Emmy Nordstrom Higdon, a queer, trans, non-binary literary agent for Toronto-based Westwood Creative Artists, brings a social justice and artist-supporting perspective to almost everything they do—their specialty is identity-driven stories based on lived experience, particularly from LGBTQ2S+ and disabled or chronically ill authors. And so Higdon is one of the people on the front lines of the publishing industry, bracing to see the impact on queer authors by what could be the biggest merger in history between two book publishers.
“I honestly feel as though I’m watching a train speeding toward a wreck,” Higdon says. “And I’m just waiting to see what will cause it to crash.” And this crash, they worry, will affect LGBTQ2S+ authors, agents and editors even more negatively than their cis, straight counterparts.
That wreck refers to the proposed U.S. $2.18 billion merger between Penguin Random House (PRH) and Simon & Schuster (S&S), two of what are called the “Big Five” U.S. publishers, which also includes HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan. The Big Five truly dominate the industry: In 2020, PRH, which is owned by German media giant Bertelsmann, controlled an astonishing 25 percent of the U.S. publishing market and has imprints in 22 countries. If the merger goes through, they will double their share and control approximately half. This affects non-U.S. spin-offs, too: Bertelsmann owns 75 percent of PRH Canada, while S&S Canada might expect to be sold along with its U.S. counterpart.
“There is a direct line from the merger to fewer queer authors finding representation.”
In a court case this summer, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has been moving to block PRH’s purchase of S&S from its owner, another giant, Paramount Global. PRH argues that it won’t be bad for authors. Their attorneys have said that the deal will create “efficiencies that will enable the combined entity to make better offers to more authors,” and will “incentivize other publishers to compete harder to acquire the books they, too, need to win sales among consumers.” The federal judge hearing the merger case is expected to make a ruling in the next few months.
Higdon is not alone in shrugging off those “don’t worry” assertions. “In my three years of agenting, I would say that the vast majority of my books have been sold without any competition — and I consider myself to have had a pretty successful start to my career in the industry. Publishers by and large do not want competition.”
In objecting to the merger, the DOJ argues that far from enhancing competition, the merger will create the close sibling of a monopoly: a monopsony. A monopsony is the mirror image of a monopoly, where instead of a market with only one seller, one buyer holds so much power that they can set whatever terms, rules and prices they like for everyone else.
A monopsony could be bad enough for publishing in general—the “suppliers” are creative people who make their living from their way with words. Yet Higdon says that the merger would do particular damage to queer publishing worldwide.
“There is a direct line from the merger to fewer queer authors finding representation,” Higdon says. “Anyone who experienced barriers to access from multiple aspects of their identity or lived experience will feel those barriers compounded when there are fewer options available to them.”
“You can see why less competition in the industry is dangerous.”
Rebecca Podos, a senior agent based in Boston for Rees Literary Agency, specializes in representation for QBIPOC authors. Her career covers more than a decade of shepherding such prestigious queer books as Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, and the forthcoming BIPOC romance The MisArrangemet of Sana Saeed by Noreen Mughees. But while Podos has helped an impressive number of authors find success, she shares Higdon’s fear that the merger will only further diminish agents’ power to advocate for the LGBTQ2S+ community.
“What we ultimately have going for us when negotiating bids is… competition between imprints and publishers, and so you can see why less competition in the industry is dangerous,” says Podos.
Beyond diminished competition, Podos fears that the combined power of the merger with recent political assaults on queer rights, including attempts to ban books from schools and libraries, will create a synergy that helps the far right’s “intended purpose of gutting the market for queer stories.” For example, a U.S. federal judge recently thwarted Republicans’ efforts to limit sales through Barnes & Noble’s Virginia locations for non-binary author Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. The petition against the memoir gained ground by claiming it violated the state obscenity law. If opponents of the book had won, booksellers would have been forbidden to sell it to minors—even though Gender Queer has a special appeal to readers between 12 and 18.
“My clients are worried that publishers will regard their books as risky investments.”
The fallout from such frivolous lawsuits doesn’t depend on the far right even winning cases—it’s about intimidation. “My clients are worried that publishers will regard their books as risky investments,” Podos says.
The perception that LGBTQ2S+ content is a risky business decision diminishes not just publisher access for these authors, but the quality of the deals they can negotiate.
QBIPOC authors already frequently accept increasingly substandard publishing contracts, says Podos. Publishers will demand four- and five-way splits on payments, scoop up all possible sub rights and offer unlivable advances, for instance, just for an author “to be able to place their books on shelves.”
