“...it’s an extremely handy collection.”

October 25, 2016 1:24 PM

Finally a Handy Chart of the “Big 5” Book Publishers and Their Imprints [Tor] “Trade book publishing is dominated by the “Big 5”: five book publishing companies that own or partner with over 100 different publishers and imprints, and who are responsible for the lion’s share of books that you see on shelves. As such, it can get confusing as to which imprint (like Tor Teen) is owned by which publisher (Tor/Forge Books) is owned by which “Big 5” company (Macmillan). Designer and author Ali Almossawi recently collected this information into an easy online info chart, allowing curious folks to quickly identify imprints and publishers owned by the same “Big 5” company. This is publicly available information, but it can be difficult to track down in some cases. Almossawi’s chart greatly simplifies that information. It should be noted that not all publishers are included in the chart, just the ones that are considered the five most prominent.”
posted by Fizz (20 comments total)

Have there ever been any attempts to regulate the publishing industry? I'm asking this because it sort of pops into my mind in relation to the recent AT&T and Time Warner merger. Oh, and this illustration is lovely.
posted by Fizz at 1:47 PM on October 25, 2016

I'm not sure the situation is super analogous to cable providers. I'm not sure the chart shows a landscape where every press you could think of is secretly linked back to the big five; more the extent of the recent phenomenon of the big five in the US fracturing themselves by handing out almost-vanity imprints either to famous names within the business or to celebs proper. The impression I get is that these are often then under-serviced; a new celeb's imprint might not get new hires on the marketing or publicity teams, for example, but just drop its workload onto existing employees.

A bit of this goes on in the UK, too, but not to the same extent.
posted by ominous_paws at 2:16 PM on October 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Good article; I was surprised to find it on a website that was owned by an imprint that's owned by one of the Big 5 (and is kind of their 'auxiliary brand', providing an outlet for content just below their threshold for paper publishing).
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:24 PM on October 25, 2016

I don't think the Big 5 are keeping any secrets - they don't care if we know who their imprints are.

This chart only shows the imprints they own. There's a whole nother level of imprints/publishers they distribute, which gives them even more industry power.
posted by lyssabee at 2:49 PM on October 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wow, "big" doesn't begin to describe these guys. They are way more than "big" and we should employ some other word, "biggus" perhaps, which, even though sometimes seen in the same vicinity as the word "dickus", is no insult.
posted by storybored at 3:06 PM on October 25, 2016

If I might quibble: it was five before Random House ate Penguin, shouldn't it be the big four now? According to Wikipedia, this would mean demoting MacMillan. Unless, of course, there is some special numerological significance to five that I am unaware of.
posted by spindle at 5:20 PM on October 25, 2016

Before Random House absorbed Penguin it was the Big Six.
posted by lyssabee at 5:50 PM on October 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

…wait, so Tor Children's is run by Macmillan, and Macmillan Audio is independent? What the hell is that about? Publishers buying and selling imprints among themselves, without changing the names? Bizarre.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:48 PM on October 25, 2016

Macmillan also appears to own "Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for Young Readers" and "Henry Holt Books for Young Readers," not to mention an imprint called "Second First" an imprint called "Imprint." I'm beginning to suspect an absurdist sense of humor somewhere high up at Macmillan.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:51 PM on October 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Literally everything in the graphic on tor.com is part of Macmillan because that graphic is explaining what imprints are part of what groups within Macmillan. So yeah Macmillan Audio is part of Macmillan, as is FSG, FSG Young Reader, Imprint, etc.
posted by (Over) Thinking at 7:02 PM on October 25, 2016

Also imprints are generally named by the publisher (meaning the person in that role, not the company) who founds them.
posted by (Over) Thinking at 7:03 PM on October 25, 2016

You may wonder which of the Big 5 are themselves owned by even larger international media conglomerates. It's exactly as many of them as you'd expect.
posted by sfenders at 7:49 PM on October 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

It would be great if this chart took the form of a timeline. There used to be a print publication called Who Owns Whom in British Book Publishing that did this.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:15 AM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Huh. I didn't realize that my boss from my first job after college has her own imprint now.

This chart also doesn't really capture the hierarchy at the lower levels well, making it seem like small imprints are on equal footing with large ones. Still a very useful chart, though!

