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 had big-box bookstores, much larger than the typical bookstore, where the buying was also consolidated: Barnes and Nobles only had a single book-buyer for literary fiction—if your book didn't meet with her approval, then it wouldn't be stocked, and your potential sales would plummet.

The rise of these corporate bookstores also led to a revolution in distribution. Previously, bookstores used to buy their stock directly from publishers: to stock your bookstore, you might be getting shipments from dozens of different publishers. But now a new middleman, Ingram, arose. This company would buy stock from many different publishers, consolidate a bookstore’s order, and send it to each bookstore in fewer shipments than had previously been the case.

Previously, mass distribution had been the preserve of the paperback publishers, who used a system that was quite different from the hardback publishers. But now, between bookstore conglomeration and this improvement in distribution, it was suddenly possible for hardback releases to get mass distribution.

As Sinykin puts it:

With the spread of bookstores, supported by Ingram and its marketing apparatus, trade publishers (owned now by conglomerates that demanded quarterly growth even as the market was contracting), realized they could reach much larger audiences than previously, adopting the mass-market model and focusing on a small number of titles distributed widely for strong returns on investment.

The publishers also consolidated

Because of conglomeration in bookstores and distribution, there was now an incentive for publishers to place bigger bets behind single books.

It's not that bestsellers hadn't existed before, it's just that beforehand, it hadn't been possible to game the bestseller system in the same way. Before, bestseller status required something more intangible—if bookstores perceived there was demand for a book, they would order more of it, and other bookstores would also put in orders, and that would create the bestseller.

Now it was different. The game was to ship large quantities to bookstores right away, to discount those books and pay for premium placement in bookstores, in order to sell lots of copies quickly so that the book hit bestseller lists. Bookstores want a product that will actually sell, so if a book hits a bestseller list, this becomes a great advertisement to other booksellers and encourages them to stock it (which in turn leads to greater sales).

This change in the industry encouraged conglomeration. The publishers that would succeed were the ones that had the most resources to put behind individual books. If a publisher was larger, it also had more influence with the buyers at big bookstore chains.

During the same period when bookstore conglomerates formed, publishers also began to buy each other. And, even more importantly, publishers began to be run in a larger, more impersonal fashion. And this in turn influenced what kinds of books got written:

To write a novel in the United States in 1985 was a completely different experience than it had been twenty years earlier, before conglomerates swept through the industry. Then, your odds amounted to how easily you could get your book in the right editor’s hands. It helped a lot to have the right friends. Now you faced a gauntlet. Could marketers see a market? What would the chain bookbuyers think? Could publicists picture your face on TV, your voice on the radio? Could agents sniff subsidiary rights? Would foreign rights sell at the Frankfurt Book Fair? Might your story be remediated? Would it work in audio? On the big screen?

But of course here we get into the controversial part. Because Sinykin doesn't just say that the book business has changed—he also says that writers’ incentives have changed, and that this has changed literature itself. As he puts it in the next paragraph:

I do not mean that authors kept these questions in mind when writing, or even that they knew to answer them in the first place. Nor did each question exert force on each book that came up for acquisition. Rather, I mean to dramatize the dispersal of power out of the hands of the author and the editor and into a great many hands. The exact formula to determine who held sway differed at each house and with each book. Success depended on recognition by something like a system, so much so that fiction itself, when published by conglomerates, came to display, seen as a whole, a systematic intelligence, a systematic authorship.

This is the metaphor that Sinykin returns to repeatedly in the book. He says that conglomerate publishing has taken the power of authorship out of individual hands. So that now, in the conglomerate era, it's improper to speak of authors, because really books have a collective authorship: they're authored by the conglomerate itself.

This is very controversial, because Sinykin implies that this 'systematic authorship' isn't merely a property of commercial fiction—it's also a property of the works of Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. In other words, even Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy aren't really the authors of their work—instead it is the conglomerates who wrote their work.

Big Fiction is itself a work of art

I find that when people talk about Big Fiction, they immediately want to jump into arguing about these particular statements about conglomerate authorship. In fact, the main reason I read the book was because Christian Lorentzen, writing for Granta, got into such high dudgeon about precisely this notion of collective authorship:

Falling ‘for the romance of individual genius’, in Sinykin’s schema, is akin to thinking there’s something special in the soda aisle when you see the Sprite insignia but fail to comprehend that it’s just another product of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company.

