The “Big Five” publishing houses — Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House — wield enormous global power, controlling about 80 percent of the English-language trade publishing market. As Vox reported in 2022, “The big publishers are now so big, with such extensive backlists and such deep pockets, that it’s nearly impossible to compete with them at scale.”

In the United States, Big Five–published books make up more than 80 percent of the titles on bestsellers lists. They also dominate the book market in the UK, Canada, and Australia. The top four of the Big Five also publish in more than fifteen additional languages and sell licensing rights in every other language. In most languages, translations from English make up a surprising number of newly published books, and these translations are most likely to have originated at one of the Big Five publishers.

As the second-largest publisher in the world, with operations in fifteen countries and more than 120 publishing imprints, HarperCollins had sales of more than US$2 billion in 2023. The “About Us” page of the HarperCollins website points out to potential readers that HarperCollins is the house of “Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, J. R. R. Tolkien, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr., Gabriel García Márquez, George R. R. Martin, C. S. Lewis, Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, and many more.” It fails to mention that HarperCollins is also a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.