The career novelist

Staying alive in the land of the giants

lishing, media, or entertainment conglomerate. Further, the con-
glomerate is as likely to be global as it is to be based in America.
The situation is the same in the other genres. Thus, if you are a
career novelist you are, like it or not, almost certainly squirming
under the huge, hairy foot of a media colossus. Not a comforting
thought, is it?
Should you be worried? Can you do anything practical about it,
short of selling to a small press or giving up altogether and going to
work as a CPA? How did this mess get started, anyway?

THE URGE TO MERGE

Let us back up for a moment. Understanding the history of this sit-

uation will go a long way toward putting you back in control. First of

all, conglomerates per se are nothing new. During the go-go years of

the sixties, large corporations regularly gobbled up smaller compa-

nies, regardless of whether they had a logical connection to their

core business or not. Bigger was better, and earnings proved it.

The conglomerates of today are somewhat different. An early

forerunner in the communications area was CBS. Under William

Paley, CBS acquired or started up entertainment-related businesses

like Ideal Toys, Steinway pianos, Fender guitars, magazines, cable

networks, and film studios. But the regulatory climate in the Paley

years was working against conglomerates.

Things really got cooking in the heady, deregulated atmosphere

of the eighties. Mergers and acquisitions (M & A's) were, until

recently, the hottest game on Wall Street. Bigger became—and still

somewhat remains—better thanks to a tax system that favors debt.

The fall of the dollar, a move engineered by our own government in

the Plaza Accord of 1985, attracted foreign buyers such as the

moguls Maxwell and Murdoch, the German giant Bertelsmann, and

the Dutch firm Elsevier.

1 mentioned science fiction imprints ... for the record, here are

the big ten, along with the colossus that owns, controls, or distrib-

utes each:

Ace-. Seagrams (via MCA and Putnam-Berkley)

AvonNova-. Hearst, a U.S. publishing conglomerate