Random house6/27/2023 “I think it's strange not many people have mentioned the consolidation and layoffs from Penguin and Random House merged,” she said. A literary agent who asked to remain anonymous told me that if the merger goes through, she anticipates shuttered imprints and layoffs across the board. Previous PRH mergers, particularly the high-profile merging of Penguin and Random House in 2013, suggest that more consolidation will mean fewer imprints in existence to offer authors a home-and less competition among them to drive up authors’ advances. The bigger the company, the less likely anyone is going to return my emails after eight weeks. This author believes that PRH’s marketing and publicity departments were explicitly told to deprioritize her imprint’s books, and worries what that could mean for the authors at S&S whose imprints might soon be acquired. “By 2020, the publisher support had almost entirely evaporated for me and so many other midlist authors that I know, both at my imprint and elsewhere.” “Five years ago, when I was debuting, I had an advance that was smallish but standard for a new author at my imprint, and I got marketing and publicity to match,” she shared. I spoke with an author who was until recently published by PRH and wishes to remain anonymous she told me that the marketing and publicizing of midlist authors has already diminished significantly during her career. “The bigger the company, the less likely anyone is going to return my emails after eight weeks.” ![]() He anticipates that this support will only wither further if the merger goes through. It’s not hard to see the consolidation happening after all, The Big Five was The Big Six less than a decade ago, and now we’re one DOJ case away from it becoming The Big Four. “The concentration we have seen in the book industry since 1990 has pushed publishers to double down on star writers, celebrities, and politicians, leaving emerging writers with less support,” Vaidhyanathan observed. The publishing house employees, authors, and literary agents that I spoke to for this piece all shared feelings of uneasiness about what a PRH/S&S merger would mean both for them as workers and for the industry as a whole. It turns out that I’m not the only one with concerns. Now that I’m no longer employed by one of the companies involved, I can say out loud that I hold major reservations about what it could mean for those still inside the book machine. Having worked in the publishing industry for almost a decade at both S&S and PRH, I’ve been wary of this merger since the news of it first broke in November 2020. The five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Hachette. Midlist:Ī term for books that aren’t bestsellers but are still economically viable for the publisher. Simply put, it’s a subdivision of a larger publishing house. Imprint:Ī name under which a book publisher publishes books. Once a book “earns out,” authors can earn royalties. When the publisher makes back the amount of the advance from book sales, recouping their initial investment. Frontlist books are newly released titles that come out each season. Backlist:īooks that a publisher keeps in print over time. When multiple publishing houses bid against each other to acquire an author’s work. Payments are usually distributed in fourths. The amount of money paid by the publisher to an author in advance of their book’s publication. ![]() If you want to get a more granular picture of what’s going on in the trial, I recommend reading Publishers Weekly News Editor John Maher’s epic Twitter thread, which recounts a play-by-play from inside the courthouse. There were several gasp-worthy moments from these publishing power players who spilled more industry tea than at the National Book Awards afterparty. PRH and S&S argue that combining their resources would not hurt competition and would in fact allow PRH to make higher offers overall, thus encouraging competitive advances from other members of the Big Five (well, four), as well as independent publishers like Scholastic and Workman.ĭuring the first week of the trial (which is still ongoing), we heard testimony from witnesses on both sides, including S&S CEO Jonathan Karp, PRH CEO Markus Dohle, and bestselling S&S author Stephen King (for whom I once bought a sandwich as a publicity assistant). Bookstores Are Peddling the Lies of 'Go Ask Alice'. ![]() ![]() The Crypto Revolution Wants to Reimagine Books.
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