By Vincent Czyz 

On closer inspection, Dan Sinykin’s notion of a “conglomerate author” is largely a fiction.

Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature by Dan Sinykin. Columbia University Press, 328 pages, paperback, $30.

I picked up a copy of Jason Epstein’s Book Business in 2001, the year it was published. Epstein, former editorial director of Random House and founder of the Library of America, opens with: “Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers.” I had already read A. Scott Berg’s superb biography of Maxwell Perkins, the fabled editor who worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, and after Epstein’s many-faceted gem, moved on to Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books, Diana Athill’s Stet: An Editor’s Life, and Michael Korda’s Another Life.

Alas, the most recent of these is Schiffrin’s (late 2001), and in the intervening two decades much has transpired in publishing. Last year Dan Sinykin stepped into the vacancy with Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (ironically, perhaps, via a small press). If you’re interested in the history of book publishing in America, Big Fiction is indispensable. It’s brimming with well-researched information, entertaining anecdotes, and delightful tidbits of literary gossip, many of which are not flattering (Epstein may have been a brilliant editor, but he does not come off well as a person).

So, how was a collection of cottages transformed into the literary-industrial complex? The conglomerate era began, according to Sinykin, in 1960, when “Times Mirror, a newspaper company, bought New American Library, a mass-market publisher.” In 1966 RCA, an electronics firm, added Random House to its portfolio. Time Inc. snapped up Little Brown in 1968, and so on. Worse, parent corporations put people like Alberto Vitale in charge. Vitale, whose PhD was in economics, had been a higher-up at Fiat with no particular interest in books.

“Editorial judgment and a democratizing ethos,” Sinykin writes, “were devalued in favor of more calculable virtues — determined by production, marketing, distribution, and sales — under the banner of privileging the bottom line.”

Sinykin pegs the completion of conglomeration at 1990. Thirty-four years later, five New York publishers — Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster — account for more than 80 percent of all new titles published in the United States.

Despite the statistics and analyses, I enjoyed Big Fiction more than some Big Five novels I’ve read. Sinykin is an engaging narrator and he has a good story to tell. The book is intelligently organized, the sentences are well-wrought, and the personalities of the players, such as Andre Schiffrin, Jason Epstein, and, among others, Scott Walker (founder of Graywolf Press), backlight the recounted events.

How book publishing has reorganized in the last 60 years isn’t much in dispute. The more difficult task is determining what impact conglomeration has had on contemporary literature. In decades past, Epstein assures us, editors and publishers loved their work enough to accept small profit margins and used the revenue from commercially successful but aesthetically questionable books to underwrite the cost of producing books of enduring literary value. Big Five CEOs, however, decided publishing was an industry like any other. Profit margins, they decreed, had to increase by a factor of eight or nine, and every book had to pay its own way.

Gerald Howard, who fled Penguin “screaming,” sums up the sentiments of editors who remembered the pre-conglomerate era: “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.”

One consequence of the corporate takeover of publishing houses, as Sinykin notes, is that the demand for genre fiction — already a staple at the Big Five — spiked. After all, science fiction novels, fantasy, romance, mystery, and westerns sold well year after year. Looking to squeeze still more profit from their writers, editors pushed them to think in terms of sequels and sequels to the sequels, i.e., in series.

Publishers also invested heavily in genre-bound authors — writers who were industries unto themselves. “Between 1986 and 1996, ’63 of the 100 best-selling books in the United States were written by just six authors: Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz,’” and Sinykin’s favorite, Danielle Steel.

Sinykin also maintains, less convincingly, that literary authors, such as Toni Morrison, adopted elements of genre fiction as a result of conglomeration. But because a ghost is central to Beloved doesn’t mean Morrison has ripped off the horror genre; a ghost is also central to Hamlet. Literary authors have always pilfered from popular fiction. Moreover, the source of the horror in Beloved isn’t the supernatural; it’s the appalling realities of slavery.

