The ownership of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster has been much in the news over the past couple of years. First Penguin Random House tried to swallow it up, then a fascinating antitrust trial put a bunch of agents and writers on the witness stand. A judge eventually quashed that merger as potentially monopolistic, and more recently, a private-equity fund, KKR, swooped in to buy the company.
If you’re a shareholder or an employee of any of those companies, these have been hugely consequential events. But I can’t be the only person who has wondered: If you’re just someone who enjoys reading good books, why does any of this matter at all?
The most buzzed-about work of literary scholarship published this past year, Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, promises to answer that question. The subtitle says it all: Sinykin, an English professor at Emory University, proposes to tell us not just how the purchasing of smaller publishing companies by bigger, diversified ones has transformed the industry’s financial structures but also, much more interesting, how it has changed literature itself.
Let me be clear: Sinykin’s book is delightful, smart, and teeming with insights. As a concise historical survey of changes within the publishing business over the past half century, it is invaluable. That said, although his book raises a very compelling question, it tellingly and consistently fails to offer any satisfying answers. More than anything, the book demonstrates how very difficult it will be for us to attain any real understanding of how the structures of the publishing industry affect the contents of books.
One of the many successful qualities of Big Fiction is that it moves briskly from one topic to another, but that can make pinning down Sinykin’s key points a bit difficult. Flipping back and forth, one finds that he focuses on a few main “consequences” of conglomeration that he says “stand out” from all of the others when it comes to the literary effects of this industry change.
By Dan Sinykin
The first has to do with the rising popularity of autofiction as a way for writers to assert their authorship and individuality at a moment when business forces are encroaching on their independence; the second is that “the distance between genre and literary fiction narrowed”; the third is that “novels began to incorporate conglomeration,” introducing characters, plot points, or allegories related to the business of publishing. Finally, Sinykin insists that conglomeration and all of its moving parts mean that no one person can really be thought of anymore as the author of any one book.
Each of these claims deserves a longer treatment, and I expect that arguments on these topics will overtake the pages of academic journals in contemporary American literary studies for the next several years, and they’ll be great fun for those of us in the field. None of these points is wrong, exactly, but they’re not entirely convincing for the main reason that nothing Sinykin describes seems specific to the era under discussion.
To give one truncated example, take the third point: During the era of publishing conglomeration, authors have written, explicitly and implicitly, about the companies and people involved in publishing their work. That’s undeniably true, but I can’t think of any historical period in which that wasn’t the case. Ben Lerner memorably starts his 2014 novel, 10:04, with an author and his agent lunching and discussing a “‘strong six-figure advance,” but Ernest Hemingway begins The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, with a harsh (anti-Semitic) critique of a rich poser who edits a small literary magazine; also in the 1920s, Edith Wharton spent almost the entirety of her novel Hudson River Bracketed lamenting the way a gifted young writer’s potential can be trampled upon by unscrupulous editors with unsubtle names like Rauch and Dreck. In short, this strikes me less as change caused by conglomeration than as continuity: You can always read the literature of a period for insights into the systems that produced it.
Similarly, I’m entirely sympathetic to Sinykin’s insistence that it’s false to think of any book in the conglomerate era as the product of a lone genius, toiling away in solitude. Still, I cannot see how it is possible to claim this as a special feature of recent times, because it is true of the literature produced in every period of history, from Greek epics and Biblical poetry to Victorian triple-deckers and the slick short stories of the 1920s. People who study the “history of the book,” such as the historian Robert Darnton and the sociologist Wendy Griswold, have been emphasizing this aspect of literary culture for almost half a century; for just as long, undergraduate English majors have been reading Michel Foucault on the “author function,” his theory that the author is mostly a kind of projection or limit placed on a text. We shouldn’t think of Cormac McCarthy or Judith Krantz as having written their books alone, just as we can’t think of William Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf as having done so.
Here’s a different question to consider: How is it possible that a scholar as insightful as Sinykin can’t, in some 200 pages on the subject, give a satisfying answer to the question of how conglomeration has changed literature?
Scale presents a particularly challenging hurdle. According to the companies, Penguin Random House publishes “15,000 print books each year,” and Simon & Schuster publishes “more than 2000 titles annually.” It might be possible for someone to read every book that the extraordinary small press Graywolf releases in a year—about 30 titles—but no one is looking at, let alone reading, 2,000 or 15,000 books. And that’s just one year. The mind-boggling transformation Sinykin writes about, in which the publishing industry went from a stuffy, dandyish collection of family-owned companies to a slickly rationalized set of corporately controlled behemoths, the so-called Big Five, took place over a number of decades.
