Don't Feed The Penguin
So a couple days ago I made a little comment on reddit about the publishing industry, and that comment got the most upvotes I’ve ever received. Some of those who replied made me realize that I had made some pretty huge assumptions and generalizations, but also reaffirmed that my overall point, about the precarious situation the industry is in, was more or less valid.
For context: the news came out this week that Penguin Random House, the biggest publisher in the U.S., just bought Simon & Schuster, the third biggest publisher in the U.S. Until this week, there were four corporate mega-publishers in the U.S., known as the “Big 4” (HarperCollins and Hachette Book Group being the other two). But now we are down to the “Big 3”. Does this trend sound familiar?
It was only seven years ago this group was known as the “Big 5”, before Penguin and Random House merged. And probably in another couple of years, we’ll see Penguin Random House Simon & Schuster buy one of the remaining members of the Big 3, and we’ll be just a step away from a complete publishing monopoly.
Here’s my comment from this reddit thread, which explains my concern with this situation (this was in response to a question about censorship in the publishing industry):
...I can agree with OP that just because someone doesn’t want to publish you doesn’t mean you are being censored. However, with the news today that Penguin just bought Simon and Schuster, meaning that the “Big 4” publishing houses are now just the “Big 3”, the literary world is in basically the same boat as film and TV: the vast majority of the industry is controlled by a few giant monopolies, and that situation tends to have a seriously negative impact on artistic expression throughout the industry.
Just look at how uncomfortable small filmmakers are with Disney taking over so much of the industry. Disney is never going to produce challenging, controversial movies because it’s not their brand, and it involves too much risk. They will take the safest route to profit every time, which means the safest, least controversial projects will get made, while anything new or different gets sidelined.
It’s not “censorship”, but having monopolies control the industry leads to homogeneity and suppression of artistic expression across the whole industry. Sure, there will always be some small publishers willing to print risky/unusual content, but with how consolidated the industry is now, those small publishers generally get completely buried by the giants they have to compete with. Not being chosen by a Big 3 publisher means your book has a really limited (maybe even nonexistent) chance of reaching widespread success…
While I stand by what I said, other commenters pointed out some inaccurate assumptions in my argument. This one mentioned the nature of “imprints” at a publishing company, which makes a really good point:
u/bingbangbongg
An imprint is basically like a sub-division under a larger publishing house. They allow publishing houses to diversify the content they publish and to market that content to a specific audience. So instead of Penguin Random House having one cohesive brand that limits them to only publishing books within that brand, they essentially have 275 different brands, allowing them to publish a diverse range of books. So, for example, new-age poetry would be published under one imprint, books on environmental sustainability would be published under another, and paranormal romances would published under yet another—and all of these would technically be distributed by that larger publishing house. Also, imprints typically are creatively independent. It’s relevant because it supports the diversity of books published overall and mitigates the risk for censorship generally.
This made me feel a little better about the situation, if it’s true that imprints typically have creative independence, so that a publishing monopoly wouldn’t necessarily destroy artistic freedom. But I’m still afraid because, even if the CEOs choose not to use it, they have the power to control exactly what gets seen and read by the vast majority of people in the country. And maybe just as importantly, it leaves most authors’ entire careers at the mercy of a monstrously huge multi-national corporation.
The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t need to be this way, and in fact there is a very easy way out of this corporate trap, a way that has been tried before and in the end worked out better than anyone could have imagined...
The music industry may not be as absurdly lucrative as it once was, but that’s because it has been almost completely democratized by the internet. It was never the artists who benefited from the big record company model anyway. The ‘skyrocket to fame and fortune’ dream may be dead, but that was a dream that only ever came true for a miniscule percentage of artists, while the rest were lured in with fake promises and then ground up into sausage for the fat cats.
And on top of that, many of those artists who did achieve fame and fortune were still cheated, coerced, or loopholed into exploitative contracts and limited artistic freedom.
Point being, the death of corporate record companies was the best thing that could have happened to the music industry, and we are all better off because of it. There is a veritable ocean of amazing music out there, available to everyone, created by gajillions of self-made artists, with absolutely no limits on their form of expression (I talked about this in a previous post). Very few of them get rich, but hasn’t that always been the case?
This is what I want for publishing, and all the tools are already available to us. The publishing giants have somehow managed to de-legitimize that option in the eyes of the public, while keeping their industry gates tightly shut.
Established authors, industry insiders, and general audiences alike sneer at the dirty, arrogant, compulsive nature of the self-published author. And in the eyes of the gate-keepers, self-published failure counts the same as mainstream industry failure, despite the obvious gap in terms of resources and market access.
I don’t think this is fair at all; compared to the past century, there are both more aspiring authors and fewer options for exposure, why must we play into a system that is making this problem worse?
I don’t quite know what is blocking the self-publishing revolution. Even right now, as it consolidates into bigger, more homogenized pieces, we would have a good shot at capsizing the industry the way musicians did with theirs. But I suspect it has something to do with the psychology of writers, we’re too skittish and too fatalistic to simply abandon the traditional industry, even though we know it would be good for us.
And it’s kind of ironic for me to say that, considering that I have the option to self-publish my own novel, and yet choose not to, in large part due to the fear of not being taken seriously. There are other reasons too--my novel still needs work--but even if it was all ready to go I’m not sure if I would pull the trigger, the stakes being as needlessly high as they are.
Sooo, what do you think? Will writers just go on screwing themselves? Or will we take back control of our industry? Will everything be owned by Disney in the end? Let me know in the comments! (Apologies for the invisible font in the comment box, please bear with me as I resolve this issue) Thanks for reading!
Peace,
Gibstradamus
