Digest 12/1/2020

The Simon & Schuster-Penguin Random House merger, Facebook to pay newspapers, and more.

WHAT THE SIMON & SCHUSTER-PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE MERGER MEANS FOR PUBLISHING

ViacomCBS announced on Wednesday that it’s selling Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for $2 billion. ViacomCBS had put the publishing house up for auction to help fund its streaming service; the company is going all-in on streaming, having announced in September that it will relaunch its CBS All Access streaming service as Paramount Plus in an attempt to rebrand. In October, the company also announced a major restructuring to prioritize streaming. Books are out, streaming is in! (Which is also a pretty apt summary of my personal media consumption habits in 2020.)

Publishing, like digital media, is in the process of consolidation, with companies hoping that scaling up can strengthen their bargaining power with Amazon, the monopoly that is single-handedly crushing booksellers. It’s not so different than Jonah Peretti’s big idea to merge BuzzFeed with competitors — this month, HuffPost — in order to create a super-company to better bargain with Google and Facebook, the ad monopolies that are crushing media companies.

So what does the sale mean for publishing? I asked Maris Kreizman, former book editor, current host of LitHub podcast The Maris Review, and critic and essayist who writes about the world of publishing. (She also runs marketing and events for bookstore McNally Jackson.) She pointed out that within the last seven years, the “Big Six” publishers — Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan — have become the Big Four. Penguin and Random House merged in 2013, forming a behemoth that controlled over 25 percent of the industry; now that behemoth is swallowing up Simon & Schuster. “There will be fewer people bidding on books and buying books,” said Kreizman. For authors, this could have material impacts.

“The advances will likely go down,” she said. “Also, one of the things that authors of second books would do is if their debut didn’t sell that well — which most don’t, and often it is not the authors fault — is they will take their next book to a different house and start again fresh there, and there’s one fewer place to do that now.”

The merger could also mean more homogeneity in content, Kreizman noted. “The disappearance of what they call the midlist” — a publishing term for books or authors that aren’t bestsellers but sell well enough — “has been a shitshow for a decade now,” she said. A 2011 piece in Publishers Weekly (back when there was still a Big Six) decried the “death of the midlist,” attributed to bigger publishers swallowing up smaller and midsize ones, creating higher expectations for sales and revenue that threatened to push out non-bestseller authors. Since then, according to Kreizman, the problem has only gotten worse.

“If you want to publish a book at this point and you’re an editor, you have to get something that is guaranteed to sell or something you are willing to take a huge risk on, so there isn’t a lot of room for these $50,000 advance books that are a passion project,” said Kreizman.

The deal will also squeeze smaller presses that distribute their titles through the publishing houses — those small presses will have fewer options now when it comes to prospective distributors and less room to bargain. But I was curious whether Kreizman thought more small independent presses might spring up to fill the void now created by mass consolidation. The short answer: not likely. “It’s so hard, because most indie presses are struggling financially too,” she said. “For the most part, they don’t have the scale; they cannot print hundreds of thousands of copies of something,” which would make it difficult to keep up with operating costs. 

“What I think about all the time is Emily Books,” said Kreizman, referring to the small publishing house founded by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry in 2011, which announced earlier this year that they would wind down operations. “Emily and Ruth were really smart about trying to launch their own little publisher, and every time I hear someone say someone else should start their own, I think about how hard they worked, how small the margins are, and how ultimately it just wasn’t something that two people and a small press could handle,” said Kreizman. “It’s really, really risky.”

Meanwhile, at Penguin Random House, employees are protesting the company’s decision to publish Jordan Peterson’s new book. A VICE report detailed the internal rebellion, which became apparent in a town hall meeting in which some staffers shed tears over the decision. Employees are even considering a walkout, per the report. In my mind, this story is linked to the state of publishing I described — as a result of mass consolidation, fewer authors will get published, and those who do will get smaller advances and are less likely to get a shot at a second book if the first isn’t wildly successful. 

It is in this climate that Peterson, a transphobic grifter with a large online audience, is getting a second book published by one of the remaining big publishers. If Penguin Random House cancels the book in response to a staff uprising — as Hachette did with Woody Allen’s memoir — then conservatives and self-described anti-woke liberals alike will decry the decision as speech suppression. But most writers — who are likely not peddling all-meat diets and refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns, like Peterson — are seeing their chances to publish a book with Penguin Random House diminish.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

– Spotify released data on the top podcasts on the platform: The Joe Rogan Experience is first, TED Talks Daily is second, the New York Times podcast The Daily is third, and Michelle Obama’s podcast is fourth.

– In the UK, some people are losing their hats over the Netflix show The Crown, which has taken some inevitable creative liberties in depicting the royal family. Culture secretary Oliver Dowden has called for Netflix to add a disclaimer that the show is fictional at the start of each episode — which seems redundant, given that the episodes contain footage of Olivia Colman, who is not the queen, pretending to be the queen — and opined that “a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”

– Facebook will pay newspapers in the UK to license their articles for a curated news section launching in January. The move follows Facebook’s threat to pull news from the platform in Australia over a regulatory battle over a new law that would force Facebook and Google to pay publishers for content in that country.

– The Great Newslettering continues. Politico’s Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan are planning to launch a daily Capitol Hill newsletter in 2021, and Libby Watson has left The New Republic for Substack.

– According to advertising agency executives, BuzzFeed’s acquisition of HuffPost will likely bolster ad sales. Looks like Jonah Peretti’s plan is working!

Correction: An earlier version of this newsletter stated that Emily Books had shuttered in 2016. The publisher ended their ebook subscription program in 2016 and announced that they would wind down operations starting in March 2020.