Why are books so boring now?

If the figures are to be believed, there has never been a better time to be a publisher. In 2022, British publishers sold 669 million physical books, the highest number ever recorded. 2023 was tougher for many, with the post-COVID bump in book sales finally coming to an end. Even so, according to Nielsen BookScan, £92.3 million was spent on books in the week leading up to Christmas alone that year – the highest figure for 16 years.

Yet these buoyant numbers can hide more than they reveal. The Bookseller, the publishing industry’s trade magazine, is regularly filled with publishers lamenting the state of the industry. In its pages we hear tales of woe about the number of books published each year (too many), the sales of individual titles (too few) and the ability to compete for space on the bookshelves (too hard). Staff, we are told, are leaving the industry in droves, forced out by overwork, stress, low pay and an over-emphasis on the bottom line.

The age when publishing was a gentleman’s pursuit, of long boozy lunches and strolls with authors around well-appointed Bloomsbury offices, when the undisputed kings of the trade (and kings they were in this male-dominated world) were the editors, is well and truly over. The hold on the industry of the big houses (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan; plus Simon & Schuster in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK) has grown hugely since a wave of mergers and acquisitions that began in the 1960s, consolidating what were formerly small family-run boutique houses into publishing behemoths.

As the academic Dan Sinykin argues in his revealing book, Big Fiction: How Conglomerates Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, so deep has been the effect of this new corporate world that it constitutes its own epoch: the conglomerate era.

Image by Driek, via Flickr.

Beginning in the 1960s, in response to antitrust laws, corporations like the electronics giant RCA (which bought Random House in 1965) and Time Inc. (which bought Little, Brown in 1968) began looking for new worlds to conquer, a process that accelerated during the neoliberal 1980s and 1990s. The resulting waves of mergers and acquisitions led to new corporate demands on publishers. As Sinykin writes, ‘marketing, publicity and sales departments grew and gained influence. Editors spent more time in meetings and filling out profit-and-loss forms. Literary agents became essential intermediaries, as publishing houses no longer rifled through submissions to find emerging talents.’ Today, Penguin Random House, by far the largest publisher in the Anglophone world and constituting a vast thicket of different imprints and presses, is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann; HarperCollins is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp.

With this shift, the purpose of the publishing house changed too. As Richard Snyder, then CEO of Simon & Schuster, said rather ominously in 1991, ‘we are not a publisher, we are now a creator of copyrights for their exploitation in any medium or distribution system.’

The scourge of the ‘comparable title’

The divide between popularity and prestige was always present in publishing but, Sinykin argues, the conglomerate era has seen it grow wider. Where once a novel like
E. L. Doctorow’s formally innovative Ragtime could hold its own as the year’s biggest title, as it did in 1975, those who came out on top in this new world were a different kind of name brand author. The 1980s and 1990s saw authors like Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton gain ascendency, expected to churn out a blockbuster a year with work that tended to incorporate the conventions of genre fiction.

Today’s biggest sellers are no different. Recent years have seen the dominance of young adult romance writer Colleen Hoover (six of the UK’s 50 top-selling books of 2023), Richard Osman’s gentle crime books (four of the top 50), and J. K. Rowling (whose Harry Potter series has provided the best-selling book of the year nine times since 1998). Alongside these commercial giants are big sellers from those famous in other fields: 2023’s overall highest seller was Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare.

In the editorial meetings where what is published is decided and why, the most enduring effect has been the dominance of the ‘comparable title’. Comps, as they are known, are the system whereby newly acquired titles are judged by reference to the sales of older, similar books. Although a long-standing practice, it wasn’t until the introduction of BookScan in 2001, and with it the ready availability of accurate industry-wide sales figures, that they gained a new kind of dominance.

For an editor to acquire a book today, a list of comps will need to be drawn up, their sales figures high enough for a book to break even. The book will then be scrutinized by the marketing, publicity and sales departments, where the author’s ability to discuss their work on TV or podcasts is evaluated, their social media followings judged and the chances of review coverage assessed.