Of particular interest in terms of assessing how conglomeration has affected American literature (and culture) is Sinykin’s section on the nonprofit presses, particularly Graywolf, Milkweed, and Coffee House, which arose in opposition to the Big Five’s bucks-above-all-else business model. Eventually, they too succumbed to the need for cash infusions, but instead of focusing on acquiring genre fiction, they relied on donations from wealthy foundations. This meant that the values embodied in titles bearing their colophons had to reflect those of their benefactors, most notably multiculturalism. If the conglomerates imposed what E.L. Doctorow referred to as “censorship by the marketplace,” the nonprofits imposed censorship of another sort.

Despite its invaluable insights into the publishing industry, Big Fiction is fundamentally flawed. “If this book has a villain,” Sinykin writes, “it is the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge.” Sinykin decries the homogenizing of fiction, the dehumanizing of the editorial process, the subjugation of editorial judgment to the assessments of marketing executives, the conglomerates’ “crass pandering to the lowest-common-denominator tastes” and their “neoliberalization” of publishing but singles out the “romantic” author as the archenemy.

Hypothesizing that “conglomeration changed what it means to be an author,” he posits a theory of “conglomerate authorship”: a hive-mind composed of proofreaders, copy editors, jacket designers, cover artists, publicists, etc.

There are half a dozen reasons why this approach is misguided. To start with, writers long ago ceased to have the cachet of Hemingway or Poe or Woolf. Replying in 1985 to Roland Barthes’s 1968 announcement of the death of the author, William Gass denies the author’s demise but admits, in Habitations of the Word, to “a decline in [the writer’s] authority, in theological power, as if Zeus were stripped of his thunderbolts and swans, perhaps residing on Olympus still, but now living in a camper and cooking with propane.” It’s not likely anybody’s going to make a museum out of Tony Morrison’s or Cormac McCarthy’s childhood home. No bar is going to be famous because Jonathan Franzen or Alice Walker drank there.

Another problem is that Sinykin doesn’t interview a single author, doesn’t even quote from a memoir offering an authorial perspective on the publishing process. Nor, while making copy editors, proofreaders, agents, et al co-authors, did he interview any of them. Absent this sort of information, I suspect Sinykin has adopted a romantic idea of what proofreaders and copy editors actually do and the conditions under which they work (most are harried freelancers who, I’d bet, would prefer salaried positions, benefits, and job security to sharing in the glories of authorship). He shows us no manuscript pages before the conglomerate hive-mind got hold of them to compare with the final text (although he teases us with glimpses of the contentious relationship between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish). Even if extensive changes were made to a manuscript, it’s impossible to judge whether the changes were for the better. While we can only imagine what the conglomerates would have done to A Remembrance of Things Past or Ulysses, one thing is certain: neither book would have emerged unscathed.

Still another issue is that Sinykin conflates a book’s “success” with its sales. This is how cover artists, publicists, and the like become co-authors: They’re part of the team effort to entice readers to buy a book. Sinykin doesn’t seem terribly concerned with a novel’s aesthetic merit, contribution to culture, or influence on other writers. To the contrary, he’s at pains to put authors like Toni Morrison and Danielle Steel on equal footing. He’s miffed, for example, that “Toni Morrison generates 3,109 hits on MLA International bibliography, Danielle Steel six.” After all, Steel wrote over 190 books, some 140 of which were novels, and sold around 800 million copies. By Sinykin’s reckoning, she’s a more successful author than Morrison, who wrote fewer than 40 books and moved nothing like 800 million units. If Steel’s not more successful, at the very least her numbers should land her equal billing.

While I think Sinykin’s concept of conglomerate authorship is irreparably flawed, I find some merit in his hive analogy. No single worker bee is essential to the functioning of the hive; no queen, however, no hive. Similarly, no author, no book. Cutting 100 or 200 pages from a novel like Infinite Jest isn’t the same thing as writing 100 or 200 pages of Infinite Jest. Writing and editing, as anyone who’s done both professionally can attest, are fundamentally different activities. Editor’s never face a blank page. Not surprisingly, no one ever hears them complain about editor’s block.

To be clear, I’m all for acknowledging the contributions a house’s employees make to a work of fiction, so long as it’s commensurate with the work done. If all you’ve done is tidy up the punctuation, you don’t rank as co-author.

