What consolidation, crisis, and a few stubborn independents tell us about the future of books
In 2022, the Department of Justice blocked the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster on the grounds that it would harm competition — and, more pointedly, harm authors. The government’s expert witness argued that the merger would depress advances for books, particularly for the midlist writers who form the backbone of literary culture: not celebrities, not guaranteed blockbusters, but the serious novelists and essayists and poets whose work accumulates meaning over years and decades.
The merger was blocked. Simon & Schuster was sold instead to private equity.
The outcome felt, to many in publishing, like a narrowly avoided disaster that revealed exactly how precarious things already were. The room had already been narrowing for a long time. We just got a clearer look at the walls.
Five Publishers, Most of the Market
The “Big Five” — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster (now KKR-owned), Hachette, and Macmillan — control an estimated 80% of the U.S. trade publishing market. These are conglomerates that themselves contain dozens of imprints, each nominally independent, each operating within the logic of a parent company that must answer to shareholders or private equity funds.
This is not a recent development. Consolidation in publishing has been accelerating since the 1980s, when the first wave of corporate acquisitions transformed what had been a cottage industry of gentleman publishers into a component of entertainment conglomerates. What’s changed in the past decade is the intensity of the pressure: the rise of Amazon as a distribution monopoly, the collapse of the physical bookstore chain, the disruption of the returns system, the growth of self-publishing as both a genuine alternative and a devaluing force on advances.
The result is an industry that has become increasingly conservative in its acquisitions. Books are green-lit that fit an existing category, that can be pitched in a sentence, that have a “platform” behind them before a single page is written. The celebrity memoir, the trauma narrative packaged for mass relatability, the thriller with a high concept and a twist — these are not bad books by definition, but they are the books a risk-averse industry has learned to feel safe about.
The midlist — literary fiction that doesn’t break out immediately, debut short story collections, poetry, experimental work, translated literature — has paid the price. Advances for these books have shrunk. Marketing budgets have thinned. The traditional model in which a serious writer might build an audience across three or four modestly selling books before achieving broader recognition has largely collapsed at the major publishers, replaced by a sink-or-swim logic in which a debut that doesn’t earn out its advance in twelve months may not find a home for its follow-up.
What Independent Presses Actually Do
This is where independent publishing becomes not just a romantic alternative but a structural necessity.
Independent presses — Tin House, Graywolf, Milkweed, Coffee House, Restless Books, Two Dollar Radio, Akashic, Archipelago, and dozens of others — exist outside the logic of consolidation. They are not answerable to private equity. Their editors acquire books they believe in, on timescales that allow a serious literary work to find its audience. They publish translated literature at rates the majors have largely abandoned. They take on debut collections. They keep backlists in print.
They do all of this, almost uniformly, on budgets that would not cover a single marketing campaign at a Big Five house.
The economics of independent publishing depend on a web of grants, donations, university affiliations, and the labor of people who are genuinely underpaid for the work they do. Many small presses operate with tiny full-time staffs. The work gets done because the people doing it believe in it — which is a beautiful thing and also, let’s be honest, an unsustainable one if we don’t build structures that support it.
What independent presses have demonstrated, consistently, is that there is a readership for serious literary work. The success of small-press titles that crossed over — The Neapolitan Novels published by Europa Editions, Graywolf’s consistent presence on prize shortlists, Tin House’s growing influence in literary fiction — shows that the audience is not the problem. The problem is a distribution and marketing system organized around blockbusters.
The Translation Problem
Nowhere is the failure of mainstream publishing more visible than in translated literature.
The United States publishes, in any given year, somewhere between 3% and 5% of its books in translation. Compare this to Germany (12-15%), France (27%), or the Nordic countries, where translated works routinely comprise more than a third of published titles. American literary culture operates in an almost monolingual bubble — one that its readers often don’t notice because the domestic output is large enough to feel comprehensive.
What gets lost is the entire texture of global literary culture. The writers who are shaping conversations in Brazil, in South Korea, in Nigeria, in Poland, in Argentina — they exist in English primarily because small presses decided to take a chance on them. Clarice Lispector came to wide English readership through New Directions. Elena Ferrante through Europa. Han Kang’s earlier work through Portobello and Granta before The Vegetarian won the International Booker and Bloomsbury paid attention.
This pattern — small presses discovering, major publishers following — is not accidental. It reflects what the small presses are actually for: they are the R&D wing of literary culture, identifying writers and forms that matter before there’s a market signal to follow.
The problem is that they’re doing this work on shoestring budgets while bearing all the risk.
What We Owe Booksellers
Any honest account of literary publishing’s current state has to reckon with booksellers.
The collapse of Borders and the near-death of Barnes & Noble left independent bookstores as the primary physical infrastructure for literary publishing. This has had some genuinely positive effects: independent booksellers are intensely knowledgeable advocates who hand-sell books, develop community, and support the midlist in ways that chain stores never did. The growth of indie bookselling over the past decade — more than 700 new independent bookstores opened between 2009 and 2023 — is one of the genuinely hopeful developments in this industry.
But indie bookstores operate on razor-thin margins in an era of rising rents and Amazon pricing, and the distribution system that serves them is itself fragile. The near-collapse of Ingram, the dominant distributor, during COVID disruptions reminded everyone in the industry how much of the physical book supply chain depends on a handful of chokepoints.
Supporting independent booksellers is not just a consumer preference. It is a choice about what kind of literary culture you want to exist.
A Reason for Stubbornness
None of this is a counsel of despair. Literary publishing is in crisis in the way that literature is always in crisis — which is to say, it is threatened by forces larger than itself and it keeps going anyway.
The writers keep writing. The small presses keep acquiring. The editors keep believing in books that might sell three thousand copies and change a reader’s life in ways that can’t be measured. The booksellers keep recommending. The readers — and there are more of them than the apocalyptists want you to believe — keep reading.
What we need, alongside that stubbornness, is structural: better funding mechanisms for independent presses and literary journals, a distribution system that doesn’t require small publishers to bet their whole operation on a single season, translation subsidies that bring more of the world’s literature into English, and a broader public conversation that treats literary culture as infrastructure — as essential and worthy of support as any other form of cultural commons.
The room has been narrowing. It doesn’t have to keep narrowing.
But that requires people who care about books to act like they care about books — not just read them, but support the institutions that make them possible.
