None of this is new, it has been this way for decades. It just gets worse as the industry gets more concentrated, and the publishers are more tightly controlled

None of this is new, it has been this way for decades. It just gets worse as the industry gets more concentrated, and the publishers are more tightly controlled by media conglomerates and equity investors who treat them as black boxes for the extraction of value. I haven't worked on the acquisitions side in a long time, but practically everything in this article could have been written thirty years ago. The midlist where you'd try to grow a new author's audience was already being squeezed out.