And Then There (Will Be) Four

What does a Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger mean for your future?

Somebody approached me about a newsletter I’d written shortly after the presidential election, where I’d discussed why none of Trump’s lackeys should get book deals ever, and asked how the situation I had described was affected by Penguin Random House’s declaration of its intent to purchase rival publishing company Simon & Schuster for $2 billion.

Well, as I said over the weekend, when word got out that Melania Trump was planning on “writing” a memoir, “one hopes that it doesn’t land at any of the Simon Schuster’s House of Random Penguins imprints, because that’s an awful lot of books to boycott.” (I owe the combined name to science fiction writer John Scalzi, who’d come up with it a day or two before.)

In a more serious vein, both the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association have already made concerned statements asking the Justice Department to look into the proposed merger, warning of a possible squelching of competition within the book industry if the Big Five conglomerate publishers become the Big Four. The Guild asserts that if the deal goes through, the newly formed megapublisher would be behind roughly half of all books published; the ABA drily noted that Penguin Random House’s parent corporation, Bertelsmann, is based in Germany, and that “the deal will concentrate vastly too much power over the U.S. book market in the hands of a single, foreign-owned corporation.”

Both organizations advise that, with reduced competition among publishing houses for hot new manuscripts, writers will suffer because their agents will have less opportunity to play publishers against one another to raise advances—and because reduced financial resources will mean a reduced ability to dedicate oneself to the intense work necessary to produce books that engage critically with the world at a level that these times, fraught as they are, require.

To these legitimate concerns I would add that both Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster have extensive distribution networks, which provide smaller publishers with sales and inventory and even production resources. Combining those two infrastructures may lead to greater efficiency at getting books into bookstores, or at least into Amazon warehouses—but it may also leave those independent publishers facing higher prices.

Now, Penguin Random House’s CEO, Markus Dohle, assures everyone that these fears are overblown, that competition is actually very fierce among book publishers and that PRH needs S&S’s portion of the pie to make up for everything it’s been losing to smaller publishers in recent years. He made a point of dismissing the notion that his company would run half the book market; more, he suggests, like 18.4 percent. And getting big isn’t even the point—really PRH just wants to make sure that bookstores will continue to have books.

The more cynical readers among you might be thinking, well, it’s not as if he’s going to cackle madly at us all, is he?

Ultimately, what I would suggest to you, the person reading this newsletter because you want to develop a stronger writing practice and produce strong work that you can share with the world, is that you think about this stuff as little as possible.

I’m not saying you should ignore it. You’d do well to have some fundamental understanding of the layout of the contemporary publishing industry. You just don’t need to worry about it now, while you’re still working on your manuscript. Two large conglomerates becoming one enormous conglomerate isn’t going to get your book written any faster, and neither would the deal falling apart, if that should happen. The only thing that will get your book written is you, writing.

If you do get your book written, and you’re able to secure representation from a literary agent, that’s the time when it will be helpful to know enough about what’s going on in publishing to ask your agent about your options, but even then you can let your agent carry a lot of the knowledge burden. After all, it’s her job to know what’s happening within the industry, and how it affects her ability to sell your book.

(If you don’t have a literary agent, and you’re not famous for something non-literary, honestly, your chances of selling your book to a Big Four publishing imprint, on your own, are negligible. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it essentially requires getting discovered in a manner akin to the legends about Lana Turner and the soda counter at Schwab’s. You might be better served by continuing to look for literary representation or focusing on independent publishers more likely to take a chance on unagented writers.)

Instead of imagining what might or might not happen to the book you haven’t written yet, though, you should be writing that book. Or towards that book, if you haven’t zeroed in on your story yet. What’s happening between these two giant publishers might affect you down the line, or it might not. It’s like being prepared for an earthquake—you can pull everything you need to get through an earthquake together, so the survival kit is there when you need it, but after that you can’t just sit around waiting for the tectonic plates to grind up against each other. You have to keep living your life, doing what needs to be done.

Of course, you could decide not to live on top of a fault line, even if everybody thinks living on a fault line means you’ve really made the big time.