Big Publishing

From Publishers Weekly:

Memoirs by former publishing executives have become something of a cottage industry this year. On September 19, former Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s Turning Pages: The Adventures and Misadventures of a Publisher is due out from Skyhorse Publishing, and on November 7, Lyons Press will release Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing by Charles Scribner III. These titles follow Applause Books’ January publication of Stephen Rubin’s Words and Music: Confessions of an Optimist, which recounts his executive days at Random House and Macmillan.

Unlike Rubin’s book, which at times offers harsh critiques of his colleagues, the upcoming titles are by men who grew up with publishing in their veins. Sargent’s ancestors include Doubledays, while Scribner’s family name still adorns one of publishing’s most admired imprints.

And besides writing books due out within a few weeks of each other, they have some other shared history: Sargent writes in his prologue that his great grandfather, Frank Nelson Doubleday, got his start in publishing when he quit school “and went to work for Charles Scribner, a prominent publisher of the time.” In his book, Scribner notes that while 1897 was a good year for Scribners, the company did suffer a major loss when the business manager of Scribners magazine left, noting that “Frank Nelson Doubleday joined the company 20 years earlier as a fourteen-year-old lad.”

Sargent and Scribner also had a shared mentor. Jeremiah Kaplan hired Sargent to work at Macmillan, and Kaplan would later bring Sargent to S&S when he moved there. Kaplan was the president of Macmillan when the Scribner family sold the company to them. After the deal, Scribner worked for Kaplan as v-p of special projects.

Similar to Rubin in his book, Sargent and Scribner describe publishing as an exciting, rewarding, and at times very stressful life at the executive level. Scribner’s account is cleverly written and punchy, with a focus on how publishing’s movers and shakers (including authors) operated, while Sargent’s memoir maintains the CEO-of-the-people style that made him one of publishing’s most popular CEOs—an approach that got him fired.

To answer the question many in the industry still wonder about, does Sargent disclose why he was in let go in late 2020? The answer is not exactly, but he does drop several clues. When the Covid pandemic hit, Macmillan’s owners, in particular Stefan von Holtzbrinck, were worried about the company’s liquidity and had Sargent implement a number of cost cuts, which included cutting salaries. As Macmillan’s financial results remained better than expected, Sargent convinced von Holtzbrinck to undo the cuts, though Sargent admits he was “impolite” during those discussions.

In August, von Holtzbrinck called Sargent again with a plan to “protect the capital structure of his family’s holdings,” Sargent writes. Sargent reluctantly agreed to implement the plan, but as work on the project progressed, he said he became certain the plan was wrong and that “hundreds” of employees would lose their jobs. (He goes no further about what the plan was. His account doesn’t counter the widespread belief that von Holtzbrinck wanted to sell the trade division, but it also doesn’t discount the idea that von Holtzbrinck wanted to consolidate and streamline Macmillan’s various departments.)

Sargent told von Holtzbrinck in an email on August 21 that he would not carry out the plan, and von Holtzbrinck responded that the plan would be scrapped, since the board agreed it could not go ahead without his support. Sargent writes that he thought things were settled, but “the next day I got the gate.”

Sargent notes that he doesn’t burn with anger over his dismissal and was grateful for the time he had running the company and appreciated the “remarkable autonomy” the von Holtzbrinck family gave him. He also offered a salute to Macmillan employees, saying they will always have his respect and admiration for achieving all the goals that had been set for them.

Until that episode, Sargent had a stellar career and was involved in some of publishing’s most important developments around such hot-button issues as free speech, copyright protections, and publisher relations with Amazon. Regarding the latter, Sargent was running Macmillan when Amazon decided to turn off the buy buttons on Macmillan titles in a dispute over e-book terms. After a week of tense negotiations, a deal was reached, which led Amazon to post an infamous statement in the Kindle forum, explaining that it would have to eventually accept an agreement with Macmillan “because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles.”

Sargent joined Macmillan in 1996 as head of St. Martin’s and quickly rose up the ranks. In the book, he recounts interactions with publishing legends, including Roger Straus as he was heading toward retirement; the decision to publish Monica Lewinsky’s book, which drew criticism inside and outside of the company; and the decision to publish Fortunate Son, a book critical of then–Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush that Macmillan would later need to recall.

Sargent once again dealt with White House issues in 2018 when Macmillan’s Holt division published Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, one of the first books critical of then-president Trump. After word spread about the impending publication, Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to Macmillan, but the company released the title anyway, and it went on to become one of its biggest bestsellers.

No book about Macmillan can be written without some comment on its former headquarters. The Flatiron Building was one of New York’s first skyscrapers, and though it was elegantly designed, the problem, as Sargent notes, “was everything else.” When the lease was up in 2018, despite much employee support for staying, Sargent decided Macmillan had no choice but to find a new home.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG says the Amazon pricing for each of these books is calculated to generate very few ebook sales, which, of course, doesn’t guarantee that anyone who enjoys reading ebooks will be inclined to purchase print versions of either book.

Of course, ebook sales at reasonable prices generate much more money for publishers than sales of printed books at higher prices.

Amazon Derangement Syndrome still runs rampant in the dusty and spider-infested halls of Big Publishing.

From The New Publishing Standard:

Revenues up, profits down, workers laid off. The PRH H1 memo to employees paints a fuzzy and incomplete picture, but let’s be generous to newly installed CEO Nihar Malaviya as he sups from the PRH chalice poisoned by previous CEO Markus Dohle’s abortive bid to acquire Simon & Shuster last year.

By the time Dohle finally fell on his sword, the damage had been done. Many senior executives at PRH had jumped ship following the debacle in court where PRH operational policy (read guesswork and gambling) and real market share was laid bare, and the then CEO’s paranoia about subscription was laughably exposed.

Malaviya was left to pick up the pieces and rebuild PRH’s tarnished reputation.

Parent company Bertelsmann is unsurprisingly impressed by the revenue rise PRH clocked in H1, which as Porter Anderson at Publishing Perspectives headlines, saw a YoY rise of 9% to €2.1 billion. But in a report noteworthy for not once telling us how affable Nihar Malaviya is, Anderson neglects to mention that PRH profits for the same period were up less than 1%. Hardly an auspicious start for the new CEO.

Malaviya’s first H1 report presented inherent challenges to the new chief. He’s hardly had time to make an impact on his inheritance – most of the ups and downs can be firmly attributed to the Dohle era, as can the $200 million penalty and untold legal fees that arose from the acquisition fail, that no doubt goes some way to necessitating the redundancies programme Malaviya has been forced to roll out.

On the Court case, Malaviya has been tactfully silent, but did manage a dig at Dohle’s splash-the-cash record with a reference in the H1 report, smugly noting “we acquired several small companies during this year, furthering our ambitions to grow in audio, children’s, and data-driven publishing, as well as in local content, among others.”

That’s something the employee base needed to hear. Reassurance that Malaviya was not on a power and glory grab like his predecessor. But questions remain about Malaviya’s ability to connect with his workforce. Parts of the memo read more like a pitch to senior management and investors than to the team that do the company’s day to day grunt work.

Explained Malaviya: “Industry inflationary cost pressures and increased costs across our businesses have continued to impact us. We have already taken several steps to offset these pressures in some of our markets around the world and will continue to carefully navigate these industry and structural dynamics.”

That’s industry-speak for, we’ve got rid of some of you and more will have to go. 

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

At times, the close followers of major US publishers remind PG of a cult. They’re fixated on every little change or word from inside the walls of Big-But-Getting-Smaller-Publishing.

PG always thought the Dohle play for Simon & Schuster was a stupid idea and bound to attract antitrust attention with a good possibility of litigation. It was an immense distraction for Dohle and, almost certainly, for the remainder of the executive ranks and a goodly number of the PRH peons as well.

Plus major antitrust litigation sucks up breathtaking amounts of money, money that would otherwise be available to fund large advances for any number of ghost-written celebrity books, perhaps even a couple more Barack and Michelle coffee table tomes.

The Mohn family, owns and controls (directly and indirectly) Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, which, in turn, owns PRH plus a large collection of of other stuff, including stupendous bank accounts. PG doesn’t remember reading anything written about the adult Mohns of the twentieth and twenty-first century that doesn’t describe them as a collection of billionaires.

PG has never met an actual German billionaire, but he suspects they don’t like receiving bad financial news from their underlings. PG also suspects German billionaires loath the idea of truckloads of their money being paid to New York lawyers.

From Publishers Weekly:

Simon & Schuster was the only one of the country’s four largest trade publishers to show an improved profit margin in the first half of 2023 compared to last year. While industry sales were generally flat in the first six months of the year, companies cited higher costs as the major reason profit margins shrank in the first six months of 2023.

In reporting Penguin Random House’s first-half results last week, where sales rose 9.5% but profits were up less than 1%, interim global CEO Nihar Malaviya told employees the small earnings increase “should come as no surprise, as industry inflationary cost pressures and increased costs across our businesses have continued to impact us.”

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray noted earlier that in addition to higher manufacturing, freight, and distribution costs, the industry has faced macroeconomic headwinds that he hasn’t seen since the Great Recession of 2008. Those challenges, as well as the unique conditions tied to the pandemic—including overprinting by publishers and over-ordering by most accounts to meet the early surge in book buying—created a bubble that began to fizzle last year, and it took time for all industry players to recover, Murray said. That resulted in earnings falling 32.4% at HC in the first half of the year on a 6.5% decline in sales.

Profits fell 19.7% at Lagardère Publishing despite a 2.5% increase in six-month sales. In addition to inflationary pressures, Lagardère cited increased costs incurred on “transformation projects in France” as the reason for the earnings decline. Some of those costs were partly offset by higher selling prices and the impacts of operational efficiency plans, particularly in the United States, the company said.

Among the cost-cutting measures employed by all three companies were workforce reductions, with HarperCollins’s and PRH’s efforts garnering the most attention. HC was under a corporate mandate to reduce its North American workforce by 5%, while PRH cut staff through layoffs and an early retirement program for employees over 60 who were with the company for at least 15 years (voluntary separation offer). HBG also had its own early retirement initiative (voluntary resignation benefits program).

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Los Angeles Times:

It seemed to many in book publishing like good news last October when the Department of Justice successfully sued to block Penguin Random House (PRH) from acquiring Simon & Schuster. PRH is the largest publisher in the United States and S & S is third. Together they might have controlled more than half the industry. Only three other publishers — HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan — control the bulk of the rest. Such consolidation has long worried literary types who fear it leads to the privileging of profit over culture. But the alternative in this case might prove worse. On Monday, Paramount sold Simon & Schuster to KKR, a private equity firm.

Simon & Schuster’s role in the book world

Simon & Schuster is a 99-year-old house. Founded by two Jewish bookmen, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, it was among a wave of new firms established in the first half of the 20th century by Jewish bookmen, including Knopf, Random House and Viking. But whereas these other houses were literary ventures, S & S was more commercial from the start. While Random House profited from the scandal of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” S & S grew on the back of crossword puzzle books.

Paramount acquired Simon & Schuster in 1975, leading to vast growth through acquisitions, with a focus on educational and professional publishing. By the 21st century, Simon & Schuster had become a behemoth, one of the Big Five, inevitably containing multitudes. Today its imprints include commercial lines such as Atria (Vince Flynn, Colleen Hoover, Jodi Picoult, Brad Thor) and the venerable Scribner (Stephen King, Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward) whose backlist features F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

What is KKR?

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is an investment company founded in 1976. Henry Kravis and George R. Roberts continue to hold positions as executive co-chairmen. They pioneered leveraged buyouts in the 1980s, culminating in one of the largest in history when they bought out RJR Nabisco in 1989. As first documented in the investigative blockbuster “Barbarians at the Gate,” the firm established an early record of buying companies, loading them up with debt, then squeezing them for profit — maybe most famously with the slow death of Toys R Us. More recently, KKR acquired hundreds of facilities for people with disabilities, which, under the new ownership, led to conditions in which residents were “consigned to live in squalor, denied basic medical care, or all but abandoned,” according to Polk-winning reportage from Buzzfeed.

Its reputation has grown more complicated over time, even as it’s made some incursions into publishing. KKR is enormous, with more than $500 billion in assets. Simon & Schuster, purchased for $1.62 billion, will account for less than one half of 1%. Still, KKR co-CEO Scott Nuttall told the the Wall Street Journal that “the firm puts new growth opportunities through a screen. ‘Can we do it in a way that is special? Can we get to the top three in the world?’”

KKR has some publishing connections. Co-CEO Joseph Bae is married to the respected novelist Janice Y.K. Lee — though she publishes with PRH. More notably, Richard Sarnoff, chair of KKR’s media group, worked in publishing from the 1980s until 2011. He helped the German conglomerate Bertelsmann acquire Random House in 1998, after which he became an increasingly influential figure in the industry, an early advocate of audio and new media who also pushed publishing toward increasing financialization through further acquisitions and investments in venture capital.

One benefit touted by Simon & Schuster as well as KKR on Monday is its habit of offering equity to employees of its companies. Such a program will now be established at S & S. This worked out well for the company’s recent publishing asset, RBMedia, the world’s largest audiobook publisher. Acquired in 2018, RBMedia was sold last month in a deal that, according to KKR’s statements to the New York Times, earned employees payouts of up to two times their annual salaries.

What does the sale mean for the industry?

It is, in one sense, the continuation of an old story. The corporatization of publishing began in the 1960s. Times Mirror acquired the esteemed mass-market paperback house New American Library in 1960 and hired McKinsey consultants to rationalize its operations, leading to increasing control for the business office and an exodus of editorial talent that included luminaries such as E. L. Doctorow and André Schiffrin. Few acquisitions or mergers have been as dramatic since, though all nudged publishing toward prioritizing financial growth. The big difference this week is that for decades media companies have tended to acquire publishing houses: Bertelsmann, CBS, Hachette, Holtzbrinck, News Corp, Paramount. Not so much private equity.

