It was a literary trial, but the men were discussing beauty contests. Jeffrey Vernon, a lawyer for the Justice Department, asked Jonathan Karp, the C.E.O. of Simon & Schuster, if book publishers competed for high-demand authors on “non-financial” terms. “Pulchritude,” the executive responded, and Vernon repeated the word back in the form of a question. Karp clarified: “It’s beauty.” “Beauty,” Vernon repeated again. “O.K. I should have guessed that you would have a big vocabulary as the head of a publishing house.”
Vernon’s quip was more cutting than he realized; it is hardly a given in 2023 for the head of a book publisher to be, well, bookish. Once reserved for the prose style of Ernest Hemingway or the open-collar shirts of Farrar, Straus and Giroux co-founder Roger Straus (“to allow his silk ascot to debouch,” per Tom Wolfe), beauty in publishing is now, for the most part, a term for contests over ghostwritten celebrity memoirs.
Markus Dohle, the C.E.O. of Penguin Random House, the target of a U.S.-government anti-trust lawsuit over their attempted $2.2 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster, displayed a vocabulary at the trial earlier this year that was more M.B.A. than M.F.A.: “We are angel investors in our authors and their dreams, their stories.” (The court ultimately blocked the merger; three weeks later, Dohle stepped down as C.E.O., and now retains an “advisory” role at Penguin and a seat on the boards of PEN America and the National Book Foundation.)
How did we end up with Dohle, a product of the middle-management ranks of German multi-national Bertelsmann, as a typical publishing executive? Dan Sinykin, in his new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, blames conglomeration. As publishers merged with big business, Sinykin argues, so did authorship, taste, and the nation’s literary culture.
Going Mass
The story begins with the invention of the mass-market paperback. After World War II, Americans were richer and more educated than ever, and these affordable, eye-catching, racy entertainments—such as Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury and Harold Robbins’s Never Love a Stranger—became a national sensation. In 1948, Victor Weybright co-founded New American Library (NAL) with the aim of making serious literature convenient and accessible. This was a radical idea, since “literary prestige was supposed to depend on not being for the masses,” Sinykin writes—“on making art that wasn’t validated by its success as a commodity.” Weybright reprinted Thomas Mann and D. H. Lawrence alongside Richard Wright and Flannery O’Connor, bucking the lowbrow reputation of paperbacks to great success.
NAL had just hired an editor named E. L. Doctorow when they sold to Times Mirror, in 1960—the original publishing merger (Weybright and his co-founder were getting older and didn’t want to risk an estate tax). Times Mirror brought in mega-consultant McKinsey, and editorial control was “delegated almost entirely to marketing executives.” Along with most of the top editors, Doctorow soon left. “A publishing list has always reflected the tension between the need to make money and the desire to publish well,” he wrote of the experience, but the conglomerate “overloads the scale in favor of commerce,” a scale he would later dramatize in the hit novel Ragtime.
Between 1974 and 1977, extraction and manufacturing giant Gulf and Western bought Simon & Schuster; Italian conglomerate and Fiat owners I.F.I. bought Bantam Books; CBS bought Fawcett; and Doubleday, already the largest American publisher, bought Dell. Book sales had been climbing for decades, and it was open season for acquisitions.
Then, in 1980, sales declined for the first time since the war. In response, management went all in on brand-name trade favorites: Danielle Steel for romance, Michael Crichton for science fiction, and Stephen King for horror. Sinykin tells the story of King, insecure that name recognition rendered the quality of his work moot, publishing a series of books under a pseudonym: “They sold poorly. The first four were out of print when King was outed in 1985, sending the fifth, Thinner, onto the bestseller list.”
Authorial integrity took a back seat to marketers, chain book buyers, publicists, celebrity book clubs, audio and screen adaptations, foreign and subsidiary rights, and so on. In the words of Weybright, long since retired to a farm in Maryland: “The barbarians had taken over.”
“A publishing list has always reflected the tension between the need to make money and the desire to publish well,” but the conglomerate “overloads the scale in favor of commerce.”
Big Fiction aims at a singular Theory of American Fiction, in the tradition of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era. McGurl’s bogeyman is creative-writing programs, but conglomeration proves a more slippery concept. Sinykin, a professor of English at Emory “with a courtesy appointment in quantitative theory and methods,” is a consummate researcher. Yet with its nested chapter headings and preponderance of question marks, by its own rules this is not a book that will find wide readership, dutifully avoiding the dirty tricks of the publishing industry in favor of expansive rigor. In the second half of the book, which attempts to take on nonprofits, universities, and the employee-owned W. W. Norton, alongside Amazon, the Reddit “fanfic” universe, and more, even Sinykin seems to lose enthusiasm.
Ultimately, by establishing his intent to write not only a book but a theory, Sinykin is a man with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail. “To read a book through its colophon is to read it anew,” he writes. So we end up with boutique and nonprofit publishers stripped of their agency, instead forming an “organic whole” of “lash and backlash” with corporate houses.
Following McGurl, Sinykin offers unorthodox readings of well-known works. Is it really true that “conglomeration made [Cormac] McCarthy middlebrow,” or was his wife tired of living in squalor?
Big Fiction’s most outlandish re-reading is Beloved, written after Toni Morrison left an editorial position at Random House, where she was tokenized and pigeonholed by regressive racial attitudes. In the introduction to her masterpiece, Morrison writes of newfound freedom upon leaving the publishing world. But Sinykin takes it a step further, “acknowledging the possibility of exaggeration” to claim that a novel about the psychological legacy of slavery also “allegorize[s] the publishing industry.”
Still, no one can deny that “now is more in the conglomerate era than ever.” Though the courts blocked P.R.H.’s purchase of Simon & Schuster, some within the publishing world were quietly rooting for the merger, if only because they saw an established publisher as a safer buyer than non-industry alternatives. Indeed, in October the behemoth investment firm K.K.R. acquired Simon & Schuster (for $600 million less than P.R.H. offered).
All signs point to K.K.R.’s enacting the standard playbook: saddle the publisher with interest on the debt used to buy it, aggressively cut costs to juice margins, and sell it in five to seven years for a healthy multiple. It remains to be seen where beauty figures in, let alone pulchritude.
Micah Cash is a New York City–based writer