Purely a Business: Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction

Scholars in college literature departments talk every day about the social and economic conditions that underlie specific novels. But it is far less common to talk about the economic mechanisms that bring those novels to readers. Creative writing programs introduce aspiring writers to examples of lauded literary style, but there’s much less discussion of what made those styles popular—which is to say, marketable—in the first place. Why? I kept asking myself that question while I was in college during the early 2010s, reading assigned short stories and keeping up with the book world on the Internet. Why were romance novels or science fiction marketed differently than so-called literary fiction? Why did it seem like so much acclaimed writing was about the marital problems of affluent people in Manhattan or Brooklyn, or the marital problems of writers in Midwestern college towns?

I wish I’d had Big Fiction when I was 19, an age at which I would find myself wondering: Who decided that these books were the good ones, the ones we should study and emulate? Big Fiction takes the notoriously exclusive and counterintuitive industry of U.S. book publishing and gives its recent history a lucid and unsparing treatment.

Sinykin’s broad argument, in one sentence, is this: the extreme conglomeration and corporatization of the book trade since 1960 has radically altered the kinds of books we read and the ways authors navigate the system. On its face, this sounds banal or self-evident. But the richness of Sinykin’s argument is in its details, in the stories of the companies and the personalities of a trade that, in its dual and contradictory way, subjects a timeless art form to the fast-paced logic of markets. For a book that addresses academic readers, Big Fiction is surprisingly character-driven. Sinykin stays light on his feet throughout the book’s headier and more analytical sections, and these take up much less space than the highly readable profiles of authors and industry figures. These anecdotes, enlivened by the industry’s big personalities and grand egos, get at how literary power actually works in America.

Big Fiction’s substantial cast of characters could fill a Thomas Pynchon novel; in the backmatter is an “idiosyncratic and far from comprehensive” glossary of publishing figures with more than 125 entries, including two unrelated people both named Robert Gottlieb. Toni Morrison appears—as both a novelist and a groundbreaking editor at Random House—and so do E. L. Doctorow, Percival Everett, Renata Adler, Danielle Steel, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cormac McCarthy.

But many of the most intriguing and powerful figures are effectively unknown outside the industry: names like literary agent Lynn Nesbit, who’s represented everyone from Joan Didion to Anne Rice. Readers will learn about Jane Friedman, the publicist who claimed to have invented the author tour. Publisher Scott Walker appears—founder of the much-applauded Graywolf Press, Walker is a figure whose exit in 1994 due to financial mismanagement says much about the pitfalls of non-profit publishing. Sinykin goes on to cite the influence of the wholesale and retail wizard Harry Hoffman, who advocated for “shorter books that could be read before going to sleep.” Also listed is former Barnes & Noble book-buyer Sessalee Hensley—in Sinykin’s words, “Her approval could create a hit; her neglect could condemn a book to obscurity.” These are just five of the people who have exerted immense influence on what and how Americans have read in the last several decades.

“Myriad figures introduced or empowered by conglomeration exercise influence on each stage of a book’s life, from conception to its acquisition and editing to publicity; subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers, sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureaucrats.”

Each passing year has seen the industry further consolidated, and all aspects of book publishing further commodified. In the modern market, corporatized production and promotion networks inform which authors we hear about, how they write, and how we read them. Commercially and critically successful authors—even the rebels and iconoclasts—are “privileged vessels for conglomerate authorship.” If we don’t acknowledge this fact, Sinykin says, “we have misread six decades and more of U.S. fiction.”

Big Fiction begins with the history of mass-market books, a publishing format consigned to the dustbin of history—but not before it had upended, then cemented, divisions of class and taste. In the early years of the Cold War, there was a cultural hunger for cheap books of all kinds. Before it became common for American towns to have dedicated bookstores, you could find pocket-size editions of Nobel Prize winners on drugstore racks, spine to spine with pulpy thrillers. Mass-market publishers like Bantam and New American Library made these books accessible to an unprecedented degree. Partly or fully independent to start, these publishers were gradually acquired for one reason or another, beginning in the boom years of the 1960s. By the next decade, a crisis had taken root:

“Large media conglomerates began buying mass-market houses in the 1960s, but in the 1970s the boom bled into a downturn, and the book business slowed. Wages stagnated and inflation grew, hollowing out the middle class. Conglomeration intervened, created a class of mega-bestsellers, engineering the harder (if still porous) divide between popularity and prestige that we live with today. By 1980, market segmentation and sales prioritization had become the norm, bestseller lists populated by a small group of brand-name authors.”

These top brand names, e.g., Stephen King and Danielle Steel, were the winners in a game driven increasingly by predictability and replicability. Enter the domination of profit-and-loss statements, the increasing segmentation of genres, and the restrictive logic of so-called “comps,” or comparative titles—books with comparable attributes used as benchmarks to predict sales before acquiring anything new. (Comps, as Laura B. McGrath wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2019, “codify the discrimination that writers of color have long faced, perpetuating institutional racism through prescription.”)

The segmentation of popular from prestigious fiction also had to do with a new invention: the trade paperback. This is the paperback we know today, which is larger, sturdier, and more expensive than its mass-market predecessor. Its creator, Jason Epstein, described trade paperbacks as being made for “a much smaller and more specific audience, mainly academic, literary, highbrow.” These new paperbacks catered to an in-crowd, and Epstein was in all the way. Authors, editors, publishers, and professional book reviewers (the latter were much more consequential at the time than they are today) built up an intricate system of clubby courtship, centered in the Upper West and East Sides of Manhattan. This tight-knit, provincial, highbrow coterie set standards for literary taste across the nation.

