“You have to think about the long term,” she said. Mary Rasenberger, the executive director of the Authors Guild, a writers’ group that opposes the merger, said that while her organization is pleased about the internal bidding rules, it doesn’t do much to alleviate their concerns. Some publishers only offer house bids and do not allow internal competition. If the third party drops out, the bidding stops, and the author selects an imprint from within Penguin Random House in what the industry likes to call a “beauty contest.”Ī spokeswoman for Penguin Random House said the practice of allowing imprints to compete would continue but that it was too early to say whether Simon & Schuster and its imprints would still count as a third party. Penguin Random House operates about 95 imprints in the United States, like Vintage Books, Crown Publishing Group and Viking, and these imprints are allowed to bid against one another, as long as another publisher is bidding as well.
‘Intimacies’: Katie Kitamura’s novel follows an interpreter at The Hague who is dealing with loss, an uncertain relationship and an insecure world.‘On Juneteenth’: Annette Gordon-Reed explores the racial and social complexities of Texas, her home state, weaving history and memoir.‘How Beautiful We Were’: Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is a tale of a casually sociopathic corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls.If there are fewer buyers, will it be harder for agents to get an auction going for their clients, and ultimately, will it be harder for authors to get an advantageous deal?Įditors at The Times Book Review selected the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. An agent representing a promising author or buzzworthy book often hopes to auction it to the highest bidder.
Perhaps the industry’s biggest concern about the merger, especially among agents and authors, is what it will mean for book deals. Trump’s 2020 memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough,” which sold more than 1.35 million copies in its first week. Simon & Schuster is a powerful player as well, publishing more than 2,400 books a year, including Mary L. Half of this week’s New York Times best sellers are its books, including Glennon Doyle’s “ Untamed,” which has been on the list for nearly a year, and Barack Obama’s memoir. With 15,000 titles published annually, Penguin Random House is a dominant force in the industry. NPD’s BookScan, which tracks paper copies sold through most retailers, put the combined company at about 28 percent of all books sold last year that figure rises to about 34 percent including the books the companies distribute for other publishers. Those numbers come from the Association of American Publishers, a trade association, which based its estimate on the complete U.S. Penguin Random House says that the two companies combined would generate less than 20 percent of the general interest publishing revenue in the United States. All that makes it difficult to get an accurate read on how dominant any one player is. Publishing is a fragmented business: There are general interest publishers and academic publishers, big companies and small ones, as well as people who self-publish. Gordon said, is how big the two companies would be if combined. One of the main questions federal regulators will look at when deciding whether to approve the deal, Mr. “But this one will get careful scrutiny.”
“We don’t know what the Biden administration’s antitrust approach will look like,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. All this comes amid an atmosphere of increased attention on the dominance of large companies like Facebook and Google, and a new Justice Department to evaluate them. The merger of two of the largest publishers in the United States - Penguin Random House is already the biggest by almost any metric - has the potential to touch every piece of the book business, including how much writers get paid, which books get priority at printing plants and how independent bookshops are run. When Penguin Random House said last year that it planned to buy Simon & Schuster for more than $2 billion, the entire publishing industry snapped to attention.