The Merger

by Sheila Connolly

This week two of the Big Six publishers, Random House and Penguin, announced plans to merge, sending ripples through the publishing community.  I am published by an imprint of Penguin.

 

For those who are not writers, the Big Six is the collective name for the major publishers, most based in New York.  They have been, until now:  Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House, and Simon & Schuster.  Each includes multiple imprints, some of which you may have heard of or remember.  The list goes on for pages, and represents a lot of the former small publishers that  those big publishers have absorbed (or swallowed) because they were having trouble surviving in a difficult publishing environment.

 

Random House and Penguin are the two largest trade houses in the country, and include the two dominant publishers of mass market paperbacks. Random House publishes about 10,000 titles each year; Penguin 4,000 titles. Together they would control 17% of the market, making it hard for Amazon to jigger with the Buy buttons for those titles (as they have done occasionally).

 

Why this merger?  Economics, or so they claim.  In a press release, Penguin pointed to "synergies from shared resources such as warehousing, distribution, printing and central functions." Funny—most of these functions refer to print books. Of course, the companies also add that this merger "advances the digital transformation on an even greater scale."

 

The big publishers (in my opinion) have been slow to respond to the whole digital revolution.  They didn't see it coming; they dismissed it as a mere flash in the pan.  Obviously they were wrong, and now they're playing catch-up.  But it's like trying to turn the Titanic—the traditional business of print books is hard to move quickly.

 

Another reason for the merger?  Amazon, which now controls a huge market share in book sales. Are we witnessing a battle of the Titans?  The old guard forming an alliance to confront the fleet upstart Amazon?

 

Of course, on a more personal note, I have to worry about authors like me who publish with one or the other Big Six companies or their imprints.  I'm friends with a lot of others in my position, mostly cozy writers.  Will our contracts be valid, going forward?  Are we going to have to wait and see whether those contracts are renewed or extended?  Who will sign any new authors or offer any new contracts until the dust settles? (If all goes as planned, this will be later in 2013.)

 

I'd guess that most book buyers pay no attention to the logo on the spine of a book—they recognize the author, or the style of the cover, when they make a selection.  They won't know that some of their buying options may disappear in the coming months.  It's harder and harder for them to find a bookstore to browse in, so of course they flock to Amazon because it's so much easier to shop there.

 

Random House CEO Markus Dohle says, "the whole idea is to preserve the small company culture and small company feeling on the editorial and creative side."  Let's hope so (please don't take my editor away!).  As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, "Fasten your seat belts.  It's going to be a bumpy night."

 

One last question:  will it be Random Penguin or Penguin House? Outgoing Pearson (Penguin's parent company) chief executive Marjorie Scardino joked that "Random Penguin did come into conversation, but it hurt the penguin's feelings."

 

 

Welcome, Intermix

by Sheila Connolly

Writers, can you feel the earth shifting under your feet? Yesterday Publishers Marketplace reported that Berkley/New American Library (the mass market paperback division of Penguin) will launch a new e-book imprint in January, to be called InterMix. (No, they didn't tell me, even though they publish my books.) The imprint will focus on the traditional mass market genres, and will release both reprints and titles from new authors.

What I found most interesting was not the formation of this new imprint—we all knew something like this was coming, right?—but the fact that they're starting out with eleven of Nora Roberts's titles, which have not been released as e-books until now. (Note that they didn't mention any "new" authors for release.) Through the next year they will also release Regency romances and seven more of Roberts's books, among other things.

Uh-huh. I think it's safe to say that Nora Roberts does not need B/NAL. Recent reports say that she has published over 200 romance novels; there are over 400 million copies of her books in print. Maybe more, for all I know—it's hard to keep this information up to date. She's won every award in her genre, many times over. Several years ago it was said that she was earning close to $70 million dollars—per year.

I admire the woman, no question. She's paid her dues, worked hard, and gives back to the writers community. I've heard her say that she writes four books a year (and apparently doesn't need to edit any more, but after 200 books I'd guess she doesn't have to).

But I'm not writing here to praise Nora Roberts; I'm trying to figure out what thinking lies behind B/NAL's strategy. As noted, Nora does not need them, but they seem to believe that they need her star power and her army of faithful readers to succeed in their new venture.

I'm sure most of us who write have watched the Big Six publishers struggle to respond to the wildfire spread of e-publishing in the past year or two. I have a mental image of these companies as hulking creatures, cobbled together from the bones and bits of smaller companies, and it's not easy for them to change course. Think of the Titanic trying to make its way through the icebergs: you can't change course quickly, but if you can't, you slam into an iceberg and down you go (even when you're supposedly sink-proof). Are e-books like icebergs? Maybe. They've been growing for a while, but now they've broken off the glacier and are bobbing around in the bigger ocean—and creating problems for the slow ships.

Or maybe I should offer another analogy: the king, with his bloated court and his wealth and armies and long traditions, is now on the battle field facing a new enemy (think King John and Robin Hood), who may be small with scattered forces, but who is agile and creative—and who may bring down the kingdom.

Maybe books as we have know them are going the way of the dinosaurs. That does not mean that writers and readers will disappear, only that writers will find new ways to reach readers, and readers may hope to find easier (and cheaper) ways to read.

But to come back to Ms. Roberts, she brings her readership to the table in this deal, and I'd guess that her readers will buy anything available from her. But historically the schedule for books has been driving to some extent by the physical process of printing and distribution (and the writer's speed). Now it is possible to make a book available in a day, electronically.

My question is, is there a reader saturation point? If a writer can produce three or four books a year, will readers—even the most faithful followers—snap them all up instantly? Gone will be that interval of aching anticipation of the next book, a year or more in the future. Is that good or bad?