How Capitalism Affects What Writers Write

Gatekeepers, Conglomeration, and Market Forces

Biggest “News” in Books: Big Fiction

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* Warning: this newsletter about books contains talk of economics *

Over the past months I have been reading about and thinking about Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature by Dan Sinykin. Most recently, a skeptical review in The Atlantic. The goal of Big Fiction as the article eloquently puts it, is that it “proposes to tell us not just how the purchasing of smaller publishing companies by bigger, diversified ones has transformed the industry’s financial structures but also, much more interesting, how it has changed literature itself.” The reviewer’s main contention is how datasets in Big Fiction are used to measure the changes in “American Literature.” Josh Lambert of The Atlantic argues essentially that since the publishing industry comprises such a large quantitative dataset (there are 10,000+ books published each year by just the Big-5), all of which require deeper qualitative analysis (i.e., it’s impossible to tell how you should categorize a work of literature without reading it), that Big Fiction’s answers to its questions of how corporate structure changed what gets written are left wanting.

As I’ve watched the discourse unfold over the past months, it has felt to me as if the wrong question is being asked from the start. “How conglomeration changed the publishing industry and American Literature” by its nature implies that book publishing is a supply-side market. That the firms involved — the publishers — dictate what gets published and what gets read. This is not far off from a common perception of book publishing— that it's an industry full of gatekeepers (literary agents, editors, publishers) who decide from on high who gets into the exclusive club and succeeds. Then, we supply the books and tell you which ones to read. That is the underlying logic which underpins why corporatization and conglomeration would thusly have a material effect on what writers write.

However, as the rare economics major working on the editorial side of book publishing, I believe the better descriptor of the current business of publishing is to look at it through a Keynesian economic lens. In other words, it’s not publishers or editors who signal writers what to write but good, old-fashioned demand. If a book is popular, whether than means it sells a million copies or is every writer’s favorite book (call this lowercase “d” demand), it influences what writers will attempt to write next. When Gone Girl lit the world on fire we got a firehose of psychological suspense; when All the Light We Cannot See sold millions and won the Pulitzer, a slew of every WWII novel imaginable followed; now, as Fourth Wing dominates the bestseller list, get ready for a deluge of Romantasy. This demand ultimately comes from readers, not publishers — if readers show an insatiable appetite for polarized books on politics or Abe Lincoln, or JFK, writers will fill them up. If your skepticism is: well, don’t publishers choose what those books and trends are?, you need look no further than recent history of a TikTok-driven bestseller list or the DOJ antitrust trial which exposed how much publishers are flying blind when it comes to making bestsellers. Publishers don’t know what is going to work in the market and they can’t make something work by sheer force of resources or will (although they certainly try). This is evidenced every year by the number of huge swings they take and miss, by the fact that most books fail to turn a profit, as well as the number of “mid-list” or small advance books that go on to sell millions of copies (take the three examples above: both Gone Girl and All the Light We Cannot See were mid-career books by authors with moderate prior success, likely not advanced the millions of dollars their books turned out to be worth be; Fourth Wing wasn’t even published by one of the major publishers).

Although my contention is that supply has almost nothing to do with what gets written and that demand has more to do with it, if you spend any time around writers, you realize that the vast majority of writers have incentives that have nothing to do with supply, demand, or profit at all. That’s because publishing a book is far from a perfect, lucrative, or reliable market. Writers primarily seem to choose what to write based on the culture they live in, the experiences they have, and the books that have influenced them. Readers’ desires — what’s popular, or critically acclaimed — is a far distant secondary factor. This dynamic can change when an author has gargantuan commercial success, but for the most part I would say that the industrial structure of publishing never enters a writer’s mind when they pick up their pens (and if you wonder why so many books are about writers and publishing throughout history, then just consider that those are the two experiences that nearly every published writer has).

