The History of the 5 Big Publishing Houses
The strategy for publishing houses was simple: let authors submit their manuscripts, pick the best ones from the stack, continue pushing it through the publishing process, and then market it for consumption. It’s how the industry has always worked since 1826 because, in this market specifically, the houses had something like an inelastic good-- meaning it was always in high demand, and they were the only ones who had it. The average author from the 1820s to the 2000s did not have any access to a printer to make their books or a distributor with an established infrastructure to sell them. All they had was their vision on a series of pages formatted very utilitarian and a dream of success. Thus, the Big Five suddenly had complete control over the publishing market since they never lost a supply of good ideas. In competition with one another, the houses decided what trends to follow, what was okay to publish, and what was not, all while taking the lion’s share of profit from the sales. The average author sees only about 7.5% of sales from the selling of a standard softcover (the most sold form), mass-market paperbacks (those small airport books) are even less at 5%. Also, they carry the only experts that can take a book to publish. Editors, cover artists, and even font makers were exclusively available at publishing houses. So that’s why they could make such deals with authors, deals that meant the publishing house could control the creative rights of a project. This is a complete shift in the artistic economy.
In a time like the Renaissance, it was the complete opposite. People approached Michelangelo or DaVinci with money and simply asked for their vision. Michelangelo was offered the Sistine Chapel when Pope Julius II saw his amazing work on the Pope’s tomb. DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, according to the most popular theory of its origin, was simply a commissioned portrait of a merchant’s wife that he kept throughout his life. The market model then was people wanted their work and paid for it, giving the artists complete control over the piece. With the publishing industry, this model flips.
Now the reason the publishing industry is the main focus of the article is because it is the grandfather of all the other Legacy industries. Movie studios, record labels, and TV stations all had to learn from the publishing industry simply because their mediums were so young. For perspective, Hachette Livre had already been established 35 years before Georges Méliès was even born and would have been doing business for another 40 more years before the director released his first film. And since it already had a tried-and-true infrastructure, the younger mediums were quick to follow the established tradition.
That flip is why these institutions are now experiencing their collapse. When the publishing houses like Hachette Livre made their system, they had inadvertently created the infrastructure for their own collapse. One of the most recently discussed events in the publishing industry is the mass exodus of editors from the publishing industry. Alyssa Matesic, a freelance editor, and YouTube source for authors, has talked in length about her experiences working as a Big Five editor. In a video titled “What the Heck is Going on in Publishing?” and another titled “Why Querying Right Now is Such a Hot Mess”, she explains some cracks forming within the publishing industry. In the Publishing video, Mrs. Matesic explains how a series of resignations that took place in March of 2022 was a sign of an already broken system. Many editors Tweeted, in their replies to the big names resigning, of already having left their various houses because they realized they could make more money and enjoy their work by entering the freelancing market. This created a ripple elsewhere in the houses that Matesic speaks about in her Querying video. In the video, she explained that with so many editors leaving, this creates a backlog within all of the publishing houses that forces literary agents to be more selective in their query acceptance. Usually, this results in the agents signing on to book types they’ve already had success in which is why Matesic suggests that her viewers try and find books similar to their own to acquire an agent. This is the “opportunity in the market” spoken of earlier.
As the houses and agencies continued pushing forward, effectively gatekeeping against stories that didn’t fit the market trends, they soon found themselves buckling under the weight of their rejection pile. An entire publishing house sits at a writer’s fingertips. Printers have begun offering their services to authors, there’s an editor of every single kind of genre book on Fivver or Upwork, plus artists are always ready for a project like a book cover. This creates competitive pressure as more and more books are on the market, forcing the agents to reject more books to keep to their proven model of success which always begins to get stale, creating an endless cycle that can only lead to the success of independent artists. And as said above, this is the model for most entertainment institutions. Just as publishing houses have picked up self-published authors like Andy Weir or Hugh Howey to continue their survival, record labels picked up artists like Post Malone and Billie Eilish, A24 picked up Kane Parsons to do a horror movie on his internet horror concept “The Backrooms”.
So, the question remains, why should artists view this collapse as a positive? It may be obvious, but it’s the truth which puts the artist back in control with a plethora of resources to execute the vision. Any author can hire an editor like Alyssa Matesic and have Big Five editing done on their story, putting them directly in competition with the publishing houses. With something like #BookTok existing for the author, any medium and any artist can find success. The collapse of Legacy Entertainment means a new Renaissance in art with the artist being the one back in control.
Bibliography
Cohen, J. (2023, July 24). 7 Things You May Not Know About the Sistine Chapel. Retrieved from History.com:
https://www.history.com/news/7-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-sistine-chapel
IMDb. (n.d.). Georges Méliès. Retrieved from IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0617588/
Matesic, A. (2022). Alyssa Matesic-YouTube. Retrieved from YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@AlyssaMatesic
Scribe Media. (n.d.). Book Royalties 101: How They Work [Complete Guide]. Retrieved from Scribe Media:
https://scribemedia.com/book-royalties/
The Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (2023, October 17). Mona Lisa. Retrieved from www.britannica.com:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mona-Lisa-painting
