Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Ten Things I Want to Know About Random House's Reorganization

Andrew Wheeler has the clearest summary of what some call Black Wednesday (I prefer Bloodbath Wednesday myself), which now encompasses more layoffs at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon & Schuster cutting 35 jobs (including editor Denise Roy) and Thomas Nelson's layoffs. But back to Random House, which is still the biggest story in the making, and what I want to know:

• What will Steve Rubin's new role be with the company, if he even stays put?
• Why did Spiegel and Grau get separated from the rest of the Doubleday crew? Will they work better under Gina Centrello than Sonny Mehta?
• Will Nan Talese get to keep her own imprint under Sonny's watch or is this a slow boat to retirement of some kind?
• Why does the prospect of Phyllis Grann interacting with Sonny give me flashbacks to the 2003 Ann Godoff mess? Or to 2002?
• Is there any reason whatsoever for the Crown side to keep doing fiction?
• Will imprints disappear completely and if so, which ones? (Broadway seems the likeliest candidate, and most of Bantam Dell's are up for scrutiny too, I reckon.)
• How many growing pains will there be incorporating Doubleday's commercial approach with Knopf's ethos? Yes, Knopf isn't nearly as highbrow as its reputation, but they wouldn't have published Dan Brown or John Grisham.
• Are Ballantine and Bantam Dell honestly expected to keep separate editorial mandates when what they publish are so close in nature?
• How exactly will marketing and sales be streamlined across the board?
• Last but not least, will all this news finally make Markus Dohle speak to the press? (I already know the answer to that: nope.)

Random House Reorganizes

I am about to pick my jaw up from the floor, but here's the summary of a press release Random House CEO Markus Dohle just sent out:

• The Random House Publishing Group, under the leadership of President and Publisher Gina Centrello, will expand to include the imprints of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, including The Dial Press, along with Doubleday’s Spiegel & Grau.
• The Knopf Publishing Group, led by Chairman Sonny Mehta, will expand to include the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group.
• The Crown Publishing Group, under the direction of President and Publisher Jenny Frost, will expand to include the other imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group—Broadway, Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion and WaterBrook Multnomah.
• As a result of the reorganization, Bantam Dell publisher Irwyn Appelbaum and Doubleday publisher Steve Rubin are leaving the company. Appelbaum leaves immediately while Rubin is in discussions with Dohle about "creating a new role for him in the company."

Wow. Just wow. And that publishing imprint report card? Presto, obsolete.

Publishing Imprint Report Card, Part VI

(This is the sixth and last part in a multi-part series examining publisher imprint brands in an informal, opinionated manner. Part I, focusing on Macmillan, is here, and Part II, focusing on Simon & Schuster, is here,  Part III, focusing on Hachette, is here, Part IV, focusing on HarperCollins, is here, and Part V, focusing on Penguin, is here.)

Before I get to the biggest corporate behemoth of them all, a word on why I'm ignoring some of the other majors. Norton is a large independent that seems to know what it's doing with regard to mixing serious non-fiction, literary fiction and other smart titles that cross the academic/commercial line. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt just survived a rather brutal merger of its educational and trade offerings, but the sense I get is that the end result, on the trade side, might be a leaner, stronger, more focused publishing house. And everybody else in the game is smaller in terms of how much they publish and the money they have the potential to make.

So. Random House. The "run amok with weirdness" crack of the previous post? Has to do with what the recent departure of Ed Volini, longtime COO of the company, might mean. If he was just leaving it would be one thing. But his positions are being eliminated outright, and everybody who reported to Volini will now report to CEO Markus Dohle - who of course, took over that position from Peter Olson about three months or so ago.

The prevailing wisdom is that when there's someone new at the top, reorganization down the line is bound to happen. It wasn't quite the case with Olson (beyond the Random House/Ballantine merging and Ann Godoff's firing, but let's face it, it ended up working out pretty well for all parties concerned) but the probability of change and culling seems greater with Dohle.

In fact, I almost feel sorry for him, because even though from an imprint standpoint, Random House appears to be an overly redundant, disorganized mess that is way too big for its own good, there aren't that many options for what to do. Keeping the status quo doesn't seem like a very viable prospect. Sell some of the divisions off? Well, their parent company Bertelsmann already got rid of its Direct Publishing arm, so there's a selling mood in the air. But at a time when Reed is practically begging people to take its magazine arm from them - to the point where they are practically paying prospective new owners to do so - I don't see too many enthusiastic takers for one of RH's chicken legs or thighs. Merge unprofitable divisions with more profitable ones? That seems more likely, but perhaps not for some time.

But let's go through the (many, many, many) imprints, shall we?

Publisher Imprint Report Card, Part V

(This is the fifth in a multi-part series examining publisher imprint brands in an informal, opinionated manner. Part I, focusing on Macmillan, is here, and Part II, focusing on Simon & Schuster, is here,  Part III, focusing on Hachette, is here, and Part IV, focusing on HarperCollins, is here. Others will follow over the course of the month.)

I've been saving the biggest behemoths for last because they take longer to discuss and because, frankly, they drive me a little crazy. So many imprints! So much redundancy! So much confusion! But of the two corporate bigwigs, I'd say Pearson has the edge of Bertelsmann and that's only because the former isn't about to run amok with weirdness like the latter will. In other words, we're talking about Penguin Group today.