The consequences for the industry have been complex: One could write an entire book just covering fiction. Writers and editors have developed creative strategies for meeting the needs of growth-oriented parent companies while doing good work. The question is whether a private equity firm runs things differently.

Initial commentary from top figures at KKR and Simon & Schuster have focused on growth. “I believe that they are committed to helping us grow and become even greater than we already are,” S & S CEO Jonathan Karp told the L.A. Times in an interview Monday, calling the purchase “very good news for readers and publishers everywhere.” He touted KKR’s track record of audiobook production — one avenue of planned growth — as well its proposal to offer employees equity that could result in “a life-impacting amount of wealth.” In the short term, both sides say business at Simon & Schuster will carry on as usual. Of course, they have motivations for saying so.

What does this mean for books and readers?

What happens next is unpredictable. Will Simon & Schuster end up like Toys R Us or RBMedia? We know that KKR will aggressively pursue growth. It is likely less concerned with accommodating the niceties and vagaries of publishing than the other parent companies of the Big Five. One the one hand, this might mean Simon & Schuster becomes flush with cash, enabling its staff to explore compelling new projects (so long as they facilitate growth). On the other, it could mean radical transitions at the publisher, including layoffs and changing terms for contracts with authors. Colleen Hoover, a mega-bestseller, is probably safer than Kiese Laymon, a beloved critical darling whose books have little impact on S & S’s bottom line.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Times

From Nathan Bransford:

A big domino in book publishing fell this month as private equity behemoth KKR has acquired Simon & Schuster for $1.62 billion, rather less than the $2.175 billion Penguin Random House agreed to before that deal was quashed by a federal judge, though the blow to Paramount was softened by the $200 million PRH had to pay S&S when the deal failed to close.

This is… possibly good news for Simon & Schuster and the publishing industry writ large? It emerged during discovery for the Penguin Random House trial that S&S CEO Jonathan Karp had emailed a Paramount executive in 2020 that a financial buyer “would be better for the employees of S&S and arguably the larger book publishing ecosystem,” and sure enough, in an email to Publishers Lunch, Karp said “It was the outcome I’d hoped for.”

You can see why there’s some hope. Karp is keeping his job, S&S’s imprints remain free to compete with the other members of the Big 5 publishers (thus maintaining options for agents/authors as well as avoiding antitrust scrutiny), and S&S will likely avoid the waves of redundancy layoffs you’d expect with a merger with, say, HarperCollins. KKR is also supporting the creation of an equity program that would give employees a stake in the company.

However. S&S was already known as a lean operation and KKR is known for slashing and burning costs, so where exactly will additional efficiencies come from?

My personal worry has been that one or more of the major publishers would be acquired by a private equity company who would simply mine the backlist, which is the real cash cow in book publishing, and lay off (nearly) all the editors and support staff and essentially close up shop for new frontlist acquisitions, perhaps excepting a tiny handful of established bestsellers (like say Stephen King and Colleen Hoover). Karp, longtime readers may remember, made a name for himself with a lean imprint devoted to publishing one book a month on the grounds that publishers can only really focus on so many books at a time.

Please note that there are no indications that this is S&S’s plan, and I hope this remains mere nightmare fuel that does not come to pass.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

PG says the “S&S’s plan” doesn’t make any difference now that the publisher is owned by an organization that is not run by English majors.

While PG is not privy to any of S&S’s numbers, cutting way back on S&S salary costs and office rent and mining the backlist likely makes more sense than continuing to try to make the traditional business of publishing reasonably profitable (by the standards of financially-savvy KKR execs) while spending lots of money on advances that are unlikely to earn out and paying New York City rents and low (by NYC standards) salaries for a very small return on equity.

From Publishers Weekly:

The spring sales trend of weekly declines of about 6% continued last week with unit sales of print books dropping 6.4% compared to the week ended May 22, 2021. The sales decline through May 21, 2022, also came in at 6.4%, compared to last year at outlets that report to NPD BookScan.

Adult nonfiction continued to struggle, with sales falling 11% despite a host of new titles hitting high up on the category list. The Office BFFs by Jenna Fischer was #1 in the category, selling more than 26,000 copies in its first week on sale. Last year at this time John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed was #1, selling over 57,000 copies. Other new nonfiction books that had solid debuts were Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Mulitverse, which sold nearly 24,000 copies, and Endure by Cameron Hanes, which sold almost 18,000 copies, putting the titles in second and fourth place on the category chart, respectively.

The adult fiction category was the only segment to post a sales increase over last year. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us was #1, selling over 34,000 copies, and Hoover had three other titles on the category top 10 list. The highest-ranking new release was Jack Carr’s In the Blood, which sold over 22,000 copies.

Juvenile fiction sales dropped 8% from 2021. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss was #1 on the category list both last week and a year ago, selling about 60,000 copies in each week. Bloom of the Flower Dragon by Tracey West sold over 16,000 copies in its first week on sale, making it the top-selling new release in the category.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Publishing Perspectives:

Every July, I head down to the French countryside for a much-needed change from urban cool Hackney in East London. The upsides are the weather, the air and water quality, the wine, the produce, the markets, and being visited by hordes of friends and family. The downsides are rather slow Internet connections, no public transport, the occasional overheating canicule, and spasmodic infestations of hornets or mosquitoes.

In the photo above taken from my garden, you can just make out in the distance the hills of the Grésigne Forest where I frequently walk and test my fitness for coping with steep up-slopes and slippery down-slopes. These plusses and minuses got me thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of large and small publishers. So here goes.

Large publishers, by definition, have scale.

The greater their revenue, the more scale they have. But what does scale really mean? How is it measured? I guess the simplest measure is revenue. The greater the revenue, the more clout they theoretically have with retailers, with printers, with distributors. High revenue allows higher and more cost-effective investment in systems. But does it work?

One argument for the proposed and ultimately failed takeover of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House was that it gave them more power when negotiating with that very large Internet retailer with whom we all have a love-hate relationship.

Might it have worked? I doubt it. A publisher even of the size of a PRH/S&S size is a minnow compared with You Know Who in Seattle. It would inevitably be an unfair struggle. Indeed, any retailer is more concerned with the trading terms achieved with the big publishers than the smaller ones. I can’t prove this, and trying to find out would probably be in breach of competition laws in most jurisdictions, but I’d lay money that small publishers are getting a better deal with retailers than the big guns. They might not be able to buy as much exposure but sales they make will be at higher margins. The benefits of scale might just be a little illusory.

An ability to hire the best staff is clearly one of the perceived advantages of being big.

People are keen to join bigger companies, as there should be more opportunities for promotion. And human resources departments are better funded and supported. In particular, larger firms can focus attention on trying to improve the diversity—age, gender, sexuality, race, etc.—of their workforce.

On the other hand, the structures of these companies favor specialization—production, sales, marketing, editorial, publicity, finance, IT, etc.—which works against those individuals who need to learn the whole business rather than the parts.

In addition, the HR departments of larger publishers are involved in making difficult decisions and communicating changes internally and externally. One large publisher’s internal memo I’ve read was 30 lines long, and its sole purpose was to announce in linguistic jargon the departure of a long-serving executive without a word of thanks. There are plenty more examples of such unfeeling gobbledygook. Working in a small office may be a better apprenticeship option or even offer a more secure career.

Large publishers can offer higher advances and thus attract the best authors.

Certainly it’s the case that competition between the major publishers and their ability to invest in intellectual property has led to some very significant earnings for top authors, including large numbers of ghost-written celebrity memoirs. But overall it’s unclear whether authors are the real beneficiaries of the consolidation of the industry.

One clear downside is that the large publishers have increased the discounts they grant to retailers, in some cases massively. Authors’ royalties reflect this by percentage royalty rates based on retail price being reduced for sales over certain discount points. What might appear as a 10-percent RRP royalty [recommended retail price] is frequently only 6 percent as a result of publisher-retailer trading terms. By and large, smaller publishers escape these penal discount terms by flying below the radar or simply being more prudent in negotiation and being less important to the retailer in question. Either way, authors stand to benefit even if their initial advances are lower.

There’s little doubt that the large publishers have extremely professional and diligent leadership.

This has improved markedly over the years. The downside is that when someone reaches the top of such a complex and widespread organization, it’s extremely difficult for them to do much more than try to keep the organization out of trouble and financially stable. The result is that senior management has inevitably become distanced from the real action of the business—the acquisition of the best titles and the marketing of them.

Actually publishing books has been replaced for much senior management by the chairing of strategy meetings; the writing of uplifting newsletters for staff; the supervision of audits to portray the business as forward-looking, inclusive, representative, caring, and human; the nurturing of relations with the owners, whether a distant head office in another country or hedge funds or public shareholders; the management of distribution, logistics, HR, IT and finance—all really important but not publishing, as such.

Small company managers have no such issues. They simply have to manage to stay in business and undertake whatever is required; but most of all, they have to focus on the authors whose work they represent.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Publishers Weekly:

In a week that has seen Penguin Random House’s workforce winnowed by buyouts and layoffs and the Independent Publishers Group lay off nine staffers, HarperCollins has announced that Inkyard Press, the YA imprint under the publisher’s Harlequin Trade Publishing division, will be shuttered, and its staff laid off on August 1. The move comes less than a month after PRH folded its Razorbill imprint, and during a down year for sales of books for children and young adults.

Inkyard published approximately 2-4 books a month, and those titles, a representative of HarperCollins and Harlequin told PW, “will transition to [HarperCollins Chidlren’s Books] imprints.” When asked by PW how many employees were impacted, the representative provided no comment. Among those laid off were senior publishing director Bess Braswell; editors Meghan Maria McCullough, Claire Stetzer, and Olivia Valcarce; and senior marketing manager Britt Mitchell.

“Harlequin Trade Publishing has made the difficult, strategic decision to close the Inkyard Press imprint and transition the titles to HarperCollins Children’s Books,” the publisher’s statement read. “Current market conditions have posed a variety of challenges for the business, which [have] been acutely felt in the YA/middle grade space, with a shifting retail landscape, reduced distribution, and higher production costs in a price-sensitive segment. Inkyard titles will benefit from the synergies and streamlined processes as part of a larger Children’s division.”

At least one additional layoff at HarperCollins was made yesterday: Stephanie Guerdan, an associate editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books and a shop steward in the HarperCollins Union, which signed a new contract with the company in February after a months-long strike. When asked about the scope and specifics of any layoffs outside of Inkyard, a representative of HarperCollins declined to comment.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Publishers Weekly:

The HarperCollins union has filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board against the publisher after HC laid off Children’s Books associate editor and union head Stephanie Guerdan last week. In a statement released yesterday, the union alleged that Guerdan was “wrongfully terminated” in a retaliatory measure against her role as the union’s unit chair.

“The company is continuing to spend their resources on union-busting, going so far as to fire our Unit Chair,” said Local 2110 UAW president Olga Brudastova. “Stephanie has had an impeccable career at HarperCollins spanning over six years. They were outspoken about their support for the Union and have been very involved in every action the Union has taken, including serving as a shop steward, being part of the bargaining committee, and most recently acting as Unit Chair. Members of our Union are outraged and will not allow the company to succeed in these scare tactics.”

The HC Union also pointed out that Guerdan’s termination came on the eve of a one-day strike organized by the union last year on July 20, which was then followed by a longer strike that spanned three months.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Of course traditional publishing oppresses the powerless individual. It’s owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

From Publishing Perspectives:

In its May StatShot report released on July 19 during Publishing Perspectives’ summer publishing break, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) cites flat total revenues overall at US$846.8 million, in comparison to May 2022.

Year-to-date revenues, the AAP reports, were up 0.7 percent at $4.7 billion for the first five months of this year.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG notes that StatShot only includes traditionally-published books without any data from Amazon on self-published books.

From The New Publishing Standard:

The headline from PW this past week – “Layoffs Begin at Penguin Random House as Buyout Departures Come into Focus” – says a lot about the reality of US and global publishing today, and stands in stark contrast to the Sharjah presentation by former PRH CEO Markus Dohle just a short while ago.

Per Jim Milliott, Dohle’s successor Nihar Malaviya confirmed long-rumoured are a reality. The PW post has detail on many of those who opted for the early retirement, and quotes Malaviya’s no doubt genuine sentiments of regret at the job losses.

But beyond the of course painful individual losses is the stark reality that the post-pandemic New Normal in publishing is nowhere near as rosy a picture as Dohle chose, on auto-pilot and quite detached from reality, to paint at Sharjah.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

From Publishers Weekly:

When my publishing career began in the late 1990s, a period that I refer to as the golden age of New York publishing, it was an enchanting time.

From an outline, my first book, What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should), went into a four-day auction between several editors. (This was during the era when imprints within a parent company could bid against each other.) It might have lasted longer, but my brilliant agent, Richard Curtis, called for “best offers on the table before sundown,” when Yom Kippur began. Each publisher placed significant six-figure bids.

Putnam won the hardcover, paper, and audio rights. Then they went to work, intent on delivering a bestseller, which they did to such effect that 22 years later, the book continues as a successful backlist title.

I have published six books between Penguin/Putnam and HarperCollins. All were either auctioned or preempted with large advances. Every person attached to the projects was marvelous and committed. For each release, I traveled on multiple-city tours with generous expense accounts. Publicists delivered remarkable national media spots, including ones with CNN, Fox, the New York Times, People magazine, and The View. The coverage didn’t stop there; in every city, I received substantial local media attention as well, including reviews and television and radio appearances. Speaking at independent booksellers’ conferences, I met store owners who, kindly, hand-sold my book.

