The Penguin in the Coal Mine
If you’re in or adjacent to the publishing industry, you’ve probably been following the developing news out of Penguin Random House over the past few years. Sadly, few in the industry bothered to heed what turned out to be a penguin in the coal mine.
See former PRH employee Alyssa Matesic’s video:
After the collapse of their attempted merger with Simon & Schuster, PRH began shedding executives like a sinking ship dropping ballast. That so-called "changing of the guard" is a symptom, not a cure. Legacy publishing isn't evolving. It's dying.
Photo: @eyretartt on X
Just look at those bargain basement Penguin Archive Edition covers. You don't need insider sources to see the reason for oldpub’s demise. Anyone who has paid attention to the last decade of corporate publishing decisions can tell you that the Big Five—or what’s left of them—are not serious enterprises anymore. They're ideological platforms masquerading as businesses. Rather than adapting to the changing market, they tried to capture a bigger piece of a shrinking pie. And in doing so, they deliberately drove away one of the largest, most loyal, and most underserved customer bases in publishing: men.
Before ruling cult dogma took over legacy publishing, the industry understood that men read books too—and that if you gave them stories they actually wanted, they would buy a lot of them. Genre fiction: thrillers, adventure, science fiction, fantasy, war stories, thrived because men were still welcome. Editors understood that entertaining your customer was not an act of moral compromise.
But sometime after the mid-90s, a new generation of publishing insiders decided that male readers were a problem. One by one, major imprints purged adventure fiction, space opera, and heroic fantasy in favor of domestic dramas, victim lit, and navel-gazing autofiction. Instead of courting new audiences, publishers played a suicidal game of musical chairs, marketing the same dwindling pool of product to the same shrinking, insular audience: upper-middle-class women with graduate degrees.
The strategy was simple: sacrifice growth for control. Make the market smaller but predictable, then squeeze it dry. When that didn’t make enough money, they turned to Hollywood to option what little was still salable. Book advances went down. Editorial standards collapsed. Covers got worse. Every year, the industry celebrated its declining influence like a drunkard boasting about how little he needs to eat.
Related: No, Men Do Not Hate Reading
And then AI arrived.
Now, nyone with an ounce of tech savvy can now produce endless content. And if content is all you’re selling, you're already dead. Traditional publishing had one advantage left: prestige. But their social proof is eroding as readers and authors alike realize the emperor has no clothes.
PRH’s recent layoffs tell the real story. They didn't just cut the dead weight. They culled seasoned editors who knew how to make books that sold to men and women alike. The ones who remembered that a publishing house is supposed to produce mass-market entertainment, not act as a cultural gatekeeping committee.
In their place? A new generation trained not in storytelling, but in ideological policing. The same people who believe their job is to "represent the world" instead of entertaining the customer. But customers don't care what you represent. They care about what you deliver. And when you consistently deliver boring, preachy, self-important lectures, they stop buying.
This is why newpub destroyed oldpub, and why neopatronage is poised to succeed indie. Authors who understand the simple principle of serving their audience will inherit the future. The old publishing houses are like ship captains steaming toward the iceberg: dimly aware of the looming threat but too proud to change course.
There’s no fixing the Big Five. They are getting the death they chose. A better publishing industry is already being built; one that doesn't treat half the population like an afterthought.
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Dark fantasy minus the grim plus heroes you can relate to battling vs overwhelming odds
