For over a century, American literary publishing was a genteel industry, run by highbrow "bookmen" driven by the renown of the writers on their list as much by the black on their balance sheets. Today, the "Big Five" publishers exercise outsize control of the U.S. book market, and are mainly divisions of corporate entertainment conglomerates, responsible to shareholders first. This market dynamic continues to shape contemporary literature, argues Sinykin, a professor at Emory University. In "Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature," he argues that a climate that prizes profit above helping writers develop their craft has almost snuffed out something vital in our literary culture.
The "conglomeration era" began in 1960, when Random House, then the largest U.S. publisher, bought rival firm Alfred A. Knopf. This brought the ur-bookman Knopf's quirky literary gatekeeping under the control of the backslapping huckster Bennett Cerf, the celebrity publisher best known for his joke books and side gig as a "What's My Line" panelist.
Conglomeration metastasized as corporate mergers came to dominate American business in the ensuing decades. By the 1990s, only six major publishers, each featuring dozens of formerly independent "imprints" like Knopf, remained. But these houses themselves were now merely minor components of enormous media companies like Bertelsmann, Disney, Viacom, or NewsCorp, where shareholder value was the principal goal. Corporate publishers' primary mission was now "synergy," creating book-based "assets" that could be shared and promoted across the parent company's other divisions. The slow cultivation of serious writers' careers, once publishing's cherished mission, was collateral damage in this revolution.
This was most deeply felt by industry veterans in 1990, when Random House CEO Alberto Vitale fired André Schiffrin, editor-in-chief of Random's prestige imprint Pantheon Books and an icon of old-school publishing. Schiffrin's firing "revealed," Sinykin writes, "that a monumental shift had taken place [that] would pull everyone into its vortex, dominating the creation of literature for the next thirty years and more."
Publishers like to talk about publishing, and they buy ink by the vat. So there has been no shortage of sour accounts of the conglomeration era, including Jason Epstein's 2001 Book Business or Schiffrin's own 1999 The Business of Books. These are histories of decline, and Sinykin certainly echoes the doom-saying, although he also details the insularity, self-regard, and sexism and racism that characterized the publishing industry before and during its corporate consolidation phase. But - perhaps in spite of himself - Sinykin's lively, personality-driven, and original study also provides compelling evidence that conglomeration hasn't killed but only altered literary publishing, and not always for the worse.
In addition to shaking the publishing business, Sinykin asserts, conglomeration also "changed what it meant to be an author," and that's the real subject of his book. Mass-market writers-by which he means not just pseudonymous toilers producing Harlequin romances and cozy murder mysteries, but also respected authors like E.L. Doctorow and Ursula Le Guin-became "industrial writers [who] wrote from within an increasingly complex bureaucracy struggling to maximize its returns on investments... Their writing was... property" to be leveraged in the synergy system.
Not everyone wanted to submit to that system, even if they ultimately had no choice. In response, Sinykin claims, "autofiction" arose in the more self-consciously literary strata of trade publishing. In "autofiction," authors insert themselves into their novels as characters, as in John Barth's 1972 Chimera or Alison Lurie's 1969 Real People. "The act of inserting a version of oneself in one's novel reveals a desire for control and recognition and is evidence of anxiety about lacking the same," he explains. So if you feel disrespected by your publisher treating you like a widget-stamper, then stamp on your widgets a tiny little picture of you flipping the bird-at the effrontery of an industry that has emasculated you (typical of male writers) or at the abject chauvinism of the publishing industry (frequent among female writers).
On the whole, consolidation and conglomeration have impoverished American literature and intellectual life. Trade lists of literary fiction have shrunk, and brand-name authors receive more of the resources that used to be spread among many newer writers. However, as Sinykin details, over this period serious novelists on trade lists from Toni Morrison to Cormac McCarthy came to adopt some of the techniques of genre or mass-market fiction, which made their works much more popular and accessible than they had been before.
Moreover, Sinykin shows, the challenging and experimental fiction that had been on trade lists before the 1960s migrated to a new set of foundation-, university-, and government-funded publishers such as Graywolf, Copper Canyon, and the like, which are not subject to the same market imperatives. This is in fact a kind of return to roots, for the avant-garde writers of the early 20th century, so often associated with corporate-swallowed imprints like Knopf or Liveright or Farrar & Rinehart, had published with just such noncommercial ventures before they were belatedly welcomed by the trade publishers in the 1930s and 1940s.
It's hard to be optimistic about American literary publishing when consolidation has only accelerated, although the scuttling of a proposed Bertelsmann-Simon and Schuster merger last year is undeniably good news. (The private equity firm KKR then purchased Simon & Schuster from entertainment conglomerate Paramount, closing the $1.6 billion deal earlier this month.)
If there's much to lament about today's publishing industry, Sinykin also explores the idea that consolidation has also given rise to a kind of counter-industry that is seeking to foster a broad-based cultural and artistic conversation outside the market-defined constraints of today's media and tech behemoths.
BIG FICTION: HOW CONGLOMERATION CHANGED THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND AMERICAN LITERATURE | By Dan Sinykin | Columbia University Press | 328 pp. | $30 paper, $120 hardcover
Greg Barnhisel is a professor of English literature at Duquesne University and the author of "Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy."