Source: Persuasion
by Elizabeth Kaye Cook & Melanie Jennings
“Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding. It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has actually occurred is death by committee. One hundred years ago, there were dozens of publishing houses and a robust publishing landscape. … No longer. Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s ‘Big Five’: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. The result is a monopsony, a market dominated by only a few buyers.” [editor’s note: On the other hand, self-publishing nearly free, and selling via large platforms like Amazon, are available now – TLK] (12/19/24)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-have-killed