Each side of the merger has its own reputation and personality as a publisher. Some agents worry how conservative tendencies at Simon & Schuster could play out at Penguin Random House, in part because S&S has courted so many controversial books by conservative authors.
In 2016, for example, the publisher stood by its decision to publish a ghostwritten autobiography by alt-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. The Chicago Review of Books denounced S&S’s decision as a “disgusting validation of hate.” Though the company later cancelled the deal, it was only after Yiannopoulos came under fire for comments on sexual consent with minors—comments that were so outrageous that the annual Conservative Political Action Conference withdrew their speaking invitation, and Yiannopoulos resigned from far-right Breitbart News Network.
“With the political climate of book bans and regressive social policies in the U.S. and abroad, a merger may cause that conservatism from S&S to influence imprints within PRH over time.”
More recently, S&S publishing deals with controversial conservatives that were not cancelled include those with Fox News hosts Mark Levin and Greg Gutfeld, as well as Alex Marlow, the Breitbart News Network editor-in-chief who had a book published in spring 2021 by the same S&S imprint as Tucker Carlson.
“With the political climate of book bans and regressive social policies in the U.S. and abroad,” Higdon says, “a merger may cause that conservatism from S&S to influence imprints within PRH over time.”
That could not only affect who is getting deals, but how they are rolled out and supported after they’re published.
“There’s already so much pressure placed upon LGBTQ2S+ authors, especially QBIPOC authors,” says Podos, “that queer authors are worried that our books won’t be available in libraries and school districts across entire states.”
Some believe — perhaps the more realistic word is hope — that micro- and mid-size publishers might be able to save LGBTQ2S+ authors with a more fulsome role in the industry. But with the emergence of a monopolistic publishing market, mid- and small-size publishers have not had the financial support to compete with large corporate publishers.
Large publishers have long been dominant in the industry due to their ability to publicize, produce and distribute large quantities of titles to advance new authors and sustain the careers of established ones. Indeed, as DOJ attorney John Read repeatedly emphasized during the court case, no up-and-coming publisher has managed to challenge the Big Five in more than 30 years, in part due to these publishers having such extensive backlists to sustain future ventures.
Smaller publishers too often “fall victim to poor funding and organizational challenges,” says Higdon, “so I’m not entirely sure that all of them would be prepared, interested or flat-out able to pursue the kind of growth they would need in order to compete with the presumed Big Four.”
“Like the fears raised by a horror novel, LGBTQ2S+ people can feel this saga is beyond our control.”
The most frustrating aspect for so many in publishing right now is how easy it is to see the DOJ court case as a show trial—one that will have no effect. The merger will almost certainly go through, some experts believe, and even if this one doesn’t, there will inevitably be another. As S&S’s current CEO Jonathan Karp said in his testimony, the publisher has already gone through seven new owners within the last hundred years. Sooner or later, there will almost certainly be an eighth.
Like the fears raised by a horror novel, LGBTQ2S+ people can feel this saga is beyond our control. And while a merger will be bad, other endings might be worse. Higdon wonders if the devil-horned Penguin we know is better than a devil we don’t.
“My fear as an agent is what the alternatives to the merger might be,” says Higdon. “If we are going to lose Simon & Schuster’s imprints entirely, or if they are able to merge with another large publisher instead of PRH, the problems to me will be the same and the outcomes might be worse.”
Regardless of whether the merger moves forward, how should queer and trans writers and agents respond to what’s happening?
Podos, who is also a Lambda Literary Award-winning author of YA novels, says that awareness of the struggles faced by the queer publishing community need to reach the people running the publishers. “Even if readers and bloggers don’t have access to the email addresses of executives, publishers have general contact info on their pages. If we agents are pulling a sub or rejecting an offer on behalf of our authors because of a harmful company policy or decision, we can communicate that beyond the editors who have no say in the situation.”
Higdon says the government needs to intervene to protect marginalized voices in the publishing industry. “Our call to action,” they say, “is to work for a more regulated industry that protects the rights of authors on both the agent and publisher side.”
Minnesota-based Laura Zats, co-founder of Headwater Literary Management and co-host of the award-winning publishing podcast Print Run, suggests that for people working at a publishing house, the next step “looks like unionizing, which will lead to improved working conditions and better diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Perhaps caught up in the urgency of the moment, Zats, on her podcast, took her advice one step further. “Let this radicalize all of us.”
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