With the guidance of tremendous publishers and editors like Phyllis Grann, Sheila Curry, and Michael Morrison, my career was launched. Successful books led me to form a syndication company to distribute a weekly newspaper column—entertaining stories about the South, its characters, and its unique language. Frequent speaking engagements and occasional television work came, including documentaries with Fox Sports (I wrote a critically acclaimed book about my NASCAR days) and a recent HBO documentary on my stepmother-in-law, Mary Tyler Moore, in which I referred to her as a “feminine feminist,” a phrase I coined in my first book.

I self-published two books of columns because I didn’t want to sign away rights to 1,200 columns. With almost a million readers, I have a devoted fan base.

Now comes a new journey. My book, St. Simons Island—A Stella Bankwell Mystery, releases in August from Mercer University Press in Macon, Ga. It is the first in a series of Stella Bankwell mysteries. In every way, publishing this book has been a different experience from working with major publishers. Quite frankly, without a nudge from Mercer’s Allen Wallace and Marc Jolley, I might not have published again. The industry has changed so dramatically, with big publishers today focused much more on books by celebrities, reality stars, and well-established authors.

After an aggressive deadline to finish the book, I slept for three days, then opened an email from Mercer’s marketing department asking when I would deliver copy for the book jacket and online booksellers. I was stunned. I’d never had that responsibility. Fortunately, I am a journalist turned publicist turned author, so it’s in my wheelhouse.

The real game changer—which makes it easier to go to a small press—is social media. I and my husband, a prominent television producer, have celebrity friends and influencers who will join us in posting. But any tour stops, such as the Southern Festival of Books, will be at my expense.

With Mercer’s limited resources, why did I choose to go there? For important reasons. I believe that Mercer is one of today’s best publishers. The catalog is diverse and bold. Mercer takes chances on authors who the big publishers now overlook. They are also my people—Georgians—so it feels like family. Though advances are small, the team there is incredibly passionate. It’s hard not to be drawn in by such devotion and enthusiasm.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

The industry has changed so dramatically, with big publishers today focused much more on books by celebrities, reality stars, and well-established authors.

PG was not familiar with the author of the OP, so he doesn’t know her books or history other than what she includes in the OP.

However, the phrase, “kicked to the curb” floated into his mind as he read her story. The phrase, “smiling bravely” also came to mind as she described how “passionate” the folks at Mercer University Press are about her book.

Since PG was unfamiliar with Mercer University, he did a bit of online research and found the institution was founded in 1831 in Penfield, Georgia, by a group of Baptists. From humble beginnings, it has grown to 9,000 students with campuses in Macon, Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus.

PG’s conclusion is that Mercer is a perfectly respectable institution and he has no doubt the university’s press is filled with committed and hard-working people.

However, the mystery book buyer at Barnes & Noble doesn’t have Mercer on speed dial.

PG can’t help wondering why the author of the OP didn’t go straight to KDP, saving time and keeping a much larger percentage of the sales price for each book for herself and controlling her own writing career. That said, if she’d chosen KDP, Publishers Weekly wouldn’t have been interested in her column.

From The New Publishing Standard:

It seems like only nine weeks since former PRH CEO Markus Dohle was in Sharjah explaining how well book sales were doing, and how no-one gave a flying fig about digital, stuck at 20% forever and ever.

Dohle’s blinkered view of the publishing world through the cocoon of being CEO of the world’s largest trade publisher, dictating consumer trends by the simple expedient of pricing ebooks higher than their hardcover versions and removing all PRH titles from unlimited subscription services while claiming no-one cares about subscription, still lives on thanks to uncritical reporting by journalists infatuated by Dohle’s personal charm over his publishing chops.

But ne’er a day goes by now without new reportage knocking more nails in the coffin of the Dohle fantasy world.

Take the latest report from Germany, Dohle’s homeland, where the German publishing body Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels tells us book sales are falling – down 1.9% – and digital subscription is up 154.9%.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying them”

Harold J. Smith

From Electric Lit:

Obsessively scratching her scalp, while simultaneously chiding herself not to, Kendra Rae Phillips sits on a MetroNorth train anxious and jittery. She’s worried about being found, after being found out. Every lingering eye incites more sweat, and more scratching. Relief only comes when her train departs Grand Central Station. This is how Zakiya Dalila-Harris’ debut novel The Other Black Girl begins: in 1983 with a Black woman on the run.

It may be a coincidence that 1983 was also when Toni Morrison, the first Black woman editor at Random House, resigned after 16 years to focus on writing and teaching full-time. But unlike Morrison, Kendra Rae’s departure from her role as the Black woman editor at the fictional Wagner Books was not of her own volition.

Kendra Rae’s flight from New York City is a harried moment, symbolic of an ongoing pattern in book publishing, then and now. The numbers are scarce when it comes to Black people, and Black women, in publishing, and the systems in place have yet to change significantly enough for Kendra Rae, and the other Black women, in The Other Black Girl to feel safe in the professional space they occupy. The novel’s main storyline takes place in 2018 and follows two Black editorial assistants at Wagner Books: Nella who attempts to rise through the ranks as one of the only Black employees, and the newly arrived Hazel. Nella and Hazel’s conflict unravels the sinister motives behind the infiltration of OBGs (Other Black Girls) in the workplace, but Kendra Rae’s story serves as the catalyst for what unfolds.

For much of The Other Black Girl, the narrative surrounding Kendra’s swift retreat is that she chose to leave. The headline summarizing her feelings on the “frigid racial climate” at her workplace, “If You White, You Ain’t Right with Me,” is polarizing, inaccurate, and ultimately positions Kendra as “problematic” for her unwavering desire to work exclusively with Black authors. Kendra Rae’s intention to do her job, and do it well, makes her a threat the moment she vocalizes the issues she faces in the workplace. Even after being assigned a book that becomes a breakout hit by her best friend Diana Gordon, Kendra Rae is expected to retract her statements as if her experience isn’t important or necessary compared to Wagner Books’ image.

As a former acquisitions editor, I found Kendra Rae’s plotline relatable. Sadly, so was her departure.

Last year, PEN America published a lengthy report on Race, Equity, and Book Publishing. Earlier in 2022, publishing veteran and VP/executive editor at Little, Brown, Tracy Sherrod wrote “Black Publishing in High Cotton” about the history of Black editors in book publishing for Publishers Weekly. Sherrod’s piece noted numbers as slim as seven total for Black editors in trade publishing. (Today, several dozen Black editors [including editorial assistants] exist at Big 5, mid-sized, and small publishers in the United States, totaling about 60 or so.) Prior to Covid, I reported on the inherent biases in book publishing, interviewing several Black women professionals. Almost 30 years ago, in 1995, The Village Voice reported on the “Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing” in two parts. And in 2021, Shelly Romero and Adriana M. Martinez revisited The Voice’s premise for Publishers Weekly. These reports, among others, reflect the same issue again and again and again: BIPOC writers and publishing professionals continue to face exclusion in the publishing industry. 

