Once upon a time, many moons ago, I was touring the hallowed halls of a Big Five publisher where I had a novel under contract. Top brass led me to a new release table in the lounge, where I admired the authors I’d be joining at the imprint. One of the executives, whom I’m going to call Randall, picked up a title by a brand-name author whose detective novels always hit the bestseller list. “This is the fellow who’ll be sending you on book tour,” he said, pointing to the name embossed in gold.
I’m going on book tour?! was all I could think in response to Randall’s joke. I was giddy on that visit, navel-gazey: It had been my life’s dream to publish a book with a Big Five publisher. But on the train ride home to Massachusetts, I sat with Randall’s comment, considered what he meant. For a long time—until I got a book deal, to be honest—I’d spent a lot of energy being envious of Big Five authors, especially the household names, the ones who hit the list. But Randall’s offhand comment changed that. He helped me understand that far from being jealous of my best-selling brethren, I should thank my lucky stars for them. The proceeds from their blockbusters helped Big Five publishers take on literary newbies like me. From that day on, I was a writer changed, evolved, convinced that literary fiction and commercial fiction could live in harmony. I’ve been operating from that assumption for well over ten years, with five books to my name, some at Big Fives, some at indies, all positive experiences. Imagine my surprise when a viral Substack article declared that the Big Five publishers I’ve enjoyed collaborating with are out to murder me.
“The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction,” announced an essay in Yascha Mounk’s Substack Persuasion, coauthored by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings, who, according to their bios, are working on a book together. In Cook and Jennings’s opinion, the halcyon days when “publishers needed to nurture, court, outbid, and out-promise each other in landing both emerging and established writers” has given way to “monopsonists” who dash with Black Friday–level fervor at the “safe money” of “‘auto-buy’ readerships and genre hits.” For an industry notoriously awful at trend forecasting, that is quite a claim.
I kept pausing in my reading to compare my publishing experiences to the maledictions presented by these writers who—unless I have this wrong—have not yet published with a Big Five imprint. I can’t count the friends whose high-concept literary fiction has engendered feverish commercial auctions, the glasses I’ve clinked when their Big Five novels went to print. Were these happy memories but a fever dream? Had my friends and colleagues signed not a book deal, but a death wish with a contract killer? Was I living in a hole of naivety and optimism by thinking well of the Big Five?
This question is an honest one; my position is worth stress testing. I’m a white author in a notoriously elitist industry, so normally I would assume that privilege has shielded me from the machinations Cook and Jennings accuse commercial publishers of, check my assumptions, revisit what I thought were facts. The thing is, though, back in 2020, I published an author’s handbook to the publishing industry called Before and After the Book Deal that saw me interviewing more than two hundred publishing professionals about their experiences writing, publishing, and supporting books in North America, and because I run a Substack of the same name, I continue to interview literary citizens. In fact, my inbox has become something of a dead drop for people experiencing both frustration and glee with the current state of book publishing. And while I certainly have heartbroken emails from authors whose Big Five literary novels underperformed, I haven’t had many conversations with authors who felt that their publishing partners rigged their books to fail. That’s not how publishing works. It costs a ton to get a book out, it costs real money to hire copyeditors and graphic designers, proofreaders and in-house publicists. And while most authors will certainly encounter friction with someone on their publishing team, I’ve never heard of the “death by committee” scenario that Cooks and Jennings claim is killing all literary fiction—not some of it, all—at a conference table. Most people work in publishing because they love connecting stories with the stories’ perfect readers. This is not why conglomerations invest in publishers, mind you, but so far, it isn’t the corporate investors who are up late, editing books.
One of literature’s roles is to help us see our lives in a new way, and the Cook/Jennings article certainly made me feel like I was hallucinating mine. After establishing that Big Five publishers were no longer pursuing literary authors as clients, they revealed the sacrifice of the Big Five’s “flagship product” for automated schlock. At that point, I had to scroll to the top of the page to check whether the article itself was fiction. Since when has “Literary Fiction” been the flagship product of Big Five publishers??? For nearly a century, publishers have been putting out literary titles and commercial ones to mutual advantage. The literary titles bring in the award nominations, boosting imprints’ reputations and credibility, and the commercial titles keep imprints connected to huge readerships whose book purchases help attract highbrow writers to their brand. One of Simon & Schuster’s biggest early hits was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936. Whether this decidedly commercial title might have helped lubricate the publication of John Steinbeck’s unfashionably short and somber Of Mice and Men in 1937 or the same publisher’s support and distribution of Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940, I’ll leave you to decide.