But I think it's worth pausing for a moment to emphasize that Big Fiction is really good. This book is itself a work of art! This book is exceptionally clear, exceptionally lucid—it's hard to believe it was written by an English Lit academic, because there's so little double-talk and jargon.

Moreover, it's a book that is heavy on examples, heavy on narrative. But the examples feel very well-chosen. The balance of theory and example feels perfect. There will be a few paragraphs of theory, then a few pages of examples. Sometimes there'll be examples in the same paragraph as the theory. As a result, the book is not just easy to read, you also just feel like you understand exactly what he's trying to say.

For instance, take this paragraph:

A host of new figures—the chain bookbuyer, the agent, the publicist—eroded the editor’s power. The scale of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks with their hundreds of locations in suburban shopping malls made it easier to manufacture bestsellers, giving power to the chain bookbuyer. Agents could demand more, knowing the scale at which big books would newly sell; they became much more aggressive in defense of authors’ rights and in pursuit of large advances. Publishers could count on Tom Clancy, Stephen King, or Danielle Steel, paid huge advances, to win back enough profits to satisfy CEOs concerned about the bottom line. The buying power of the chains, the infusions of capital from conglomerates, the high-powered auctions made book business, in the words of Owen Laster, agent to James Michener and Gore Vidal, “suddenly glamorous.” Glamour favored the marketer, the promoter, the publicist.

Not only is it very clear, but every sentence in this paragraph was preceded by paragraphs of evidence and examples. So when you finally read this paragraph, you believe that it is indeed true, and that something has in fact changed in the industry.

As a description of the changing nature of the publishing industry over the last fifty years, this book is incredible. Once you read this book, you will understand, on an intuitive level, that the industry which published John Steinbeck was very different from the industry that published Toni Morrison.

Personally, what I gained most from this book was an understanding that publishers aren’t really in the business of selling books to consumers; they’re in the business of selling books to bookstores. And that this business changed tremendously over the course of the latter half of the 20th century.¹

That alone is worth the price of admission. There are many people who write about books, but do not understand the things that Sinykin has written here. I myself thought that I understood conglomerate publishing, but my understanding has certainly been deepened quite a bit by this book. I think it is essential reading if you're going to write about this industry.

What does this have to do with literature?

With this book, Sinykin is participating in a strand of English academia called "the sociology of literature". This school of literary analysis seeks to deepen our understanding of literary works by studying the social and economic factors that underpin literary production.

The most well-known book produced by this school is Mark McGurl's The Program Era, which sought to understand how the rise of MFA programs had affected literary fiction in the 20th century. McGurl’s book, The Program Era, is an explicit influence on Sinykin's book, and is name-checked several times in Big Fiction.

The difficulty faced by academics undertaking a "sociology of literature" is that they need to demonstrate that this activity can somehow improve our understanding of texts.

In The Program Era, McGurl attempted to 'read' the conditions of the workshop into a number of literary texts. For instance, Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest while taking creative writing classes at Stanford, which means, in McGurl's telling:

...it is difficult to read the scenes in the novel where patients gather in a circle for Group Meeting without seeing an afterimage of the Stanford seminar room hovering behind them. They are all of them—the writing workshop, the group therapy session, the psychedelic bus trip—strikingly similar in their intermediate social scale, and it makes sense that these forms of small group association would achieve, in experience, a level of analogical inter-substitutability.

I am not alone in being less-than-impressed by this kind of textual analysis. It's not that I don't think writers can be influenced by the form of the workshop, it's just...this reading doesn't do much. It's not very revealing. It feels like a trick. If you hadn't known that Ken Kesey went through workshop, you'd never have read the workshop into his book.

The interpretative readings in The Program Era really mar the book, because they're constantly forcing us to ask, "Is this actually interesting?"

Sinykin, perhaps as a result, includes far fewer of these kinds of interpretative readings. But he does include a few, and they tend to be the weakest part of the book. For instance, he writes that Toni Morrison's Beloved is about her finally being freed from her role as an editor in the conglomerate publishing system:

Acknowledging the possibility of exaggeration, let’s follow Morrison’s thought. Beloved describes the thrill of freedom, but also insists that freedom is contaminated by the haunting of slavery. Among the degradations that haunt Sethe, she was coerced into complicity with racist writings. A villain named schoolteacher—uncapitalized—dehumanizes Sethe by forcing her to submit to his pupils’ scrutiny as they write down, in parallel, her “human” and “animal” characteristics. Sethe returns to this traumatic event, remembering the observation. She also remembers, and is haunted by, the fact that she made the ink that schoolteacher and his pupils used. “I made the ink,” she says, toward the end of the novel, “He couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made the ink.

