Merging Into A Colorless Stew

Mergers in any industry have consequences that the Board of Directors hope to manage as they arise. Any venture into uncharted territory will yield surprises or crises to be wrangled. The merger of Random House and Penguin, to form a gigantic publisher strong enough to battle the likes of Amazon, is no different.

There is the usual merging of the corporate cultures and the interweaving of various presidents, directors and the like. Those who were accustomed to the Random House way of doing things will have to learn the Penguin principles, or the other way around, depending on whose head did not roll when the leadership positions were handed out.

As Boris Kachka points out, all that enmeshing will likely result in the loss of brand recognition, with so many small independent presses getting rolled up over the years into some behemoth like Random Penguin House. The name of the publisher no longer signifies any particular strong suit, whether it's thrillers or history or literary fiction.

Besides the loss of publishing opportunities for writers, the readers are losing out as well. They don't have a particular imprint they can turn to and know what sort of book they'd be getting. There was a time when you could pick up a book published by MacAdam/Cage and know that you had a well-crafted piece of literary fiction in hand, but those days are gone...like MacAdam/Cage, now struggling to survive.

Publishing is more and more about creating some big blockbuster that sells through and then some. It doesn't matter if it's under the Knopf imprint or the St. Martin's Press imprint. Indeed, the imprints don't mean anything to the average reader, who just wants something entertaining or enlightening or escapist.

What does Hachette represent, brandwise? Not much of anything, and Mr. Kachka sees this as an unintended consequence of all the mergers that have turned the Big Six...make that Big Five now...into producers of books that could have come out of any one of the publishing houses.

Without small independent publishers, the type of book available will be more formulaic and definitely less risky. The reading public loses out on gems that might not sell one million copies worldwide, but are worth reading just the same.

It should come as no surprise that small presses are arising, to fill the niche that is being left unfilled by major publishers who abandoned those niches in an ongoing series of corporate mergers. Mr. Kachka calls for more gatekeepers to keep publishing from becoming a colorless stew that has no room for distinctive branding. Those gatekeepers are out there, struggling to get noticed, to get their books into brick and mortar stores or reviewed in the New York Times.

Independents need a little help to survive in a world of massive competitors like Amazon that make it very difficult to operate a small business. In a crowd of giants, it is nerly impossible for a small company to be seen, let alone heard.