Exclusion begins with erasure. Because if you don’t exist, how can you even attempt to tell your own story? 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG says this is one more reason to stay away from professional publishing unless you want to directly support a racist commercial enterprise. There’s no difference with the major European publishers as well.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

On June 12, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert announced that her forthcoming novel The Snow Forest, slated to be published by Riverhead in February 2024, will not be released as scheduled due to backlash from Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian internet users over the novel’s Russian setting. The book, which was added to the the Penguin Random House website on June 6, has since been deleted.

“Over the course of this weekend, I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now—any book, no matter what the subject is—that is set in Russia,” Gilbert said in a video message posted to Twitter. “As a result, I’m making a course correction, and I am removing the book from its publication schedule. It is not the time for this book to be published.” All pre-orders, she said, would be refunded.

The weekend prior to her announcement, more than 500 people rated the book with one-star on the book review platform Goodreads, with nearly a third of them also leaving critical reviews. Large swaths of the reviews included concerns that the novel would “romanticize” Russia. “While Russia is shelling and destroying Ukraine in 2023, writers continue to romanticize Russia? Shame!” wrote one user. Many comments were not specific to the book, with one-star rater simply declaring, “I hated, hate and will always hate russians [sic].” Many commenters’ usernames were written in Cyrillic.

The outpouring of criticism is an example of what has become known as “review bombing,” in which Goodreads users mount a coordinated effort to inundate a book’s Goodreads page with negative reviews. However, the outcry over The Snow Forest is somewhat unique as it took place pre-publication, and was therefore based not on the book’s content but its premise.

According to the publisher’s descriptive copy on Goodreads, the novel takes place in the 1930s and 1980s, and is set “in a remote, high-altitude corner of Siberia.” It follows a family of religious fundamentalists who, per Gilbert’s video message, “made a decision to remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try and defend nature against industrialization.”

“I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and are continuing to experience grievance and extreme harm,” Gilbert said, “so that is the choice that I have made.”

Criticism of Gilbert’s decision swiftly followed, with many authors, writers, and literary critics extremely concerned by the precedent that it set. On Twitter, authors such as Isaac Butler, Sarah Rose Etter, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Olga Grushin, Lincoln Michel, and Matt Taibbi expressed their outrage and frustration; the Atlantic repudiated Gilbert’s “wrongheaded attempt to help the Ukrainian cause.”

In a statement, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel acknowledged that the decision was “well-intentioned” but “regrettable.” Nossel went on to urge Gilbert to reconsider:

“The idea that, in wartime, creativity and artistic expression should be preemptively shut down to avoid somehow compounding harms caused by military aggression is wrongheaded. The timing of the uproar, right after Gilbert announced the forthcoming publication, makes clear that those objecting have not yet had a chance to read or judge the work itself. The publication of a novel set in Russia should not be cast as an act exacerbating oppression…. We hope Gilbert might reconsider and we urge others to rally around the on-time publication of her book, and the principle that literature and creativity must not become a casualty of war.”​

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From Jane Friedman:

Question

My manuscript has been edited by two top editors on the east and west coasts. Yet, it has been declined by more than 250 fiction agents who merely decline by form letter. I have no idea what could be wrong. I have a great story, but maybe for the wrong time. I am not a BIPOC author and my characters are not BIPOC, which seems to be a lot of what agents are looking for.

—Rejected and Dejected in Miami

[Editor’s note: We asked this writer for their query and first pages so we could best assess the situation rather than guessing. The following answer is based on a review of those materials.]

Dear Dejected,

There are three reasons your book is getting rejected:

1. The query isn’t selling the book or your professionalism.
2. The book feels dated (despite the argument in the query that it’s in tune with current events).
3. In the first 25 pages, as the story flickers to life, it’s drowned in an ocean of backstory.

Let’s talk about the query first. An author’s query must establish three things: this story is compelling, this author understands the conventions of publishing, and the book has a market.

The query’s description of the plot and themes make the book sound like a downer, and it’s unclear where any hope, triumph or change appears. What’s the lead character’s choice? Where does she take an action that transforms her world?

Most queries are 250–350 words, with some narrative nonfiction stretching to 450–500 words. This query is 750 words. No matter how well-written it is, sending a 750-word query announces, “I don’t know much about how publishing works.” Plus the query is missing some key elements—the book’s word count and genre (women’s fiction).

Half of the 750 words are themes, comps, social issues and cultural movements more suited to self-help or narrative nonfiction than women’s fiction. It’s great to offer quality comps, though. Comparative/competitive titles show agents that readers are buying books like yours—but their purpose is to show current buying patterns. Of the seven books, three documentaries, two news organizations and three celebrities mentioned in the query, only three of those media qualify as “current” (within the last few years) and only one of those is a book. For a novel, list two or three comps, books or TV/movies, that are fiction.

Authors should also watch out for reviewing their own book. Assertions like “readers will sympathize” and “an emotionally gripping tale” ring false in queries. Let the agent discover those characteristics when they read the manuscript pages.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

From Publishing Perspectives:

Speaking at the Global Sustainable Development Congress in Thuwal, Elsevier‘s global director of sustainability, Rachel Martin, has told an international audience that within five years, it’s likely that all mainstream printed books will display labels on their front and/or back covers, specifying their “environmental credentials.”

“This will not only give consumers more information,” Martin told her audience, according to the event’s organizers. “But it will help publishers, authors, and booksellers too.”

Martin, as Publishing Perspectives readers know (here is our pre-London Book Fair interview with her), has become a leading figure in the international book business’ bid to bring its operations and output into environmentally responsible ranges. Working closely with the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the programs it’s leading, some of them in cooperation with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals framework, Martin was a player in the development of London Book Fair‘s Sustainability Lounge earlier this year.

. . . .

In her comments made Thursday (June 1) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, organizers say Martin pointed out that a single paperback book emits “on average the equivalent of between one and four kilograms (2.3 to 8.1 pounds) of carbon dioxide.” Indeed in international estimates, the average international carbon footprint for a human being each year is believed to be the equivalent of some 4.5 to 5 metric tonnes (4.9 to 5.5 tons) of carbon dioxide.

In the United Kingdom, Martin said, that range of emission may rise to as much as 9 or 10 metric tonnes—and to more than 15 metric tonnes in the United States—but might be as low as 2 or fewer tonnes in India.

Martin, the congress says, told the audience that she sees the value of product-labeling for books to be the logical consumer-demand response as world citizens become better versed in the details of the climate crisis and responses being made by many industries and businesses, including book publishing.

. . . .

“In the near future,” she said in the conference’s report to us, “consumers will think much more about the environmental cost of what they buy. How much carbon is stored in a book will be something they consider and something that influences what they choose to read.

“Books teach, entertain, inspire, and enrich our lives, but they also have an impact on the planet. By calculating the carbon footprint of our books, we can make more informed choices.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG says, “Read Ebooks and Save the Planet!”

From Nathan Bransford:

Controversy erupted in the publishing Twitterverse in a few different directions over the weekend.

. . . .