As for the literary fiction titles the Big Five has killed? Where’d they hide those darlings, because my PO box is crammed with exceptional releases, past and future. Had I imagined Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! coming out from Knopf? Tony Tulathimutte’s William Morrow–published Rejection being longlisted for the National Book Award last year? Dreamt that Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland was a breakout gem from FSG? Had I only imagined reading Henry Hoke’s prescient 20K-word novel Open Throat narrated from the POV of a freaking mountain lion? Did I, a loyal reader of difficult fiction, not find Justin Torres’s 2023 National Book Award winner Blackouts formidable, indeed? Were these the literary fiction titles that Cook and Jennings accuse the Big Five publishers of murdering? If so, I volunteer as tribute. I have a literary novel in the works—Big Five, give me a call.
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I’m not a hot take writer. In fact, I hate hot takes. After reading what I experienced as an underresearched article written in bad faith, I took several days to think, then posted a response on Substack Notes and Facebook, suggesting—in a nutshell—that if readers and writers want to see more literary fiction published by Big Five publishers, they must buy more literary fiction from Big Five publishers. This obligation seemed evident to me, even pragmatic. In a capitalistic country, we can vote with wallets. The comment section disagreed. At lightning speed, I had a response to my Facebook post from a writer and adjunct professor, Nathan Pensky, informing me that I was a neoliberalist, or more specifically that “Blaming the failures of culture on individual consumer choices is classic neoliberalism.” (I’m sharing Pensky’s response with his permission.) “Supply and demand is not some immutable law of the universe,” his chide continued, “and pretending it is only plays into the hands of corporations that are more than content to dismantle literary culture for a few bucks.” Oof, I thought. That stung!
I emailed one of my favorite author friends, Lauren Hough, who never minces words, to judge whether I was a garbage human. Was it unforgivable to believe that consumers have the power to sway publishing trends at the Big Five level, instead of vice versa? “The news of literary fiction’s death came as a surprise to me,” she emailed, “likely because my friends—people like you, Elizabeth McCracken, Scott Guild, Lucas Schaefer, Edward Carey—are writing literary fiction and publishing with the Big Five. The good shit’s still being written, still being published. And it’ll be there when the audience’s palate matures.”
Lauren Hough certainly knows how to throw shade, was what I took from that email, as well as consolation that I wasn’t the only person holding out hope for the Big Fives. I continued researching, emailing publishing professionals to gauge whether there was less literary fiction in circulation because it wasn’t being published, or because it wasn’t being bought. “The audience for prestige work has always been small in comparison to works appealing to popular taste,” wrote industry guru Jane Friedman when I asked for her insight. “The upper classes have often complained—since the rise of literacy—that too many people use reading to pass the time or like a sleeping pill, and do not seek out more demanding work. Literary writers, or people looking to produce art, have always been betrayed by the laws of supply and demand. Ghost stories and romances will always sell better—and publishing remains as ever a business. I agree with your sentiment 100 percent, only I have my doubts that the audience for literary fiction can be meaningfully grown. I’m one of the awful people who believes it’s a declining artform that will appeal to a smaller audience over time.”
Humph. This didn’t bode well for the idealist in me who thinks consumers can shift trends. Later in her email, Jane accorded that there were art-first publishers out there like Fitzcarraldo representing “glimmers of hope” and deep intention. “Big NY publishers can’t do what Fitzcarraldo does,” Friedman concluded, “because big publishers try to do everything; their focus is too diluted. There’s only one thing Fitzcarraldo cares about, and that makes them powerful and effective.”
Meanwhile, my suggestion that book buyers (or rather, non–book buyers) should shoulder some of the blame for literary fiction’s demise continued to garner rancor on Facebook. “Respectfully disagree with you on this, and I’m someone who indeed does buy literary fiction only in person from indie bookstores,” wrote my friend, the author, editor, and cofounder of the Writing Co-Lab, Brian Gresko. “Corporations do not have our liberation in mind, nor are they invested in aesthetics or justice or equality or even in driving up literacy rates; they are interested solely in profit, in books as products slung by social media influencers or app algorithms . . . Capitalism is an expression of our most selfish, base selves, and publishing is no different just because the widgets they are selling happen to be works of art.”
But over on Substack? The response was more nuanced. “Publishers publish books they think they can sell, end of discussion,” wrote author Alma Katsu, with whom I share a publisher. “Whether or not a book will sell is a gamble and some editors embrace risk more than others. That’s where the uncertainty comes in. They’re under no obligation to publish books that are good for us any more than food manufacturers are obligated to sell only food that is nutritious,” her response continued. “Some editors are given more leeway or an imprimatur to bring certain kinds of books into the world—an imprint for literary-leaning works by women or people of color, for example. But these efforts will only exist as long as they satisfy the C suite at the publishing house, whether that’s by hitting their numbers (books sold, money earned) or putting out books that burnish their reputation.”