And I STILL think it was a missed opportunity that they didn't go with Random Penguin House for the post-merger name.
posted by MsMolly at 1:12 AM on October 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

ominous_paws: this goes on in the UK to exactly the same degree as in the US. These are multinationals, remember.

However, I spotted one omission in the chunk of the diagram I know intimately; while Berkeley is listed under Penguin Publishing Group, Berkeley is/was an umbrella in its own right. Ace and Roc, the main SF imprints at Penguin, don't even get a look-in. (Daw, a semi-autonomous small imprint, is correctly listed.) This may reflect a current re-org in progress as my understanding is that Berkeley and its imprints are being absorbed and cannibalized by the Random behemoth, but it seems like a bit of an oversight to miss out a pair of imprints that as recently as this year were publishing over 100 books/year (compared to Daw's 30-40).

So, take this with a pinch of salt.
posted by cstross at 2:11 AM on October 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

NOTE: the key to understanding the wonderful world of publishing is to understand that it's an umbrella term covering about 20 different industries that have nothing in common whatsoever except a historical connection to printing presses -- consider the marked similarities between academic journal publishing and newspapers, or lack thereof, if you will -- and the business as it exists today is the intersecting blob at the center of the Venn diagram of business practices that did not cause some previous enterprise (that tried them) to go broke at some time in the preceeding 200 years.

Nobody sane would invent an industry structured like this -- and indeed, nobody did invent it: it just sort of happened, like the ant colony from hell, and the whacky names/hierarchies reflect the fact that the Big Five are basically the winners (or rather, survivors) of a forty-year Katamari tournament played with small independent publishers as pieces.
posted by cstross at 2:17 AM on October 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

The choice of design is interesting here - each one of them looks like an abstracted image of a Matrix squiddy.
posted by jammy at 4:34 AM on October 26, 2016

Ah thanks, (Over) Thinking. I had only looked at the first link in the FPP, which just shows a small, incomplete subset of the full chart. It has five publishers in it, which I mistook for the Big 5. My mistake.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:31 AM on October 26, 2016

As someone who works with one of these Big Five, I suspect they look much bigger from the outside than they do from the inside. A number of these imprints are little more than a marketing category and a logo on the spine. As examples, take "Orb," published by Tor/Forge (which is part of the Macmillan house), which is essentially the house label for previously-published works that Tor has gotten the reprint rights for and is now putting out in trade paperback. The back-end of Orb is Tor; they are functionally indistinguishable. They slice up the imprints the way they do, I suspect, to make it easier for booksellers and librarians to understand what they're looking at when they look at the quarterly book catalogues.

CStross is absolutely correct that when one talks about the "Big Five" what one is seeing is the end result of decades of mergers and conglomeration, the most recent of which is the Penguin/Random House merger. As media organizations go, they're all (relatively) modestly sized, which why when people refer to them as the "Big Five" I get a giggle. As others have noted, all of them are themselves part of larger media corporations, including CBS (soon itself to be reintegrated into Viacom, as I understand it) and News Corp.

I would note that Scholastic is as large as any of them and would be the sole independent; to not consider it as part of a "Big Six" is basically a case of belittling it due to its audience. It's also worth noting that Amazon has a substantial stable of book imprints, some more successful than others (47North, their SF/F imprint, seems to be doing reasonably well), although their books have some difficulty being found in physical bookstores (Amazon also owns Audible, which is the largest audio book publishers in the US and thus likely their most successful "imprint").
posted by jscalzi at 6:47 AM on October 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

As someone who works with one of these Big Five, I suspect they look much bigger from the outside than they do from the inside. A number of these imprints are little more than a marketing category and a logo on the spine. As examples, take "Orb," published by Tor/Forge (which is part of the Macmillan house), which is essentially the house label for previously-published works that Tor has gotten the reprint rights for and is now putting out in trade paperback. The back-end of Orb is Tor; they are functionally indistinguishable. They slice up the imprints the way they do, I suspect, to make it easier for booksellers and librarians to understand what they're looking at when they look at the quarterly book catalogues.

From what I've gathered from my experiences at S&S, this really depends on the Big 5 and the imprint. Some share staffs; some are independent endeavors. Simon Pulse and Books for Young Readers, for example, are run separately.

(Also always found it interesting that, because of this, publishers have different policies as to which editors an agent can submit the same book to.)

Candlewick and Chronicle are two other children's independent publishers.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 7:12 AM on October 26, 2016 [1 favorite]