The incident that got most tongues wagging was that a prominent agency, New Leaf, parted ways with a significant number of clients very abruptly by email over the weekend without giving them help to land with new agents. I don’t have any inside information, but as best I could suss out it was due to an allegedly “amicable” departure of an agent, Jordan Hamessley, who only recently sent an email to her clients about summer plans.

The injustice of quite a few authors being suddenly left in the lurch (some mid-negotiation) tapped into the always-simmering frustration the writing community has with literary agents and the traditional publishing industry writ large.

(UPDATE 5/16: Publishers Lunch and Publishers Weekly have confirmed some of the essentials. Of Hamessley’s 45 clients, 18 were offered representation within New Leaf, 27 were left to find new representation, and NL president Joanna Volpe said they would handle contracts in progress. NL literary director Patrice Caldwell said, “There was no way to do this as quickly by calling people, nor did we want people to start sharing publicly about this before we told everyone.”

UPDATE #2 5/16: Agent Jordan Hamessley released a statement on Twitter disputing the characterization of the parting as “amicable”)

In my view, this case makes for a lens into the state of the broader industry. So buckle up for one writer’s perspective on where things stand in traditional publishing these days, why this incident reflects deeper issues, and what writers can do about it.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

Why wouldn’t any aspiring author want a major literary agency represent them?

“There was no way to do this as quickly by calling people, nor did we want people to start sharing publicly about this before we told everyone.”

Do these agency people know how to send a heads-up email to all their authors at the same time?

How long have they been in the world of traditional publishing? A week’s worth of working experience would lead even a mediocre mind to conclude that the New York publishing business leaks like a sieve, especially when a breakup is happening.

PG will admit that there are not nearly as many heart-stopping thrills involved in self-publishing.

From Writer Unboxed:

Last month’s post on book bans opened with a quote from historian Thomas Zimmer, which I’ll repeat here for reference:

There is indeed something going on in America, and it does make a lot of people…really uncomfortable. We are in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them. And that can be a messy process at times. But it’s not “cancel culture.” From a democratic perspective, it is necessary, and it is progress.

I believe this is an accurate statement of where we are culturally, and that one of the most apparent arenas undergoing renegotiation is publishing. One specific example of that is the increasing role of sensitivity readers, especially in YA fiction, though the practice is extending to adult fiction, film, and TV.

The major impetus behind the implementation of sensitivity readers was publishing’s recognition of the obvious fact that it was overwhelmingly white—and that white writers, in the wake of the social justice movement that emerged in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, wanted to address that imbalance by writing across racial and ethnic lines.

The results were, shall we say, mixed. White authors were taken to task for patronizing, stereotypical, or harmful representations of minorities or for resorting to racial tropes in their work.

In September 2015, author Corinne Duyvis created the hashtag #OwnVoices as a way to recommend books on Twitter that featured authors who shared the diverse identity of their main characters. At the same time, publishers and agents began subtly (or not so subtly) discouraging white writers from “straying from their lane” in writing about protagonists or even secondary characters outside their personal realm of “lived experience.”

The sensitivity reader emerged as a possible solution to the problem of authors needing input into the lives of members of diverse communities different from their own race, ethnicity, gender identity, faith, and so on. This was done to help prevent any more representations deemed “problematic,” a euphemism that rather quickly became a new term of art.

The Term “Sensitivity” Itself is “Problematic”

In a Writer’s Digest article titled, “The Problem with Sensitivity Readers Isn’t What You Think It Is”), author Anna Hecker remarked:

“Sensitivity” … is a loaded word if there ever was one. It suggests thin skins and easily bruised emotions—a potentially dangerous combination if one perceives these readers as the gatekeepers to publication (which, it should be pointed out, they are generally not).

No wonder the censorship watchdogs are wringing their hands. The term “sensitivity reader” may be triggering to the very people who loathe the term “triggering.”

Consequently, some have chosen to use the terms “authenticity readers” or “diversity readers” instead.

There. Solved it.

If only.

For a distinctly contrarian view, we can turn to author Larry Correia, self-described “Writer, Merchant of Death (retired), Firearms Instructor, Accountant.”

A Sensitivity Reader is usually some expert on Intersectional Feminism or Cismale Gendernormative Fascism or some other made up goofiness who a publisher brings in to look for anything “problematic” in a manuscript. And since basically everything is problematic to somebody they won’t be happy until they suck all the joy out of the universe. It is basically a new con-job racket some worthless scumbags have come up with to extort money from gullible writers, because there aren’t a lot of good ways to make a living with a Gender Studies degree.

It’s pretty obvious that the problem from this perspective isn’t so much what but who. That will become a theme as we press ahead.

BTW: It isn’t just opponents of sensitivity readers who get testy when this subject comes up. Anna Hecker in her WD article makes little effort to hide her disdain for those who voice doubts about sensitivity readers, referring to them as handwringing “censorship watchdogs” (see above) and “polemicists”—the latter term being used to describe Francine Prose, a stalwart progressive who nonetheless has doubts about the role sensitivity readers play.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

PG was triggered when he saw the word, “problematic,” in the OP, but after spending an hour in a zero gravity tank listening to nature sounds, he recovered somewhat. However, there will definitely be a permanent emotional scar on the inner PG, like when he saw a rodent as a child.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

In a major decision, Oxford University Press officials have confirmed to PW that the company is set to leave its offices at 198 Madison Avenue in the coming months. The news was delivered to staff at a meeting on Thursday morning. And while a search is underway for a new space to serve at least some portion of OUP’s workforce, OUP USA President Niko Pfund told PW that the press’s post-pandemic workplace will likely be a work in progress until a clearer picture emerges of the company’s needs.

“We are exploring alternative office space right now on an interim basis because we want to observe how people work in a new environment and learn along the way,” Pfund told PW. OUP’s New York office currently has no in-office mandate for employees, and no plans to implement one, he added, noting that productivity levels from remote work remain strong and that many employees have organized their lives around working from home in the wake of the pandemic. “We don’t want to spend money on empty real estate when that money can be better invested in our publishing and our workforce,” Pfund said.

The move marks the end of an era for OUP. The press moved to 198 Madison—the iconic, landmarked B. Altman Building—in the mid 1990s. Oxford University owns the top six floors of the vast building, which occupies an entire city block between Madison and Fifth Avenues in the shadow of the Empire State Building. The Fifth Avenue side of the building is occupied by the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

While the move is imminent, it is unclear how quickly—or how slowly—a move might happen, and press officials said it’s possible the press could go fully remote for a brief period before getting into a suitable new space.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. Via Wikimedia subject to the  GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation

PG notes that prime business locations in New York City are breathtakingly expensive.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

As a publisher and a parent of a queer-identifying child, I was thrilled and honored when Drag Story Hour chose to read our book No One Owns the Colors, written by Gianna Davy and illustrated by Brenda Rodriguez, for Read Across America Day in March. I saw it as win-win: great recognition for a book and author I love, plus a wider platform for the book’s important message of joy, self-expression, and liberation.

