“On the bad days, the days when another venerable house is neutron-bombed by the mindless conglomerate that enfolded it, or a Big Name in the Lit Biz has deserted his longtime publisher for a big fat check from Long Green and Gotrocks, or an agent has slammed the wind out of me with a punishing demand for money on a book my soul cries out to publish, on those days I decide literature is the very last thing publishing is about.”
—Gerald Howard, as quoted by Dan Sinykin in Big Fiction
How conglomeration reshaped the publishing industry over the last six decades isn’t much in dispute, and five New York publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster—now account for more than eighty percent of all new titles published in the United States.1 If you’re a little hazy on the details, Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, published in 2023, should clear things up. The inspiration for a flurry of magazine articles and a flashpoint for many a social media discussion, Big Fiction does an admirable job of collating the events that led to the radical reorganization of book publishing in America.
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