“The publisher's job is to supply the necessary readings.”
– Jason Epstein 

“I found that literature, like all religions, is also a business.”
– Jason Epstein 

I love how these two statements from book publisher Jason Epstein play with each other. Something that is religious or spiritual supplies a necessary ephemera to the human experience; and so often, art is assumed to hold a morality that transcends the icky dealings of business. These quotes express that we do not create in a vacuum; business practices indelibly influence not only what we consume, but the process of how what we consume is made to begin with. 

Today, four book publishing empires exist producing 80% of the book trade in the United States. Two are German multimedia conglomerates; Bertelsmann (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster) and Holtzbrinck (Macmillan). French publishing giant Hachette Book Group is presently the third largest trade book publisher in the world. Then there is News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire that owns HarperCollins. 

Previously Viacom CBS was among the previously termed “Big Five Book Publishers,” but their former property Simon & Schuster has since been acquired by Bertelsmann back in 2020.  

Jason Epstein lived through this immense consolidation, seeing his tenure at the vibrant midtown Manhattan outfit of Random House morph from an “indie” press into a publicly traded business; a move that marked a shift toward an ever-accelerating hits-driven content churn to appease investor interests, prioritizing growth until Random House’s eventual acquisition by Bertelsmann. 

The 1920’s through 1950’s are generally viewed as a “golden age” in American book publishing, a time where the Big Four outfits were still relatively small-scale and highly personal, a time that Epstein played a significant role in creating the trade environment we see today. Before Epstein’s time, booksellers typically dealt with expensive hardbound books — a luxury item that made a trip to the bookstore a steep investment. Epstein pushed forward high-quality yet accessible paperbacks into mass production via publisher Doubleday, forcing his competing publishers to follow in his wake. 

Epstein’s inspiration at the core of his work was to spread the joy of literature he experienced as an undergrad at Columbia University. He wrote about being transported to ecstatic levels amidst the library’s resourced stacks, feeling called to bring that literary exuberance to the rest of the world. His spirit and innovation produced massively successful catalogs, and during this golden age of publishing, many publishers found such fantastic success that it drove them toward one natural conclusive direction — expansion. 

Frontlist output eventually became less about pushing forward stories and culture in a divine, sometimes daring sense and more about the bottom line. Dips in stock prices became the new litmus test for the solvency of a season’s catalog, informing future acquisition choices and risk assessments. 

Nowadays my fellow authors share a variety of experiences working under one of the hundreds of imprints within this Big Four empire. There are examples of pleasant, generative work environments with managing editors that passionately immerse themselves into the catalogs under their charge. There are other stories that report of aloof teams begrudgingly assigning their time to squeeze out yet another project on their expanding list. 

Something that encapsulates so much inevitably becomes a spectrum, undefinable in binary terms. Because big publishing contains as much as it does, experiences can change from imprint to imprint, team to team. Much like working with an independent publisher, the success of a book and the expectations around a work environment’s compatibility comes down to the team you find; the quality of aligned spirit. 

For big publishing, typically this spiritual alignment starts at the literary agent. For independent publishing, direct with the managing editor. This alignment goes on to influence a defining factor in trade book publishing, a critical force behind the possibility of a book: distribution. 

Distribution

In the 1930’s, in a Depression-era response to protect booksellers, Simon & Schuster rolled out a program where shops could return unsold copies of books to their distributors for a full refund. This practice became commonplace, and to this day, any wholesale acquisition of books via a trade distributor can be returned for a full credit. 

This practice extends to retail and ecommerce monoliths such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The great crash of Borders back in 2011 caused a devastating tidal wave of returns that mostly impacted independent publishers; bankrupting several outfits in one fell swoop when thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth of returns gutted future revenues. 

For big publishing, this is a fine practice that is mitigated by the sheer volume of titles produced. The hedge this creates is for smaller operations only producing, say, a few titles a season. The smaller the print run, the fewer books in a catalog, the more viscerally a return is felt. 

This dynamic means smaller publishers have to be supremely tactical in deploying a title through trade distribution. Unlike the big publishers with their in-house distribution ops, independent publishers rely on third party partnerships; either with independent distributors or by assigning their wholesale business to the distribution arms of the Big Four publishers. 

I can, and will eventually, take up an entire post about the state of independent distribution (any trade distributor outside of the Big Four realm), and discuss yet another great consolidation under the Ingram Company. We’re seeing a trend here with rampant consolidations, aren’t we?