This reading is somewhat convincing, because it uses evidence from a preface that Morrison wrote, where she says explicitly that the book arose due to the “shock of liberation” she felt after quitting her publishing job at Random House.

The problem is...it's not clear what conglomeration has to do with any of this. Even before conglomeration, people had jobs. People felt freedom when they quit their jobs. Even before conglomeration, black women often felt like tokens when they were part of mostly-white organizations. Big Fiction isn't about publishing in general, it's about a specific thing that happened in publishing, and there is no evidence that this specific thing, conglomeration, is represented in Morrison's fiction.

“Conglomeration made [Cormac] McCarthy middlebrow”

The difficulty for Sinykin is proving that conglomeration had an impact on the style or content of literature. This is almost impossible to prove, but at times he makes convincing points. For instance, Sinykin contrasts Cormac McCarthy's difficult, obscure book Blood Meridian (which sold only a few thousand copies) with his breakout hit, All the Pretty Horses, which Sinykin claims is lighter and more accessible. Knopf put a huge sum into marketing All The Pretty Horses, and this is part of how it became a hit.

Sinykin implies that conglomerate publishing, by turning literary fiction into a product, created a material incentive for McCarthy to create a more palatable product:

Between Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy moved imprints, gained a new editor, and hired a formidable agent. Random House fired a president who defended boutique novelists and hired one who demanded each book support itself. And McCarthy’s style changed. He adopted genre techniques that would persist in his work. We should reimagine McCarthy’s career as divided less by Appalachia and the West than by refuge from, and then participation in, the conglomerate era, culminating with his publication of Pulitzer Prize–winning, Oprah’s Book Club–endorsed, postapocalyptic mega-bestseller The Road in 2007. Conglomeration made McCarthy middlebrow.

Christian Lorentzen objected McCarthy worked on All The Pretty Horses a decade—he did not write this book under any kind of editorial pressure. He wrote the book, and then he sold it.

Nonetheless, there does seem to be a little truth in the idea that All The Pretty Horses is a more palatable book, much easier to sell to the public, than Blood Meridian. It was the kind of book that conglomerate publishing could invest a large sum into marketing. As a result of that investment, McCarthy became much more successful and popular. And...that's the reason we're talking about him today.

If Knopf hadn't made that investment in McCarthy, I probably wouldn't know his name.

That's basically what Sinykin is trying to argue with this book, which is that in order for us to hear about a book, an increasing number of people need to get behind it. And if they don't get behind it, then we never hear about it.

The idea of literature is predicated on the notion that good things are more likely to endure than bad things. Thus, if something has endured, it’s probably good.

But that doesn’t mean everything good endures. Some good things are surely lost or forgotten (or don’t even get published in the first place). And, all else equal, if something is produced in greater quantities and read by more people, it’s probably less likely to be forgotten. That’s why Steinbeck has never gone out of print, while Faulkner went through a period in the mid-20th century where his books weren’t available—both authors are great, but Steinbeck’s books were bestsellers during their initial publication, while Faulkner’s weren’t.

Right now, in America, some good authors get picked by corporate publishing, which then prints up tens of thousands of copies of their books. Those authors seem much more likely to endure than the ones that don’t get picked. Anyone who is able to fit their goodness into what’s demanded of them by corporate publishing—they are much more likely to endure, just as McCarthy hopefully will.

The strongest readings in the book

I would say the strongest readings in the book come when Sinykin tries to read entire genres instead of reading individual authors. For instance, I found his reading of the phenomenon of autofiction to be quite convincing. He argues that autofiction has arisen because literary authors are under pressure to turn themselves into marketable properties.

Beyond whatever literary innovations it is or is not making, autofiction has become a kind of literary genre fiction. It is also the perfect form for conglomerate marketing. It amplifies the romantic myth of the author, her celebrity, which raises her value as a walking, talking advertisement at the same time that she is, in fact, progressively shedding control over her image and her work, making her at once more useful and more disposable. The author gets to feel more authorial and the publisher gets to obscure the unsexy conglomerate rationalization that has diminished the status of the author.

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Conglomerate Authorship

One thing I've sidestepped in this review is that Sinykin begins his book with a number of brash statements about how he wants to attack the romantic notion of authorship (i.e. the idea that an author just sits down and writes the book, and it wholly belongs to them).

