Just last year, the book industry in America was bracing for its demise. Bookstores were returning unsold copies in shockingly high numbers. Sales of ” trade books” (the commercial titles that are normally the most secure portion of a publisher’s catalogue) seemed to be dropping precipitously.
Every week brought news of some disastrous investment: Little, Brown’s $ 3 million for Paula Barbieri’s readerless memoir of O. J. Simpson; HarperCollins’s $ 4 million for a Jay Leno book that had four-hundred- thousand copies returned to the publisher. Huge, lost advances were matched by major shake-ups on editorial staffs, notably the departure of the Free Press’s publisher, Michael Jacobs, and editor, Adam Bellow. The Chicago Tribune ran a fear-filled series on the death of publishing, and C-SPAN’s Booknotes aired a heated discussion of impending literary doom.
Last year’s storms, however, were momentarily forgotten when, on March 23 of this year, the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG announced plans to buy Random House, the largest publisher in America. Bertelsmann, the world’s third-largest media conglomerate, will merge its current American business, Bantam Doubleday Dell, into Random House — creating the largest English- language publisher ever.
Critics of the merger — committed to the notion that the larger a house, the less good literature it publishes — assume that the new Random House will abandon culturally important books in favor of blockbusters and celebrity bestsellers. In the New York Times, for example, Mark Crispin Miller’s post-merger op-ed mourned the abysmal state of American publishing: ” A literary culture that features only “big books” is a poor one, esthetically and intellectually. And that is what we have, now that the corporate houses and the bookstore chains throw all their weight behind whatever seemed hot yesterday, without a thought to tomorrow.”
Miller and his ilk are right that a big-book culture is a poor one — but they’re wrong that we have anything resembling a big-book culture. There are seven enormous houses controlled by major media conglomerates: Random House/Bantam Doubleday Dell, now owned by Bertelsmann; Simon & Schuster, owned by Viacom; HarperCollins, owned by News Corporation; Penguin Putnam, owned by Pearson; Warner/Little, Brown, owned by Time-Warner; Farfar, Straus & Giroux/St. Martins, owned by Holtzbrinck; and Avon/Morrow, owned by Hearst. According to figures in Subtext, a newsletter for publishing-industry analysts, these seven publishers account for 87 percent of trade books sold — about 22 percent of the total U.S. book sales that are estimated now to be $ 21 billion a year.
But limiting one’s view to these conglomerates excludes the endless number of independent and university presses that have already made great successes and great profits by publishing what bigger houses won’t.
There is no industry-wide definition of an independent publisher. Houghton Mifflin and W. W. Norton are often considered independents, though they operate as small conglomerates. (Houghton Mifflin, for example, reported $ 88 million in sales in 1997.) A truer entrepreneurial spirit is probably to be found in such mid-sized presses as Grove/Atlantic, which brings in $ 12 to $ 14 million on around a hundred books a year. One step down are such publishers as Ecco Press, making single-digit millions while publishing in the neighborhood of fifty titles. And then there are innumerable small presses, like the new conservative press, Spence Publishing, producing fewer than ten titles a year.
The recent Bertelsmann/Random House merger has spurred speculation that even more good books will be missed by the conglomerate publishers and fall to independents. To the charge that publishers have dropped everything except big-name bestsellers, Alberto Vitale, chairman of Random House before the merger, replies, “Nonsense. Bestsellers are clearly important, but they constitute a very small part of our business.” But it’s certainly true that independent presses have received some help from changes at the top of the publishing heap. Chip Fleischer, an owner of the independent Steerforth Press whose sales have doubled in the last year, is straightforward: “We have been getting more editorial opportunities because big houses have moved their front list toward the mass market.”
In fact, however, the independents have been gaining ground for several years — for reasons that may have little to do with media conglomeration. The Small Press Center, a New York-based non-profit group for independent presses, estimates that there are today about thirty thousand independent publishers. The list of “ISBN” numbers assigned to publishers has grown every year since 1979. Publishers Group West, the largest distributor for independent presses, has watched sales increase to $ 100 million in 1997 from $ 14 million just over a decade ago.
Curt Matthews, president of the Independent Publishers Group that distributes 313 independent publishers, sees in all this a massive change in publishing. “The New York model doesn’t work anymore,” he says. “That model is based on establishing bestsellers, books that had better sell hundreds of thousands of copies. But the marketplace has changed.” Success lies in regional publishers and niche marketing targeted to small audiences. “This is the best time to be an independent press,” Matthews declares. And regional success does not preclude national success. In 1994, Health Communications’s Chicken Soup for the Soul hit the New York Times bestseller list and spawned endless sequels. Grove/Atlantic’s Cold Mountain by Charles Fraizer recently spent twenty-eight weeks on the bestseller list and won the National Book Award.
So too, in recent years, university presses have filled the niches by steadily increasing their production of “general-interest” books. Oxford University Press was among the first to aim outside the academy, but the practice is now common. New York University Press, which publishes fewer than two hundred books a year, has increased its trade books from fifteen in Winter 1995 to twenty-six in Winter 1998. Johns Hopkins University Press has enlarged trade production from nineteen books to forty over the last ten years. In 1997, the University of California Press published an art-show catalogue that sold twenty-five thousand copies — spectacular sales for an academic press that publishes only 260 books a year.
