers. The study could have presented the work of small presses as major in its contrast to those of the major houses, but instead it ignores them, assumes we consider them irrelevant, no more than a footnote that links to an obituary, as if Black-run publishing and the independent publishing of Black literature were dead. Or the need for it were dead? It isn’t and it isn’t. You’re just not covering its work or supporting its existence, NYT.
I don’t wish to present independent or small-press publishing as some utopia, where the work of diversity and inclusion is complete. Not at all. The publishing workforce surveys mentioned above tend to focus on corporate publishers, but they do often include larger independents and university presses, so they reflect that workforce, too. Truly small-press publishing is rarely included in such surveys; it would be hard to do so, since much of the labor at small presses is unpaid and not professionalized (it’s hard to say who exactly “works” there—a friend who helped review manuscripts for ten or so hours last spring?). But one could assume that across small-press and independent publishing the workforce, whether paid or unpaid, is still disproportionately white and lacks diversity in consequential ways.
Yet we could also expect that a survey of books published by small and independent presses from 1950 to 2018 would tell a significantly different story than that of books published by major houses. We could expect that such a history (and certainly such histories exist, are subjects of scholarship, so our media could cover them) would be a devastating history of white privilege, injustice, and exclusion, because this history is part of American history. Yet this small-press history would also be multiple, defined by its differentiating, participatory, grassroots nature; it would reveal not just one praxis but many praxes, in dialogue. In 1973, asked about founding Broadside, Dudley Randall described how “Black writers could not be published by white publications, white magazines or by white publishers”: so “we had to do it ourselves.” This would be a story (many stories) of we had to do it ourselves. These are stories we should hear and learn from. They should be widely told. These are stories that offer readers and writers their own agency, back again, always theirs, newly empowered, slipping beyond corporate reach. The fact that these stories are hard to tell—that this requires excavation of an archive of ephemerality, of presses that pop up, try to serve their communities, then vanish—is maybe the point. Literature should not be—because it isn’t—a single history told by the victors.
And I don’t think the Big 5/4/1 are victors. They lose every day. Small presses publish work that the big presses never would, don’t know how to. Small presses are giving this work life. At their best they are recognizing the life that American imperial culture keeps trying to put down, to quiet down, to subjugate, to suffocate. They are keeping literature alive and in a state of hope, heterogeneity, and attempt, attempt, attempt.
In my own minor case, none of my three books had any chance of being published by a Big 5 press (or however many Bigs there were when I was submitting, god). Whether those books are worthy of publication, what kind of contributions they are, is for others to decide, but it’s simple to note that they represent a mode of aesthetic and political work corporate houses do not support (that one novel’s political perspective was too “depressing” was a reason emphasized in rejections). The same is true of the majority of the works of literature I’ve ever published in my nearly twenty years of work as an editor at independent presses. Big 5 houses wouldn’t have published most of these, even those that were later recognized by major awards for Arabic translation, South Asian literature, fiction in translation, best poetry of 2020 in the NYT, etc., etc. Sometimes, for example, you’d work to publish a fantastic fifth novel by a lauded writer from Pakistan, and mainstream reviewers would ask why this writer wasn’t “content to tell her story more simply” and complain that a map of Pakistan wasn’t included with the book. Cool. I’m digressing. What is my Rx?
The cost of that new Rukeyser being published by Murdoch-owned media is not negligible. It’s good that this book has the potential to reach many readers, and HarperCollins has a lot more market access than a small poetry press like the one I work at (the CSU Poetry Center, check us out). And this book is a better use of Murdoch-galaxy money than most. But we should remember that HarperCollins is not here to support today’s Rukeysers. They are doing that work as little as possible. So if you want there to be a book like this, fifty years from now, a writer whose oeuvre is worth reclaiming and reissuing and discussing again and anew after their death, you have to support the presses that would ever publish them while they were alive, little known, writing something challenging and unfamiliar, just getting going, just a beautiful weirdo trying something, just someone trying to live, trying to figure out what freedom language can make happen. I understand why the Naomi Kleins of our leftist political sphere publish with Big 5 presses. They want to influence the direction of our social, political, cultural conversations. They need readers to do this; they need coverage in major media. All the same, I am happiest when they occasionally (if not always) publish with Verso or Haymarket or whatever indie they love. Indies can rival the Big Money Suck if writers and readers help them. If you subscribe to the corporate logic—they’re the best because they’re the biggest and they’re the biggest because they’re the best—you’ll be leaving the next generation a world in which there is, I wish I were joking, one publisher and one book. Nothing for people to be part of, nothing for people to share in. (The other day I logged on to my local Cleveland library’s website and saw the exact books the NYT had named in that bestseller article, like these were the only 5 books worth reading in the world, like Cleveland doesn’t have great writers and its own stories to tell.) The Big 4 are here to stay. Try ignoring them, for a change. Time to build our own big.
Postscript: The title of this essay is, of course, from the post-apocalyptic ’80s movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It’s the one with Tina Turner and a city run on methane (pig shit). I watched it a lot in my childhood. I remember watching it—like most memories, this is a lie—while sitting in the back of a college class my mom was teaching, as an adjunct, I think the class was on apocalypse lit or road novels. Maybe it was, that time, Road Warrior? I was 7, or a different age. First I was sitting outside on the grass, on campus, feeling cool, then I was sitting in the back of a dark room filled with college kids, who were ancient. Occasionally they looked back at me, because little kids in a college class are interesting, and it’s a very violent movie, so maybe they had some thoughts about this parenting choice (I’m for it, I remember the shit out of those movies, like a dream I can always have). I want to emphasize that this was, no question, the coolest I’ve ever been. I just told you I’ve worked in publishing for like 20 years, so you know I’m not lying. The thing is, the apocalypse is for children. It’s their problem. We should be preparing them. Life outside the thunderdome is a scary as hell because it is hell. You have to fend for yourself. You have to think of what’s to come. You have to dream of something beyond what you know. This is where writers and readers are, in the pig shit, listening to Tina Turner, getting by, scared and dreaming.
HP