A Penguin-dominated publishing monopoly is bad news for authors, ideas, and free speech
How should book lovers feel about the news that two of the world’s biggest publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, are to merge? Most of the writers I know couldn’t be more unhappy if you told them their tax relief on coffee was being withdrawn.
In the US the merger will create a behemoth of a company that will be responsible for one in every three new books published. And in the UK it means that where now we have a “big five” of leading publishers - Penguin Random House (which resulted from a merger of two companies in 2013), Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster - we’ll soon be down to a “big four”.
Executives at the publishers in question are presenting this as not so much the creation of a publishing Goliath as an alliance of Davids taking on the real enemy: Amazon. Consolidation of publishing empires, they argue, is necessary to counteract Amazon’s monopoly on bookselling: the corollary of the notion that the best way to defeat an enemy is to divide and conquer.
It’s certainly true that Jeff Bezos's Amazon calls the shots these days, and publishers (and readers) were left high and dry in the UK when Amazon decided that it could not prioritise the delivery of new hardback books at the start of the first lockdown earlier this year. We’d all benefit from the Bezos empire being taken down a peg or too.
But the corporatisation of publishing over the past few decades has not generally led to increased choice for readers or more money for authors.
We used to have a proud tradition of flourishing independent publishers in this country, but most of them have either now disappeared or been hoovered up by the conglomerates. All of the “big five” mentioned above are owned by foreign companies, whatever their origins may have been. The big companies always promise that their formerly independent imprints will be allowed to keep their unique character, but it’s hard to feel that, say, John Murray, once the innovative publisher of Jane Austen and Byron, now publishes a list that has quite the distinctive flavour it enjoyed before the company was bought by the French giant Hachette.
One should be careful of romanticising the old indies: it is far from true that independent publishers always prized the quality of their output over profit - or if they did, this often went hand in hand with a tendency to subsidise their non-commercial output by swindling the authors. But this system did ensure that more publishers followed their own tastes and did not just send out a conveyor belt of indistinguishable works designed to appeal to majority taste (whereas today’s publishers are often influenced in their choices by what books they think the supermarkets can be persuaded to stock).
Publishing is a big business these days, and it attracts shareholders who want a decent return. But although there is plenty of money sloshing around now, and publishers these days are housed in gleaming skyscraper offices instead of a couple of rooms over a chiropodist’s, the authors themselves are not much better paid on average than they used to be.
And mergers will make the situation worse. There will inevitably be redundancies and mergings of departments initially, so some authors will have to be dropped. Then because there are fewer publishers competing in the marketplace, advances will go down; they will be able to get away with paying less for the same amount of work (it is not officially forbidden for different imprints from the same company to bid against each other for the same book in auction, but it is hardly encouraged). Your favourite author won’t be writing as many books if he or she has to take on a part-time job to make ends meet.
If more and more imprints are governed by the same ethos stemming from a handful of big parent companies, that diminishes reader choice too; and in any case it is an axiom that big corporations tend to take fewer creative and commercial risks than small companies.
As Ron Charles has pointed out in the Washington Post, “Simon & Schuster plays a unique role in the United States as a leading publisher of high-risk political books, such as John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened and Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough - both of which President Trump tried to squelch through lawsuits and public intimidation”. What if its new owners - Bertelsmann, the German media giant that owns Penguin Random House - decide that S&S should lead a quieter life?
The imposition of corporate values is particularly worrying in our era of culture wars. When Hachette announced plans for one of its imprints to publish Woody Allen’s memoirs earlier this year, staff from another Hachette imprint protested because they were the publishers of books by Allen’s son Ronan Farrow, who maintains that his father is guilty of sexually abusing his sister Dylan (a claim Allen has always denied). Allen’s book was dropped.
That incident may stem from a family squabble, but one sees the sticky waters we might be heading for if more and more imprints are connected by fewer and fewer parent companies at a time when people are becoming increasingly horrified at being associated with anybody who doesn’t express heterodox opinions.
We’ve seen this week that dozens of staff at Penguin Random House Canada have protested against the company’s publication of the latest book by the controversial psychologist-philosopher, Jordan Peterson. You don’t have to be a fan of Peterson’s cracker-barrel witterings to be worried that people who choose to work in publishing should have so little regard for freedom of expression and the exchange of ideas that they want to proscribe an author whom some of their colleagues have deemed worthy of publishing.
This follows similar protests by staff at Hachette in June over the publication of JK Rowling’s The Ickabog; not because they objected to this charming children’s fairytale about a terrifying monster, but because they disliked some of the opinions Rowling has expressed on trans and feminist issues.
Hachette stood up for their author, but one wonders whether it will be long before the big publishing companies will find it more worth their while to drop controversial authors in the face of the mounting influence of the censorious Twitterati. One thing’s for sure: with fewer parent companies, we are bound to see more unity of policy in publishing, whatever those policies may be. And I fear that can’t be healthy for our literary ecology.