More importantly, the “rich literature” Sinykin sees coming out of the conglomerates is being produced in spite of them, not because of them. The Big Five offer nothing the family-owned houses didn’t in terms of publishing a better book. Indeed, they offer less. As Sinykin himself admits, talented editors rarely have time to edit anymore. He cites Gerald Gross, who lists the demands that keep editors from manuscripts: “unceasing reports, correspondence, phoning, meetings, business breakfasts, lunches, dinners, [and] in- and out-of-office appointments.” The task has fallen to, among others, copy editors and proofreaders, who can’t be expected to compete with someone like Maxwell Perkins or Cormac McCarthy’s editor, Gary Fisketjon. On closer inspection Sinykin’s “conglomerate author” is largely a fiction.

In addition to the advent of the conglomerate author, Sinykin pitches four or five other key claims about how corporate houses have changed American literature. While some of these changes probably occurred as described (heavier investment in genre fiction and “brand-name” authors), others probably did not. Even if, for example, the gap between literary fiction and genre fiction has narrowed, it’s not clear this is fallout from conglomeration. Literary authors who got tired of selling 2,500 copies of a book, as happened with Cormac McCarthy, might have wound up incorporating genre elements into their work no matter who was running the show.

While Big Fiction has given us plenty to debate for the next decade or so, there are a couple of glaring omissions. The most important of these is the absence of any discussion about how literary authors are increasingly being pushed to the margins, that is, to the small, independent presses, where their books won’t get more than a smattering of reviews, often in barely read publications. Many indie presses don’t even have a publicist, let alone a marketing department. (I’m not talking about well-funded, hugely successful small presses, like Milkweed or Coffee House). This, in turn, means sales will be even less spectacular than they would’ve been at one of the Big Five. It also means that with rare exceptions their titles will be passed over for major prizes. All of which validates the publishing choices the Big Five make and perpetuates the myth that, except for the occasional anomaly, the best writing is coming out of the conglomerates.

Prestigious houses have always been the literary gatekeepers, and Sinykin agrees that hasn’t changed—never mind that “The Big Five … spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson” (see Elle Griffin’s “No One Buys Books”). The fact that the conglomerates devote a diminishing fraction of their resources and attention to literary fiction hasn’t stopped the major review venues from doting on their hyped-up new releases and ignoring, overwhelmingly, the offerings of small presses (the hows and whys are to some extent discussed in Big Fiction).

If you’re curious as to the literary authors and obscure presses I’ve alluded to … well, my copy of Septology by Jon Fosse was published by Transit Press about a year before he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night was published by Northwestern University Press in 2003, when few in this country had ever heard of her. She won a Nobel Prize in 2018.

With one exception I know of, the entire oeuvre of MacArthur Fellow and, as I’ve argued, national literary treasure, Guy Davenport was published by small presses.

Tamas Dobozy, Stephanie Dickinson, Poe Ballantine, and Lance Olsen, small-press authors all, number among my favorite contemporary authors. Two of my picks for best books of 2023 were small-press wonders Unbounded Sky by Dawn Raffel and The Last Judgment by Robert Steiner, published by Sagging Meniscus Press and Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, respectively. And then there are those underdogs like Bellevue Literary Press and McPherson & Co., small houses that pulled off a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

So, one last time, what’s the effect of conglomeration on American literature? Well, if we reframe the question, the answer may become clear even to a publishing-industry outsider: What’s the effect of measuring a book’s success by the money it rakes in? Huge advances go to celebrity bios. Houses don’t invest in good authors; they invest in bad ones (sorry, but Danielle Steel is a hack). Formulae and genre considerations outweigh originality and innovation. In other words, the same things that happen whenever money calls the shots.

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Vincent Czyz is the author of Adrift in a Vanishing City, a collection of short fiction that was awarded the Eric Hoffer Award for Best in Small Press; The Christos Mosaic, a novel; and The Three Veils of Ibn Oraybi, a novella. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts, the W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction, and the Truman Capote Fellowship at Rutgers University. His work has appeared in many publications, including New England Review, Shenandoah, AGNI, Massachusetts Review, Georgetown Review, Tin House, Tampa Review, Boston Review, and Copper Nickel.