Big Fiction
How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature—and literature itself—transformed.
Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction.
Big Fiction features dazzling readings of a vast range of novelists—including E. L. Doctorow, Judith Krantz, Renata Adler, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Chuck Palahniuk, Patrick O’Brian, and Walter Mosley—as well as vivid portraits of industry figures. Written in gripping and lively prose, this deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This rich analysis by Emory University English professor Sinykin (American Literature and the Long Downturn) traces how corporate consolidation has affected the book publishing industry. He suggests that the post-WWII rise in college graduates and inexpensive mass market books made the 1950s and '60s boom times for book publishing's bottom line, sparking interest from large corporations in buying up the "small and privately held" publishers—Random House, for instance, became in 1959 "the first major house to go public and used the influx of cash to acquire Knopf in 1960" before both were purchased by RCA in 1965. A downturn in book sales in the late '70s led publishing's new corporate owners to prioritize cheaply produced genre fiction titles by brand-name authors to secure returns on their investment. Sinykin sometimes succumbs to academic jargon ("One version of the epiphenomenal author is the romantic author's obverse"), but his insights into how the corporatization of publishing has contributed to some of its most persistent flaws are revelatory: For instance, he suggests that requiring editors to justify prospective acquisitions by comparing them to "similar titles that had sold well" created a feedback loop in which editors passed on books by authors of color because there weren't many titles to compare them to. Book lovers curious about how the proverbial sausage gets made will want to check this out.
