by TAMARA PEARSON
PHOTO/Wiki Commons/LeaningLark
The publishing industry’s focus on profits amounts to a censoring of a diversity of viewpoints and experience.
Books are lives compressed, humanity summarised into screaming or striking stories. One would think the book world would be a safe haven from inequality, but instead the traditional publishing industry – the big corporate publishers – is perpetuating prejudice and limiting ideas by elevating certain authors, characters, and thoughts above all others, with significant social consequences.
The big publishers are big businesses with monopolies over a product, as much as other industries. They are driven by profit, rather than the social importance of books, and only publish books that are a sure thing, causing quality to be lost to lowest-common-denominator marketability. Sure things are books by celebrities, books with a guaranteed (forced) market such as text books and required readings in schools and universities, books on popular genres such as horror and romance, and books by authors who have already been very successful. Just as food monopolies limit food choice and news monopolies restrict our understanding of current events, the book corporations have a monopoly on the ideas, identity, history and perspectives available to us.
Publishing industry profits are strong and stable: the rumours that they have been hit by the digital book boom are exaggerated. Publishing companies’ profits sit at around 10 percent, and higher for digital books, which is a middle of the pack profit margin compared to other industries. The US publishing market is worth US$30 billion. According to Forbes, Amazon’s current annual revenue from book sales is US$5.25 billion. Meanwhile, the number of independent book stores, which usually try to sell books for their literary or intellectual quality rather than profitability, have decreased by 50 percent over the past two decades: from 4,000 to under 2,000 in the US. Independent publishers are also struggling.
Further, news monopolies are playing a bigger role in publishing. In 2013, two of the biggest publishers, Random House and Penguin Group merged, forming Penguin Random House. Random House, though, is owned by media conglomerate, Bertelsmann (which bought it in 1998), while Penguin is owned by Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times. Pearson also had shares in The Economist, but sold them last month. Penguin Random House is believed to control around one quarter of the global book market. HarperCollins was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 1987, and last year, News Corp also bought romantic publisher Harlequin. Thomson Reuters owns legal book publishers West and Sweet & Maxwell, as well as, obviously, the multinational media company Reuters.
Despite the profits, authors continue to be among the most exploited workers, in terms of pay to work time ratios – seeing many potential authors excluded from the start. Fiction writers especially work for years for no pay, with no security or labour rights. Then when, and if a book is published, they will receive 7 percent of the sale price or net profits. That figure can go up to 12 percent if they are well known. Further, publishers leave most to all of the promotion legwork to the author (with the exception of Joanna Rowley – Harry Potter), with bookshops charging hundreds of dollars just to do a book launch, on top of book profits. When traditional publishers do dare to publish a first time author, they prefer those from economically comfortable backgrounds, who are known by people from the same, who will purchase the book. All this means that poor writers – the ideas of the poor, are virtually boycotted.
Putting the market first, the publishing corporations are promoting the status quo and overlooking books that are critical, have new ideas or atypical characters or use new techniques. They are under-representing oppressed groups such as women, migrants, LGBTI and so on as authors, characters, and experts (in the case of non-fiction). They seek celebrities and the big sell, with 0.01 percent of fiction titles accounting for 50 percent of sales, and 0.1 percent for 80 percent of sales.
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