This change has not come unbemoaned. In March 1997, in the Nation, the irrepressible Mark Crispin Miller derided academic houses for “giving in to market pressure, dumping recondite monographs in favor of trendier academic fare or, better yet, whatever sells at Borders.”
The fact is, however, that university publishers have always responded to market pressures: Well into the twentieth century, general-market sales of biblical books funded the other scholarly tomes published by Oxford and Cambridge. In America, purchases by college libraries financed academic presses — until, in the 1970s and ’80s, budget cuts and astronomical price increases for scholarly journals shattered that market. With their trade- books, the academic publishers are doing what they’ve always done, finding new ways to subsidize their real work of printing scholarly monographs.
Despite all this apparent health in the publishing industry, the belief in decline remains pervasive. The Bertelsmann merger gave Todd Gitlin — a professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University — a chance to spell out the Orwellian consequences: “When authors can’t make a decent living writing necessary books,” he wrote in Newsday, “readers suffer. They may not know they are suffering, but they suffer.” Andreas Brown, owner of Gotham Book Mart, similarly declares that books are in the wrong hands: “Bottom-line people are running the publishing houses. Now if you’re dealing with shoes or toys or clothes, that’s fine. But when you start playing around with literature and culture and thought, it’s a much more serious problem.”
It is the growth of the large chain bookstores that most incites the doomsayers, who see in them at least a parallel to the growth of the media conglomerates — if not a genuine conspiracy to destroy America by homogenizing culture and narrowing thought. There was a time, Colin Robinson of Verso Publishing explained to C-SPAN’s viewers, when publishers sent salesmen out to independent bookstores. But that system has been “replaced with marketing executives of large publishing corporations going into the head offices of chains and selling their books to merchants there, and to merchandise managers. There are millions of decisions being replaced by a few thousand or maybe even hundreds.”
Media-conglomerate publishers and chain bookstores are now the stuff of conspiracy theories — based on the widely held belief that chains receive special backroom deals from big publishers, who then feel secure that their books, trash or not, will sell. In order to learn the truth, the American Booksellers Association has filed suit against Barnes & Noble and Borders, charging that these two largest chains engage in “a pattern and practice of soliciting, inducing, and receiving secret, discriminatory, and illegal terms from publishers and distributors.” The suit may have some merit. In 1995, the ABA sued Penguin Books USA for offering special discounts, and Penguin settled last September for $ 25 million. In a similar case, settled in November 1996, Random House admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to treat all its retailers equally in the future.
Still, if the chains are illegally benefiting from the major publishing houses, their arrangements do not appear to be adversely affecting independent and university publishers. “It used to be that if the New York Times reviewed a university-press book, only about a third of the country could get it,” says Douglas Armato of Johns Hopkins University Press. “Now, books are getting out to places they never could have before.”
With miles of shelves to fill, the chains by necessity welcome every level of publisher. In 1997, only 3 percent of Barnes & Noble’s sales came from bestsellers and only 46 percent from the top ten publishing houses. Borders buys books by topic, not publisher, and Jody Kohn, director of publicity and promotion, defends the chain against the charge that non-bestsellers are pulled right away: “We’ll keep a book on the shelves for six months to a year.
One complaint seems true: The growth of chains has put considerable pressure on small independent bookstores. But the world of book-selling consists of far more than omnipotent chains threatening plucky little independent book dealers. Discount stores and price clubs are new book hot spots, and the most notable development is the on-line bookstore. The clear leader in the field, Amazon.com, announced in January that net sales for fiscal 1997 were $ 147.8 million, up nearly by a factor often from the $ 15.7 million in 1996.
And even despite the increased competition on so many fronts, independents are not heading toward extinction. The stores that have survived have maintained sales by emphasizing their regional status with reading groups, newsletters, and forums. Many stores sell books through the Internet, and several well-known independents report sales to “notachain.com,” an independent-only bestseller list that diverges significantly from the New York Times listings.
Such increasing diversity in the bookselling industry makes total domination by the chains implausible. Certainly they have started bookstore wars in certain communities, and some analysts believe the chains plan the old monopolistic trick: Expand fast, kill off competition, then raise prices sky high. Chances are, however, that with so many ways to acquire books, the chains will be lucky to survive themselves.
The Bertelsmann/Random House merger has proved to be a peg on which to hang all the fears that plague the gossip-driven book industry. Critics like Mark Crispin Miller warn that conglomerates “may be sharply limiting our freedom of expression.” “The consequences for authors, for editors, and for American culture at large cannot be good,” Todd Gitlin added.
But the fact is that there are more booksellers and more book publishers than ever before. Publishers have been growing through mergers for decades, and in that time independent and university publishers have been gaining strength, too. If the expanded Random House decreases opportunities at the top of the publishing pyramid, it will simply add to the competition and creativity at the base. A less ideological view than Miller’s or Gitlin’s would see the truth: The future of books in America looks good. Very good.
Pia Nordlinger is a reporter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