Though publishing tends to be a politically progressive industry, it is also overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly populated by alumni of elite universities. The industry’s combination of prestige and poor pay—or even no pay when it comes to internships—serves to continuously reproduce this condition of inequity. It was also, until more recent times, overwhelmingly male. But when the wave of conglomeration arrived, some of its most adept riders would come from outside the old-boy networks. For those professionals who loved books but found themselves sidelined again and again by discrimination, the disruptions of conglomeration offered an opening. The increasing importance of publicity work meant that many women could circumvent established chains of command that, as Sinykin describes in detail, were saturated with misogyny. Other professionals watched the logic of capitalism closely and found powerful ways to resist it. Toni Morrison, who at Random House acquired and edited books by Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, said at the American Writers Congress in 1981, “Acceptance of the givenness of the marketplace keeps us in ignorance.”

Finally he profiles a quasi-outlier: W. W. Norton, the employee-owned house that regularly brings out runaway bestsellers and yet remains apart from the big five corporate publishers (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan). The non-profits struggled with the pitfalls of growth; Norton struggled to overcome its WASP-y company culture and its initial aversion to fiction. But these publishing houses, with one foot in the conglomerate world and one foot out, show how much effort and creativity it takes to push back against the inertia of the market.

I loved reading Sinykin’s chapter on non-profits, as my entire publishing career has taken place at one West Coast non-profit press. Heyday, where I work, publishes mostly non-fiction, so it doesn’t appear in this book. But the dynamics of non-profit publishing, as Sinykin describes them, resonate with my experience: the feeling of being simultaneously outside and inside an industry, the struggles for financial sustainability, the effort required to run an idiosyncratic institution with professionalism while keeping its personality alive.

Throughout Big Fiction the storytelling is so breezy that it sometimes feels like gossip, and it makes the book an enormously fun read. But the publishing industry doesn’t always let facts get in the way of a good story. Anecdotes from industry sources can sometimes reach recreational-fishing levels of exaggeration; often, they are marked by spin, massaged details, and competing interpretations to rival Rashomon. Sinykin pulls from these sources at his own risk, though he does shore up his research with lots of original documentation. At one point Sinykin describes the circumstances behind Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie’s instant book Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf; my colleague Steve Wasserman, who edited the book in 1990, recalls the events somewhat differently. In Sinykin’s chapter on non-profits, he leans so heavily on a single source, the literary impresario Jim Sitter, that it sometimes reads more like Sitter’s chapter than Sinykin’s.

The story of U.S. book publishing is complex and often non-linear, and Sinykin’s approach follows suit to his book’s advantage. In getting his arms around such a big and unruly story, Sinykin has to take some conceptual leaps. These are always interesting, even when they’re not completely convincing. When Sinykin lapses into a more old-school academic way of evaluating writers and writing (X author succeeds, Y book fails), his assertions start jarring. He hits some rough territory when he talks about the fraught cultural negotiations between authors and non-profit presses. His criticism of Percival Everett’s “fail[ure] to recognize that [his publisher] Graywolf and its fellow nonprofits operate according to a parallel racial logic as the conglomerates” rings false. So does his argument about Karen Tei Yamashita’s complicity with the logic of non-profits, especially when he writes that Yamashita “indicts [her publisher] Coffee House’s embrace of liberal multiculturalism at the same time that she knowingly acknowledges that her novel will advance that cause.”

Everett and Yamashita deserve more credit than this. For authors of their stature, experience, and positionalities, it is almost impossible not to experience these contradictions at a deeply intimate level. But Sinykin usually works hard to avoid such aloof academic judgments, and most of the time his care for psychological complexity comes through. He hits the nail on the head when he says, “An author has leeway in leveraging the discourse acceptable to her press. This negotiation between the author and the institution is often (but not always) subliminal, happening at the level of intuition, each player playing her role.”

Zooming out, Big Fiction does something special: it examines not only publishing houses but bookstores and—I was particularly excited on this next count—distributors like Ingram Book Company (now known as Ingram Content Group). Once a publishing company has produced a book, the distributor sells and ships the book to stores. When journalists report on extreme conglomeration in the book business, they usually focus on how Amazon has practically bulldozed away the nation’s brick-and-mortar bookstores, or they cite the Department of Justice’s successful 2021–22 antitrust suit against the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. (S&S would later be purchased in October 2023 by the private equity firm KKR.)

But major corporate publishers do big business in distribution; the distributor of famously leftist Verso Books is none other than Penguin Random House Publisher Services. And almost nobody outside the industry has ever heard of Ingram, which is not owned by a publishing house but does $2 billion in business a year. Ingram now has a concerning degree of control over book distribution in the United States; four of America’s biggest book distributors are Ingram subsidiaries. (When Columbia University Press mailed me an advance copy of Big Fiction, it came through Ingram’s booming print-on-demand service, Lightning Source.) If publishers have reached a disturbing degree of conglomeration, the distributor situation might be even scarier. A small and evidently courageous new distributor called Asterism did arrive on the scene in 2021—but a truly healthy publishing culture will need many more new endeavors like it.

Sinykin is not attempting to prove that books used to be better. As he admits, “I don’t believe the novels written in the last forty years are worse than those written in the forty years previous.” And throughout Big Fiction, readers are cautioned against assessing literary quality with a hermetic mindset. Instead, the book models a much broader outlook. It’s about getting wise to the ways capitalism determines what and how we read, and it’s about understanding the strategies that shrewd authors and publishing professionals have used to keep their heads above water. It’s about the ways exclusivity continues to shape popular culture. And it shows literature to be fluid and unfixed, contingent on economic shifts and the people reckoning with them. Big Fiction makes for a demystifying and ultimately empowering read—one of particular value for anyone who feels shut out of the publishing milieu—and will help facilitate our understanding of the culture we have. That understanding is critical as we fight for the culture we want. ♦