Vocabulary Word: Monopsony
Over the years I have tried to be more of a writer than an author, which has meant not focusing on the business end of publishing more than I have to. It’s a weird business that sometimes pretends not to be a business at all and mostly behaves like no other business I can think of. But it's hard to ignore the fact that the United States Department of Justice has brought an anti-trust trial against two of the Big Five, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.
How’s this headline for laughs?
“Book publishers just spent 3 weeks in court arguing they have no idea what they’re doing.”
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“Book publishers just spent 3 weeks in court arguing they have no idea what they’re doing.” 〰️
But isn’t that precisely the impression we’re left with sometimes? And then again, these are major companies. So what are they? Helpless incompetents? Savvy operators? Idealists advocating for books? All of the above?
A Publishers Weekly article makes this point:
From a courtroom drama angle, one of the most fascinating aspects of this trial is a somewhat peculiar irony. The government's case relies in part on making publishers look extraordinarily savvy about the market in which they operate, in addition to benefiting from their sheer size. PRH's case relies on arguing that, actually, book publishing is a crap-shoot and that even the biggest, most powerful publishers are fortunate when a book they acquire becomes a bestseller. (Both, of course, have an element of truth.)
Interestingly, the DOJ's case seems to focus an authors receiving advances of $250,000 or more. If we frame this as a David-Goliath conflict, that does not exactly put the DOJ on David’s side.
Which leads me to the vocabulary word: Monopsony.
mo·nop·so·ny| məˈnäpsənē | noun (plural monopsonies) Economics a market situation in which there is only one buyer.
Book creators are the sellers here, and monopsonies are what the DOJ is arguing against in the propos. That’s what would be created if Penguin Random House merged with Simon & Schuster. During the megamergers of the 1990s, we used to joke that in the future we’d be submitting to “The House.” The joke turned out to cast a long shadow.
Against the odds, some of us have managed to eke out a long-haul mid-list presence—yet in the shadow of this possible monopsony, no one’s really talking about us at all.