Like many commonly-held but outdated beliefs, this gatekeeper, supply-side mythology comes from somewhere legitimate: up until the late 20^th to early 21^st century, most book publishers — like many industries — were run exclusively by a small group of wealthy elites. Many writers—ones who weren’t white, male, or monied like their editors and publishers—weren’t published in the manner they should have been based on their talent and the market appeal of their books. That’s a feature of a distorted, supply-side market—a firm can artificially distort the market by controlling what is for sale in what quantity (i.e. who gets published). And there are certainly vestiges of this old publishing model today, as with any system (whether it’s in banking, housing, education, etc.) the lingering effects of how an industry was built don’t change overnight.

As The New Yorker article on Big Fiction put it:

“Though contemporary corporate publishing is superficially more diverse, less reliant on an exclusionary social sphere, than publishing of the postwar years was, the industry still struggles to foster a heterogeneous literary culture. According to a 2020 study by the academic Richard Jean So, between 1950 and 2018, ninety-five per cent of the English-language fiction books major publishers put out were written by white authors. A 2019 survey showed eighty-five per cent of the people who acquire and edit books in the U.S. are also white.”

However, statistics like these are slightly misleading, seemingly pointing the finger at publishers (and choosing a period that encompasses both eras 1950-2018, rather than say 2000-2018). What stats like this expose is that publishers are the very endpoint of the supply chain that is a result of a system of inequalities and not the primary driver of them. We’re farther away from the supply-side, gatekeeper system of book publishing then we have ever been. There is a massive will in publishing that I see every day, especially with younger generations, to publish a more “heterogeneous literary culture.” The issue goes beyond publisher decision making and into the larger economy that produces writers and readers. In many cases, the editor’s and publisher’s part of the process might entail 2-3 years for a project that may have taken 2-3 decades prior for the author to gather the requisite experience and time to make it (picture a forty-year-old debut novelist or a journalist who is 15-20 years into their career—they did a lot of work and likely participated in many institutions before their work ever gets seen by a Big-5 book publisher). Writing, in some combination, takes time, space, and education, all of which of which cost money. Publishers, and the literary agents who writers funnel through first, have comparatively little influence on the truly massive number of people and factors that afford writers these privileges. Directing ire at publishers and literary agents, a favorite pastime of many in and around the industry, is like getting mad at the workers who take the product off the assembly line at the end of the conveyor belt. Unlike in previous generations, there are also plenty of alternatives to publish and market forces to keep publishers and editors in check from distorting the market according to only their biases. Just look at the increase of bestselling self-published books and the self-published books that have been taken over by big publishers. Book publishers can’t dictate who writes what or who gets published: the market demand makes the rules.

Conglomeration is likely the result of profit incentive and markets rather than an attempt, as it is often presented, to create an oligopoly control market supply. Kevin Lozano for The New Yorker hits the nail on the head:

“[Conglomeration] helped to forge a different way of doing business, a process of diversifying and rationalizing that led to a larger, more stratified, and more economically conscious sphere, dominated by daunting hierarchies of power and money.

Today’s publishing house is closer to a hedge fund than a tastemaker. Every book that it acquires is a bet on profitability. The financialization of the acquisition process functions like an index of risk.”

It’s arguable that consolidation, not due to any moral virtue on the part of the publishers, is evidence that publishers have lost their ability to control the market rather than bend it to their will. Publishers are becoming bigger because they have less ability to dictate what sells and therefore must pool and diversify their books in order to have a chance at hitting the one-out-of-a-thousand shot to have one of the few mega bestsellers that make up the majority of profits. We’ll likely see the same thing happen with tv and film studios in coming years (in the time it took me draft and send this newsletter Warner Bros. and Paramount began merger talks), as the studios have less of an ability through the economics of scale in distribution and marketing to make hit tv shows or movies.

Ironically, bigger corporations, whether book publishers or movie studios, has meant far less control of “the machine’s” ability to put something out and “make it work” without star power, free advertising in the form of social media, and ultimately community, often created by the author/creators/actors. It creates a dissonance where production is becoming more socially progressive and democratic, but the market forces that have come with it are risk-adverse and stifling creatively (the decline of the mid-budget movie, the mid-list book). The cold, hard truth is that demand and profit economics, financialization, and the subsequent conglomeration of book publishing has likely not had a profound effect on what writers set out to write as much as it has exposed who gets across the finish line and why.