Around the time that I was collecting statements from folks in publishing, content creators on Substack were posting their own responses to Cook and Jennings’s piece. “No one has killed literary fiction, for [expletive] sake,” publicist and author of Publishing Confidential Kathleen Schmidt commented to one of these such articles. “I almost exclusively read lit fiction for pleasure and if someone thinks the genre is dead, they need to go outside and touch grass. Go to a bookstore. There’s a buffet of literary fiction. The problem is not enough people BUY IT. And maybe they don’t buy it because people keep writing uninformed takes saying it’s dead so then people don’t look for it!!!”
The piece Schmidt was responding to was agent Anna Sproul-Latimer’s riveting 3,283-word clapback where she took the Cooks and Jennings piece to task, paragraph by paragraph, in an essay titled “For God’s Sake, No, Big 5 Publishers Have Not ‘Killed Literary Fiction’” on her Substack, How to Glow in the Dark. In reference to a statistic that the coauthors didn’t provide a source for—“literary fiction has fallen to only two percent of the fiction market”—Sproul-Latimer wrote, “It’s straight-up bonkers to declare this statistic a consequence of publisher cowardice vs. CONSUMER BUYING HABITS. It is literally a measure of CONSUMER BUYING HABITS. The decline in literary fiction sales is a chicken and egg problem. Consumers are the egg. And psst: evolution working how it does, the ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg’ question is not really a question at all. It’s the egg. The [expletive] egg came first. The final finishing-touch genetic mutations that created ‘chicken’ from ‘ancestor’ started in the egg.”
Some of the comments and response articles to Cook and Jennings piece posited them as “bitter” because they don’t have a Big Five deal themselves. I have no idea whether that is true, but what I will say is that I was far less magnanimous about commercial publishing when my only relationship with commercial publishers was via their rejections. Once I finally broke through to book deal territory (which took ten years, three agents, and almost a triple-digit number of revisions to the novel I’d debut with), Big Five publishers went from being faceless, heartless entities in iron towers to publicists with adopted puppies and marketing directors whose children were experiencing bullying and an editor who fought like hell to let me keep the forty-character book title for my debut book. While Big Five publishing is ruled by corporate oligarchs, the people working at the publishers, the people actually handling the manuscripts, believing in the manuscripts, editing the manuscripts, doing everything in their power to get those books to sell? These are real people who believe in the act of making art. Sure, some people’s opinions of what “art” is definitely differs, but we need those opinions to differ, otherwise everyone in America would decide that X book is “brilliant” and Y book is “bad.” Personally, I’d rather write, publish, and read in a world where tastes vary. In our screen-directed lives of swarm intelligence and algorithms, it’s easy to assume that the most popular choice is the best one, that the restaurant with the most reviews is the one that you should go to, that the bestselling novel is the one with the best arc. Toward the end of the Cook and Jennings piece, the authors make a nod to this reality: “Readers are not just static consumers. If we choose which writers we want to read, we can also choose which publishers we want to buy from.”
See? Consumers can shift market trends under capitalism—book lovers ride at dawn. I get that change can’t happen immediately, and I respect that reading outside one’s comfort zone takes time, research, and resources. But anyone with a Wi-Fi connection interested in reading beyond the hits can find suggestions pretty fast. (I recommend starting with the Canadian magazine The Walrus’ atypical best books of 2024 and R. O. Kwon’s annual roundup of books by women of color.) When you’re looking for electrifying fiction, there’s an embarrassment of riches at smaller presses like Two Dollar Radio, the Dorothy Project, and Tin House—but the question isn’t whether indies are nurturing literary fiction (they are), the question is whether the Big Fives can. Artistic fiction can come to life at a press of any size, but it dies without a buyer. To that end, I second Anna Sproul-Latimer’s advice to art-loving consumers at the end of her essay: “Buy books that are transcendent and creative, and for every literary novel you want other people to read and buy, read and buy at least twenty-five by others. That’s how a reciprocal literary culture works.”
Courtney Maum is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking publishing guide that Vanity Fair recently named one of the ten best books for writers, Before and After the Book Deal, and the memoir The Year of the Horses, chosen by the Today show as the best read for mental health awareness. As a writing coach, director of the writing workshop Turning Points, and educator, Maum has a mission to help people hold on to the joy of art making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. Passionate about literary citizenship, Maum sits on the advisory councils of the Authors Guild and The Rumpus and runs a bestselling Substack about publishing that you can sign up for at CourtneyMaum.com, where you’ll also find her online classes.
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