This situation has been greatly accelerated by changes beyond the publishing houses. It is Sinykin’s great merit that he looks at the wider economic conditions, including the rise of retail chains, the growth of wholesalers, and with them more complex and reactive distribution chains, along with the diminishing influence of book reviews and the rise of Amazon.

Now more than ever, the journey of a book from the writer’s desk to the reader’s hands is a complex one. Joining the acquiring editor in shaping it is the agent, the publicist, the marketer, the subsidiary rights specialist and the social media manager, as well as booksellers, book buyers, wholesalers – and, somewhere behind all of this, the shareholder. Each of these has different, sometimes competing, interests and expectations.

The homogenization of books

What this system has led to, at its worst, is a homogenization of the industry and the kind of books that are published, in the larger publishing houses more than most. It would take a truly determined or exceptionally risky editor to force through a book that is wholly new in form or content, or whose only comps are books that have flopped. Instead, one success is followed by a string of imitators – think of the post-Richard Osman boom in ‘cosy crime’, or the endless run of similar blobby, multi-coloured book covers on the shelves of WH Smith. The result is the dominance of sterile, trend-following, middlebrow fiction, and identikit and insipid nonfiction.

Innovative works of fiction that have gone on to find a wider readership do exist. Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, written in a dense hybrid of Old and Modern English, was originally published by the crowdfunder-backed publisher Unbound before being longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014. The American writer Percival Everett wrote more than 20 novels for small presses before being nominated for the Booker in 2022 with The Trees, and his 2001 novel Erasure was recently made into the Hollywood film American Fiction.

But these examples merely prove the rule. As the poet and editor Rachael Allen has written, there is ‘a deep-seated, complex, and classist anti-intellectualism that pervades the UK that fears difference, difficulty and experimentation’. In few places is this clearer than the editorial meetings of that most middle-class of worlds, London publishing.

If, as the editor Daniel Menaker once said, publishing books is like a bad day at the casino, in which ‘you put your money down and most of the time you lose’, then the goal of this long process of evaluation is to lower the odds of backing a win – or, at least, the chances of losing the house on a dud. But success in publishing will always have some element of randomness to it. No one, no matter how good their comps, can guarantee a book will sell enough to break even, let alone storm into the bestseller charts. In 2003, just four per cent of Penguin Random House titles earned 60 per cent of its profits. For much of the rest, publishers rely on the continuing sales of their backlist.

It would be easy to be pessimistic about such a situation, even nostalgic for a better, less commercial age. But no matter what the memoirs from the last of the gentleman-publishers say, there never was a golden age. The bestsellers list, as even a cursory glance at Claud Cockburn’s 1972 study of popular fiction Bestseller will attest, has always been filled with pap. The trade-off between the concerns of the marketplace and those of taste has long existed.

And, as Sinykin notes, one of the reactions to the conglomerate takeover of publishing was the flourishing of independent presses, many of which continue to publish innovative work beyond the reach of the corporate giants. London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, founded by Jacques Testard, the former publisher of literary magazine The White Review, in 2014, has published four of the past eight recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Other publishers, including Verso Books, where I am one of the editors, have opted for greater vertical integration, cutting out the middlemen by selling directly to their readers via their websites.

The fear remains though that, as the journalist Louis Cheslaw recently reported, ‘more than ever, people are only buying the same few titles, if they’re buying books at all.’ The cautious nature of contemporary publishing, a factor often stemming from and heightened by its conglomerate owners, although still capable of selling millions of books, pushes readers towards a diminishing number of similar titles.

In the past half century, the publishing industry has changed almost beyond recognition, often for the worse. Where once stood an editor’s taste, or mere intuition, now stands the dominance of the comp and its flattening influence on what makes it onto the bookshelves. But taste and a book’s content still matter. It is up to those of us who care about art, those who think critically about the world, to continue to fight against the worst effects of the conglomerate era. Because if one thing is certain, there will always be the need for good books.

This article first featured in New Humanist. It has been selected as an article for Come Together, a project leveraging existing wisdom from community media organization in six different countries to foster innovative approaches.