Big Fiction

Dan Sinykin's 2023 book, Big Fiction, is an account of the structural changes in the publishing industry between 1960 and 2000. Essentially, publishing companies started to buy each other. As a result of this conglomeration, they became larger and much more bureaucratic. Before a novel could be okayed for publication, editors needed to get the approval of a much larger number of stakeholders.

This book is both quite good and extremely controversial.

My task is to: a) describe the contents of the book and tell you why the book is good, and b) describe the controversial aspects and weigh in about those debates too.

It's really the latter part that is the most difficult, so I'll leave that for the end.

The view from seventy years ago

The story outlined in Big Fiction is that in the 1960s, fiction publishing was driven by a number of relatively-small firms that were often founder- or family-led. There were two types of firms: some published hardback fictions that were sold in bookstores; others published mass-market paperbacks that were sold in drugstores, news-stands, and general stores.

Most of the authors we’d call 'literary' were published in hardback, and this business was somewhat simple. Here's Sinykin describing how an editor, Jason Epstein, conceptualized the book business.

It was easy to turn a profit. In 1963, Epstein wrote that he only needed to sell “six or seven thousand copies” to put a book in the black. Given the country’s literary infrastructure, any book stood a chance at being big. He ran the numbers: “There are only 1,804 bookstores in America, of which only a few hundred really count. If the book starts to sell in these, the other 1,500 will hear about it soon enough and begin to order it from the jobbers. There is no reason at all that such a book,” he wrote, “cannot become a great bestseller.” Reviews helped. A review in the New York Times signaled to the bookstores that counted that they ought to pick up a book.

Then everything changed.

The bookstores consolidated

This happened in two waves. In the 60s and 70s, there were the mall-chains: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. Suddenly, hundreds of stores were owned by a single corporate purchaser, and to get into these bookstores, you needed to please this corporate parent.

Then these stores were themselves challenged by Borders and Barnes & Nobles. Now you