If this book has a villain, it is the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge.

Against this romantic vision of authorship, Sinykin holds up the idea of collective authorship.

...like an ant farm or a beehive or consciousness itself—or a Hollywood film—conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individual but to the conglomerate superorganism. This book charts the emergent properties of conglomerate era fiction.

Moreover, Sinykin claims that this is not a bad thing! That conglomerate fiction is no better or worse than non-conglomerated fiction.

...this is not a tale about a Golden Age ransacked by barbarians. I don’t believe the novels written in the last forty years are worse than those written in the forty years previous. This is, instead, a tale of transformation.

This book also gestures at the idea of taking popular fiction and bestsellers seriously, as an area for literary study:

Scholars of contemporary U.S. literature have written reams on Bechdel, Cisneros, DeLillo, Erdrich, Kingston, McCarthy, Morrison, Pynchon, Robinson, Roth, Wallace, and Whitehead. We’ve written much less on Auel, Clancy, Crichton, Follett, Grisham, Koontz, Krantz, McMillan, Picoult, Steel, and Woods. At the time of writing, Toni Morrison generates 3,109 hits on MLA International Bibliography, Danielle Steel six. We avoid authors who sell the most books.

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But I found that these high-flying aims were belied by the actual tone used by the book when it talks about various authors and publishers.

For instance, in Sinykin’s section on Danielle Steel, he openly mocks her claims to authorship:

Her insistence on the myth of the romantic author reveals a certain naïveté, a willed ignorance of the compromises of adulthood, covering her eyes so as not to see the industry of which she is a product. With a childlike seriousness (“WHO writes my BOOKS???”) she wants to be the inspired creator solely responsible for her art, but everything about her art—its formulaic plots, its women’s-mag prose style, its mass production—betrays its mechanicity.

Meanwhile, when he writes about Toni Morrison, Sinykin is infinitely more respectful, and he seems to be fully on board with romantic notions about her life, her authorship.

Beloved is an exquisite work of art, terrifying and beautiful. It does everything. One of the things it does is allegorize the publishing industry for a black woman who worked as an editor at a major house for sixteen years, who fought for black writers in a sea of whiteness, who was more or less accused by other black editors of being a race traitor. Morrison, defending herself to Carole Parks, wrote that she didn’t have a career, she just had work. It is a story of coercion into white supremacy. I made the ink. But it is also a story about the exhilaration of freedom. Morrison ended her preface to Beloved by emphasizing the connection, making sure readers feel the sensation of a heartbeat that is hers and Baby Suggs’s both: “I husband that moment on the pier, the deceptive river, the instant awareness of possibility, the loud heart kicking, the solitude, the danger.”

Sinykin obviously believes that Toni Morrison is an artist in a way that Danielle Steel is not. Which is fine. But...this book claims to be against these very ideas, these romantic notions of authorship, this thought-system under which it would be possible to say that Morrison had written her own books at all.

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This wobbliness in tone really comes to a head in the final chapter, about W.W. Norton, whose unique ownership structure (the press is owned by its own workers) means that it's the only large publisher of literary fiction that hasn't been swallowed into a conglomerate.

This chapter on Norton is told as a series of romantic triumphs, when Norton took a chance on fictions (Fight Club, Trainspotting, the work of Paula Fox, Patricia Highsmith, Primo Levi, Walter Mosley, Patrick O'Brian), that were too risky for conglomerate publishers. Sinykin writes:

It is a chaotic and weird list united by its eccentricity. One lesson is that assisted by a counterfactual: if Polly Norton hadn’t given the company to its employees in 1945, then, decades later, these writers might never have made it, suggesting what exceeds conglomerate taste, what was nearly lost when the practices of the conglomerate era locked into place...

Norton is an example of a company that is run the way most publishing companies were run before 1970—on the heroic editor model, where an editor trusts their gut and buys works that they think are singularly good.

And it's clear from reading this book that Sinykin feels this model is superior to the conglomerate model. That Norton publishes better books, on average, than the conglomerates.

Which is also a fine thing to believe, but it flies in the face of what the book says about itself and its aims.

Basically, there's a sly, tongue-in-cheek quality to the book, where it constantly decries individual authorship and individual genius, and yet it's clear that the book very much believes in those things.

Big Fiction does nothing to undermine literary hierarchy

This is one reason that Lorentzen's critique of the book doesn't make sense. This criticism really takes the book at face value, on the basis of what it tries to say about itself.

