The Maw of the Conglomerate

August 7, 2008 | View Comments

In college I was warned against pursuing an editorial career. The kind of relationships Maxwell Perkins enjoyed with his publisher and authors had by the 1990s become an artifact of a bygone era. The few remaining editors, I was told, clung to jobs at small literary presses, and even there made unsettling compromises between sales potential and literary merit. The corporatization of publishing severed the personal connections between editors and writers that were once a hallmark of the industry. What place, then, for those of us who still keenly felt a connection to writers? What, then, of the writers themselves, left to fight for the vestiges of editorial support remaining in agents and the copyeditors? Publishing had changed, and I needed to learn more about the new landscape.

At Emerson College I got the most brutal news yet. In a class on book editing, I read an essay by Gerald Howard called “Mistah Perkins — He Dead,” which confirmed the worst harbingers of publishing’s demise. He claimed, first in 1985 and again in a 1993 postscript to the article, that the ideals of the Perkins-inspired editor could find no place in the modern publishing industry:

It is impossible to imagine that august figure Max Perkins working happily or even successfully in this world, for his values–loyalty, honesty, taste, proportion, Olympian standards–are not always negotiable currency these days…. The heart of darkness at the center of today’s publishing world is not a jungle. Rather, it is a flashy, disorienting environment, a combination hall of mirrors, MTV video, commodities pit, cocktail party, soap opera, circus, fun house, and three-card monte game. The message one emerges with, stunned and shaken by what one has witnessed, is: ‘Mistah Perkins — he dead.’”

Obituaries for the editorial profession have remained popular ever since. They do not misstate the situation, and in truth the facts have only gotten more grim in the intervening 15 years. At least when Howard wrote his essay, editors still had text to edit! In 2004 Robert McCrum wrote “The Curse of the Synopsis” for The Guardian. McCrum observes two entangled yet contradictory problems in the current publishing world: contracts are rewarded to writers on the basis of the briefest sketch of a book before a manuscript has been written, and the number of new publications continues to grow at an unprecedented rate.

So the industry suffers from the twin challenges of too many and not enough words. Books are created in this way thanks to the single-minded focus of once-independent publishing houses on the one thing their new corporate masters crave above all else: profit.

Step into the Light
Creative Commons License photo credit: *saxon*

A best-selling author is only as valuable as the buzz for his or her next best-seller, and that publicity begins to be generated the moment the author’s current book tops the best-seller list. Little marketing emphasis is placed on the content of these books; we are compelled to buy them (whether we read them or not!) on the basis of their proximity to other works, other authors, ideally ones also owned by the same publishing empire.

The ever-consolidating nature of the publishing industry will end only when the whole of it, owned by one corporation, collapses into itself like a star gone supernova. To fret that the maw of the conglomerate will suck down with it all of literature, however, is disingenuous.

  1. trishsmith426’s avatar

    trishsmith426 on August 25, 2008 at 8:46 am

    From the perspective of a reader (one who does not select her reading materials from the NY Times Best Seller List or from the Oprah Book Club List [shudder]), I wholeheartedly agree with you. The result of all this madness is that, in my experience anyway, it becomes harder and harder to find good books. When marketing and publishing decisions are made without the guidance of editors who care about the quality of the books they are publishing, and the decision of what to publish is based upon profit margin, then the only logical conclusion is that the quality of books being published today is significantly lower. A brief perusal through the local chain bookstore will affirm that conclusion.

    One question that begs to be asked is, who suffers from the current state of affairs? The answer: everyone. The reader, for whom it is harder and harder (though far from impossible) to find quality material to read; the writers, both new and established, who find themselves forced to produce “best-sellers” instead of quality (although the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, when quality is not striven for, it tends to disappear); and the industry itself, which is driving itself to its own well-deserved end. Thank goodness some books worth reading actually do slip past the great maw of the conglomerate, or else us readers might be truly screwed.

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