What Do Mega Publishing House Acquisitions Mean for Creators?

Illustrated by Laura Moraiti

We all heard the collective gasp of creators when the news broke that Penguin Random house acquired Simon & Schuster in 2020 for more than $2 billion, but the headline should raise eyebrows for more than just the merging of two giant publishing houses. What does it mean for creators when a publishing house actively swallows up its opposition? 

For authors and illustrators, there’s the competition to worry about; that is, competition amongst publishing houses when bidding on books is shrinking even smaller. The “Big Five” publishing houses are now the “Big Four”, an already concerningly tiny number. It stands to reason that fewer houses, even including the small ones, means lower bids as competition shrinks in favor of large companies. 

As a historically underpaid population, save for the few big-name authors like Stephen King or John Green, this is extremely worrisome. In fact, once you work out advances and the typical 10% royalties on net profit for each book, the typical author makes about minimum wage. And even if you weren’t planning on querying one of these five, er, four houses, you’d be shocked to learn just how many small publishing houses these mega publishers have cannibalized. 

Penguin Random House itself was actually two imprints as Penguin and Random house before merging in 2013. The past ten years, in fact, have shown a huge increase in publishing house consolidation. News Corp purchased romance publisher Harlequin and Hachette Book Group swallowed Perseus Books. 

Now, including audiobook, ebook, digital, and print, Penguin Random house owns and has acquired over 250 imprints. HarperCollins and Macmillan each own over 50. Hachette over 30. Simon & Schuster owned almost 70, all of which now stand under Penguin’s umbrella. The end result of this all? Penguin Random House now publishes an estimated ⅓ of all books sold in the United States. 

Giant corporations are cause for concern in general, sure. What’s most worrisome, though, is that freedom of expression seems to be shrinking with the number of publishers. Publishing houses acquired by a new parent company take on a new standard of publication with sale, leaving a shrinking hole for diverse voices and ideas to fall through. If a third of all books we read are published by one house, there’s no guarantee that the books we’re reading are giving us any new information at all. It also means that the books that are being published aren’t representative of the book queries sent into the houses. Writers and illustrators are more and more pigeonholed to very few choices in style and thought. 

Despite the concern, Simon & Schuster released a statement insisting the imprint would remain independent as a publisher, assuring that they would still bid on books as before the merger. If true, it would mean that economic competition would remain consistent, but Penguin Random House would be bidding against itself on potential clients. However, there was already a precedent for this conundrum, too: Penguin Random House branches compete against each other for book projects all the time.

But it’s prudent to ask if a company that bids against itself is at all conducive to benefit the actual creators? It’s difficult not to wonder, what sort of caps are glued to the tops of these internal bidding buckets?