The review describes Sinykin as a destroyer of literary hierarchy, saying he's written a book that: "reduces aesthetics and their pleasures to market strategies and susceptibilities...elevates the holders of placeholder jobs in the publishing world to the heights of scholarly scrutiny, and...demonizes and erases writers themselves (or at least the idea of them)."

But if you read the book, you recognize that Sinykin also basically believes in literary hierarchy. In no way does he believe that Danielle Steel is better than, or even equivalent to, Toni Morrison.

Moreover, although this book doesn't put it this way, it seems clear (to me) that the book is basically against conglomeration, precisely because conglomerate fiction tends to lack individuality. Under conglomerate publishing, any book needs to be approved by a ton of different stakeholders before it can get published, and then it needs the approval of even more people in order to get wide distribution and marketing. And, as a result, what gets published is bland, inoffensive, middlebrow.

That's the real message of the book. It's not some radical deconstruction or undermining of genius. I know many people, including perhaps the author himself, will disagree with my read, because they really want this book to be more radical than it is. But, despite the book’s claims for itself, Big Fiction does more to uphold than to challenge romantic notions of authorship.

In order to create a true challenge to ‘romantic notions of authorship’, this book would really need to say that conglomerate fiction is doing something interesting that non-conglomerate fiction isn't doing. And it generally says the opposite, it tends to say that non-conglomerate fiction is more interesting than conglomerate fiction, precisely because non-conglomerate fiction tends to be more idiosyncratic and original.

‘Conglomerate authorship’ is valuable, but under-theorized

This book is a great starting point. Until this book was published, many people didn't understand a lot of the basic contours of how publishing works in the modern day, and how it's different from the way it worked fifty or sixty years ago.

Moreover, the concept of 'conglomerate fiction' and 'conglomerate authorship' are powerful concepts that will undoubtedly be theorized in more depth by other academics, and I am sure there will be more work done to tease out the differences between conglomerate and non-conglomerate fiction.

My personal view is that many academics ignore the fact that unpublished books vastly outnumber those that get published. That all the books we see are only a tiny fraction of the books that get written. And that there are a lot of books that are of high literary merit which don’t get published at all—ever.

The main way literary history is shaped by the publishing industry is through this sieve effect—the industry publishes many good books, yes, but those good books tend to be of a certain type (whatever they think might sell). Any books outside that type tend not to be acquired. Then, when the publishing industry’s tastes change, they start acquiring and publishing different books, which creates the impression that people are suddenly writing differently, but that’s not necessarily true—instead they’re just publishing a different subset of their slush pile.

But clearly it’s more complicated, because authors are themselves influenced by what gets published. They’re influenced both in a direct way (they read the books and imbibe them as influences), and in an indirect way, because authors want to be published, so they write towards publication. This is a process that will need to be theorized and modeled in a clearer way, and I have faith that some professor will undertake the task of providing a framework for describing exactly how these corporate influences get assimilated into literature itself.

Right now, the framework from McGurl and (at times) Sinykin seems to be that those influences get directly imported into literature because great works of literature will tend to allegorize the processes under which they’re produced. This isn’t entirely absurd—my own anger towards the publishing industry certainly got imported into my debut literary novel, The Default World, and certain other of my books. But it feels like a very reductive mode of analysis: to say every book is ultimately ‘about’ its own creation feels, both to me and many other readers, like it’s robbing literature of its majesty.

However, I think there are other ways, besides the directly allegorical, for understanding the effect that the conditions of production might have upon the contents of literary texts.

And what seems unquestionable, to me, is that conglomeration has had a huge impact on what has gotten published in America, particularly over the past fifty years, and that if we understand this impact, it will improve our understanding of literary texts.

Finally, in addition to the book's virtues as a work of scholarship, it's also a work of literature: it's a case study in how to synthesize a huge amount of information and tell a story about a changing system of production. People should read it not just in order to critique or affirm its ideas, but because the book itself is also a powerful and entertaining piece of writing.

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1. This point was also made succinctly by a recent viral Substack post from

Kevin Kelly

, “Everything I know about self-publishing”:

Established mass-market publishers are failing, and they are merging to keep going. Traditional book publishers have lost their audience, which was bookstores, not readers. It’s very strange but New York book publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of the people who buy their books. Instead, they sell to bookstores, which are disappearing. They have no direct contact with their readers; they don’t “own” their customers.