To tackle this issue, many scholars, Sinykin among them, have turned to the digital humanities and “distant reading,” which, in short, means using computational approaches to talk about books you haven’t read. But these projects haven’t yet made much headway in studying the issue at scale, and haven’t produced, to my mind, compelling results. Take one project that Sinykin worked on and cites in Big Fiction to support his claims about differences between conglomerate and nonprofit books. In this study, a set of 606 books stands in for the output of Random House from 1980 to 2007, which itself is meant to stand in for all the works of fiction published by the Big Five publishers; in other words, claims about “conglomerate fiction” in the study are based on maybe 1 percent of the novels Random House published during the relevant decades. But forget sample size for a minute. What, on the basis of the model these scholars develop, can be concluded about the difference between the novels published by Random House and those published by nonprofit houses such as Graywolf and Milkweed? Well, we’re told, among the words that make a novel seem more “conglomerate” are thank, mood, and beauty; among the words that make a novel seem more “nonprofit” are surface, tree, and hands.
Computational literary scholarship may someday soon help us answer the questions that are too big to answer through reading. I’m not convinced quite yet.
Literary scholars and book critics also tend to stumble when confronted with mass-produced pulp. Sinykin expresses frustration that “Toni Morrison generates 3,109 hits on MLA International Bibliography, Danielle Steel six,” meaning that scholars are much more interested in the Nobel Prize laureate than in the best-selling author. Go figure.
But let’s say you want to write about Steel. It’s not so easy. She wrote six or seven new novels a year from 2017 to 2022; her total output, at last count, is 182 novels. The main problem here isn’t scale, though; reading all of those books is just as possible as watching every episode of a long-running TV show. But to what end? When books follow more predictable genre conventions and don’t use language in surprising ways, what is a literary critic supposed to do with them? The difficulty presented by the prospect of writing perspicaciously about these kinds of popular books has little to do with who owns what publishing house; it is equally difficult (though of course not impossible) to say smart and interesting stuff about 19th-century dime novels and fiction-factory productions, the adventures of Nick Carter and Nancy Drew. Such books certainly end up being studied by social and cultural historians for insight into the period in which they were published, but they are rarely analyzed in any depth, combed over for the specificities of their language, or unpacked and elaborated upon. Sinykin himself, revealingly, finds it useful to quote from exactly two of Steel’s 182 novels.
By far the biggest obstacle to understanding conglomeration’s effects on American literature is that we’ve all gotten into the habit of not paying much attention to how our books get made. Think about it: You know the title of the best novel you read this year, right? And the name of its author too. But can you recall, without checking, who published it? Can you name the editor who acquired the project or the agent who sold it? No way, I suspect, unless you’re an aspiring writer or work in publishing; even then, I’d be impressed. Readers—even the most careful, insightful readers—just don’t pay much attention to the publishing details of the fiction they buy, admire, and recommend. Many English professors and professional literary critics themselves don’t know this stuff.
The profound weirdness of our collective ignorance about books becomes evident when you compare the book business with other major culture industries. Even amateur film critics have all of the production and revenue data from IMDb and Box Office Mojo at their fingertips, and video-game reviewers can peruse a game’s credits and player counts. People win Oscars for makeup and cinematography and sound design, but there’s no Pulitzer or National Book Award for copy editors, agents, or jacket designers.
Such comparisons can also help us see what we stand to gain if we can change how reviewers, editors, critics, and scholars think about books. For one thing, we would be giving credit that’s long been due to many people who make our books. Translators have been agitating more loudly, in recent years, to be named on the covers of the books they translate. I’m all for it, but why stop there? Would it really be so difficult to have a credits page that acknowledges the contributions of the folks responsible for layout, marketing, and proofreading?
Beyond simply recognizing people’s labor, this would give us new, useful ways to understand the books we care so much about. If you knew that the same editor had acquired five of your favorite books of the past 10 years—even though she moved publishing houses twice in that time—you might want to keep an eye out for what she’s working on next. If you’re concerned about diversity, equity, and justice in the literary field, you will want to take note of not just which authors are getting their work into print but also which gatekeepers are facilitating their career, and whose support has been instrumental in allowing crucial books to reach us. Having reliable data on book sales might allow us to understand much more about not only which books have been successful in reaching wide audiences; it’ll also help us know which books have been successful in reaching which audiences. We would have a much better shot at knowing why it matters who owns Simon & Schuster.
Of course, to get there, we will need radically unprecedented transparency from book publishers about the advances they pay, the copies they sell, and the people who make the key editorial and marketing decisions for any particular title, as well as direct access to the data they collect. None of that seems especially likely to happen—critics have been calling for this kind of change for at least a century, with little success—but we can always hope.
We definitely need many more efforts like Sinykin’s that tell the inside stories of the publishing industry, that study books both quantitatively and qualitatively, that plumb the publishers’ archives as they open up to researchers, that interview everyone who’s willing to talk.
But let’s face it: What it will take for us to get clear and satisfying answers to the fascinating and specifically literary questions raised by the consolidation of the publishing industry over the past 50 years, by the S&S acquisition, by the outsize power of Amazon, by whatever’s coming next in the eternal commercial scrum that determines who profits off the books we love to read is not just one scholar’s efforts; it’s a whole new way of thinking about books.
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