Publisher Imprint Report Card, Part IV

(This is the fourth in a multi-part series examining publisher imprint brands in an informal, opinionated manner. Part I, focusing on Macmillan, is here, and Part Ii, focusing on Simon & Schuster, is here, and part III, focusing on Hachette, is here. Others will follow over the course of the month.)

Like Hachette, HarperCollins has spent the last while reorganizing itself. Its reasons, of course, are different, because the company hadn't been bought out by another company, nor had it bought anyone else lately, but some of the mechanisms are similar. More imprint streamlining; CEOs leaving and being replaced from within; greater attention to the Internet and its marketing potential; and the greatest focus on the bottom line. Some of the reorganization is finished - HarperMorrow on one end, Collins on another - and some hasn't really begun yet. All of which means that HarperCollins is in the midst of interesting times, imprint-wise....

Publisher Imprint Report Card, Part III

(This is the third in a multi-part series examining publisher imprint brands in an informal, opinionated manner. Part I, focusing on Macmillan, is here, and Part Ii, focusing on Simon & Schuster, is here. others will follow over the course of the month.)

Unlike the other major corporate publishers, which are in various stages of brand identity reorganization, Hachette Book Group has just thrown off the shackles of its previous name and owner, Time Warner (as well as that horribly dated Warner logo), and embraced its new European corporate overlords. If I expanded this series to look at publishers' UK arms, the landscape would be quite different (since Hachette owns Orion, Hodder Headline and Little Brown UK, leading to some imprint overlap, confusion, problems with Amazon, etc.) But on the US side, Hachette as publisher looks a lot more streamlined than Time Warner ever was. But there's still a ways to go.

Publisher Imprint Report Card, Part II

(This is the second in a multi-part series examining publisher imprint brands in an informal, opinionated manner. Part I, focusing on Macmillan, is here; others will follow.)

It's been about a year since longtime CEO Jack Romanos announced his retirement and that longtime #2, Carolyn Reidy, would take his place at the top. The company had done rather well thanks to the now-quaint phenomenal success of THE SECRET (really, the thing dated about as quickly as the movie TITANIC, unwatchable as soon as it was released on video) but that's old news. So is the company at a crossroads or still climbing? The answer, I think, is somewhere in between...

Publisher Imprint Report Card, Part I

It is not news that the publishing industry is in flux and in dire need of some new directions and definitions. It is not news that there will be more changes, more angst, more doom, more gloom, and so on and so forth. What might be news is that the teeth-gnashing starts and stops, gives way to cosmetic changes that seem to accomplish something or other, and then a year later when it doesn't, people forget or move on.

Which brings me to publishers as brands. Right now, common wisdom is that authors are brands and publishers are not - no matter how hard ex-HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman banged that proverbial gong. Common wisdom is nowhere near so black and white, otherwise why would certain small press outfits like Soft Skull, Akashic, Hard Case Crime and Tachyon have clear publishing goals recognized by those who read their books (Soft Skull: offbeat, underground. Akashic: crime anthologies, literary punk. Hard Case Crime: retro-pulp fiction reissues and originals. Tachyon: smart SF/F that's not always easy to classify.) Conglomerates could, and should, learn from their less financially mighty cousins, as they should from the larger splintering of mass media, that their imprints should mean something to the reader. Sometimes that means staying with the status quo; other times it means doing away with the imprint altogether.

So what follows, probably in four or five parts, is a highly subjective, data-free look at what publisher imprints mean to me and what they should mean to everyone else. First up, after the jump, are all the imprints under the corporate umbrella of Macmillan.

Is This the Greatest Book Deal in the History of the Universe?

Read on at Vulture to find out.

Getlin, Lippincott to Leave LAT (UPDATED)

They called it Black Monday for a reason. 150 people on the editorial side of the Los Angeles Times, taking a buyout or waiting for the axe to fall. Today some of the names of those leaving have trickled out to the public, but not all. And though it remains to be seen how the Book Review will fare - beyond LA Observed's report that the standalone hybrid with Opinion is dead as of July 27 - Josh Getlin, the paper's publishing reporter these last few years, will not be sticking around. His name was on Tell Zell's list, and he confirmed the news to me by email late this afternoon.

I wish I could say I'm surprised by the news. But lately Getlin's work, long an example of consummate professionalism about the publishing industry, had taken a more soundbite-driven turn. Some of the newer pieces, like the weekly book-to-film column "Bookit", worked fine. Others, launched more recently, struck me as a stopgap, a poor use of a good reporter's time and energy. And now he's gone, and the publishing industry will be poorer for it.

Suffice to say between this news and the shuttering of Publishing News and the Bat Segundo Show, it's kind of a sucky week in publishing town. And it's only Tuesday.

UPDATE, 7/16: LA Observed has confirmed that Book Review assistant editor Sara Lippincott will be leaving the paper and her position eliminated. I only worked with her once, just a few weeks ago, but if you want to know why my review of Zoe Ferraris' FINDING NOUF turned out so well, it was because of her thoughtful, incisive edits - a hallmark of the Book Review.