Kicking off this year’s FutureBook conference was a recorded conversation between Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, and Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House. Much of what Dohle had to say was similar to what he’s said in the past many times over. (He’s been doing a lot of interviews lately.) But now that PRH is battling the US Dept. of Justice in its fight to acquire Simon & Schuster, Jones had a chance to see if he could shake loose any additional insights.
While Dohle couldn’t comment on the nuts and bolts of the case, he echoed the broad statements that have been made to the press: “We are deeply convinced that we are the best steward for Simon & Schuster.” He then offered a number of reasons why PRH sees the acquisition as pro-competitive, even for authors and agents. “We think the court will agree with us after looking at the facts.” His key points:
- PRH’s income is aligned with the income of authors and agents. “There is a very high correlation between publisher revenue and agent-author income. If authors do well, publishers do well,” he said.
- PRH has been criticized by the DOJ for saying that it promises to preserve competition and allow bidding between PRH and S&S editors. Surely we’re not just supposed to take PRH’s word for it? But PRH has always allowed for competitive bidding, Dohle says, and it’s part of the company’s publishing DNA. “For me it was not a gesture or a gift. It was actually the most natural thing to do.” He believes this approach ensures books go to the best editor with the best vision—and the best sales. “We’ve done it always in the past and we will continue with that in the future,” Dohle said.
- While it’s true that big publishers dominate bestseller lists, Dohle said these lists are not perfect and don’t represent a holistic view of the market. Furthermore, he asserted that the presence of smaller publishers on bestseller lists has actually increased in line with their increasing market share over the last decade, according to BookScan data. So why has this happened? Dohle said, “That has to do with a very efficient marketplace,” and the shift to online retail that has leveled the playing field in some ways. “The shift to online now after 25+ years of Amazon … results in actually frontlist and bestsellers being a little bit under pressure and backlist growing.” Smaller publishers with a good backlist are doing better than ever. (We reported on this phenomenon in February.)
Dohle has been CEO in the decade now after the merger between Penguin and Random House, and Jones charitably pointed out, “It seems to have turned out pretty well. Your authors seem to sell more books—not just big authors, but also the midlist authors. Books are getting into more retail partners.” Jones also doesn’t see advances or investment lowering, and there are in fact more PRH imprints than in 2012, when the two companies merged. “You have a real, live argument that supports the benefits of consolidation,” he said. But, he asked Dohle, was he being helplessly naive?
Dohle of course did not think so. All book publishing industry KPIs (key performance indicators) have been improving since the merger of PRH. “That’s just a fact,” he stated. He partly credited the “print renaissance” for the strength of PRH and the overall industry. But also, “There are no barriers to enter this business,” he said, which allows for diverse new entrants and innovators. He said that in the countries where PRH has publishing operations, they are in most cases around 20 percent of the trade book market. “Some people seem to make that bigger than it actually is. … Some of our distribution clients have outperformed us. That’s a testament to how healthy, how vibrant—I could even say fragmented—the industry is.” For more info on those KPIs, read our July 2021 item featuring Dohle speaking with the Authors Guild.
Bottom line: Dohle pointed out that an author needs to sell fewer copies today to get on a bestseller list than some years ago, partly because of increased backlist sales. From that perspective, the market is healthy, he argued, because sales are spreading out over a long tail of titles from varied sources. He also reiterated his longtime argument that PRH is a collection of small publishers. “It’s not PRH [that] acquires a book; it’s the imprint. It’s the most passionate editor. It’s one book at a time. There is no scale. So we are competing on an imprint-to-imprint, editor-to-editor level, if you will, for a book. … [We] are competing in a very competitive marketplace that I think has become more competitive in the last decade.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