But that was before the backlash. Once I started to express my enthusiasm for this opportunity, I was accused of promoting the “grooming” of children, and an onslaught of emails ensued, one of them even attacking my mothering. The experience popped my San Francisco bubble and made me realize how important it is to stand up and speak out for books, authors, and communities who need our support.

Recent headlines portray drag events as sexual and harmful to children, distorting and misrepresenting the art of drag and its rich history that can be traced back centuries. Drag has been described as the theatrical performance of gender and creative self-expression that plays with traditional notions of gender, among many other definitions. And while there have been countless stories and features on the harm of banning books with LGBTQ content, we’re not seeing the same outrage about the war on drag.

We need to work with organizations within our industry such as Drag Story Hour to elevate their platform, which exists to promote reading and diversity. The program strives to capture the imagination and play of gender fluidity that’s a cornerstone of childhood and gives kids glamorous and positive queer role models.

It is not enough to add LGBTQ titles to publishers’ lists or create imprints dedicated to LGBTQ titles. We are at a pivotal point in history where all of us must speak out and act against any insinuation that drag has an agenda to indoctrinate children—an accusation that blatantly misunderstands LGBTQ experiences and is rooted in homophobia and transphobia.

In March, Tennessee became the first state to ban drag performances in public spaces as well as anywhere in the presence of someone under 18 years old. I am a mother of a child whose gender expression and sexuality is being questioned by conservative activists and politicians. I am also an ally—to my child and to anyone whose gender expression doesn’t fit neatly into the confines of the socially imposed binary.

In January 2022, Tennessee also banned the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus, about the Holocaust, citing “inappropriate language” as its reason for doing so. I wrote a Soapbox column for PW that March titled “Correcting the Distortion of History,” about the importance of stepping into my own power as a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to create a safe space for Jewish voices. The efforts to extinguish popular drag story hours at which queens read to kids take from the same playbook. Both crackdowns seek to undermine the validity of marginalized people’s existence.

Being an ally means taking an active stance for the rights of a minority or marginalized group without being a member of it. The Nazis began with burning and banning books in 1933. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 gay men were arrested by Nazis—a dire warning about just how scary and real these Tennessee laws are. We need to examine our relationship to homophobia and transphobia as we see the rise in book challenges and bans at libraries across the U.S.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

PG has personal feelings and opinions about LGBTQ and the current sexual/political discussions/disagreements about that topic.

That said, he reminds any visitors who choose to leave comments to be courteous and respectful towards those with opinions that may diverge from their personal opinions/feelings/etc.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, many religion and spirituality publishers publicly stepped-up commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their workforce and in their book acquisitions and marketing. Since then, however, the impact of the Covid pandemic, plus economic upheavals that prompted layoffs, hiring freezes, and other cost controls have challenged these commitments—according to PW’s conversations with executives at half a dozen executives.

When asked for an update on their DEI efforts, no publishers shared statistics. However, executives contacted by PW at HarperCollins Christian Publishing, InterVarsity Press, Eerdmans, Loyola, New World Library, and Paulist Press each spoke of their determination to push ahead. Several acknowledged that hiring efforts have stalled in this economic climate, but efforts to broaden acquisitions from people of color are moving forward with workarounds such as new partnerships and strategies to reach more BIPOC editors, writers, and readers.

Mark Schoenwald, president and CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing and HarperCollins Focus, said, “We want to remain relevant in today’s conversations, which includes being more reflective of the world in which we live.” He added that despite the current economic downturn, HCCP, “continues to recruit, publish and promote diverse authors and subjects as a long-term strategy” across all their publishing teams. He highlighted 20 BIPOC authors recently published or signed for trade, fiction, and children’s titles and cited a new 10-year agreement between Harper Collins and the Martin Luther King, Jr. estate granting an exclusive license to publish new and previously published material from the estate’s archives. (HCCP parent company, HarperCollins, is cutting 5% of its North American workforce to reduce expenses in a move due to be completed by May 31).

. . . .

Eerdman’s president and publisher Anita Eerdmans told PW, “We continue to actively pursue authors that represent diversity of all kinds, and I’m pleased with some of our success there, though we acknowledge that we (all) have a long way to go in that regard.”

At New World Library, editorial director Georgia Hughes said they have broadened their author ranks. Their fall 2022 list of 14 titles included three books by BIPOC authors and, “in the last three years the numbers of proposals we have from people of color have risen dramatically.” She continues to work with Pub West and the Publishing Professionals Network, “to build diversity and understand the concerns of underrepresented groups.” Even so, NWL has not added any new hires and, she said, “I don’t see that we will in the foreseeable future, as we have not had any openings at the company for many years.”

Paulist Press is also focusing on broadening book acquisitions and marketing to Black Catholic organizations such as the Knights of St. Peter Claver, the largest African American lay association in the U.S., seeking advice and offering review copies of titles, according to president and publisher Rev. Mark-David Janus. The company does have openings—created during the Covid pandemic when many senior staffers chose to retire — but not the cash to fill them all yet, Janus said. The Catholic house is also challenged by its as location “35 miles from New York City in Northern Bergen County, which is as Caucasian as you can get,” he said.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

Of course traditional publishing has to jump on every political bandwagon that passes by and, of course, nothing in traditional publishing ever changes. These folks are among the more skilled practitioners of tokenism.

From The Independent Publishing Magazine:

Have you encountered job ads that exclusively seek native speakers? Have you faced rejections due to not being a prolific writer?

As a non-native writer, you may have great thoughts, stories, or research to share, but your writing style and quality may not always measure up to those of native writers. This often results in discrimination and prejudice. And, this bias is not just limited to non-native speakers but also extends to native speakers from BIPOC communities, who face constant scrutiny.

Anecdotes from exophonic writers – the term for those who write in a language that isn’t their mother tongue – residing in countries like the US, Canada, and the UK suggest that non-native writers are at a disadvantage when applying for jobs or submitting their work, leaving little to no chance for those who have never been to Western countries.

While linguistic discrimination is a common problem, it is understandable that editors from reputed publications may not have the bandwidth to edit and publish articles that are not well-comprehended, as doing so may require additional editing time and resources.

This results in non-native writers constantly facing rejection across various genres, from artwork to scientific research, solely on the basis of linguistic proficiency. However, the emergence of AI tools like ChatGPT has revolutionized the writing industry and levelled the playing field for all writers. It’s time to step up!

Understanding Discrimination and the Barrier to Entry

Before discussing ways for non-native writers to improve their writing skills to meet “native standards,” it is important to address the issue of discrimination and prejudice that create a barrier to entry that doesn’t automatically get eradicated by a better quality of writing. This section will present anecdotes from real writers and research papers as evidence.

Nilofar Shidmehr, a well-known writer, a PhD holder, and a faculty member at Douglas College in Canada, has experienced discrimination based on her background as a non-native English speaker. “In Canada, I have sometimes felt that others consider me less capable of becoming an ‘English’ writer, and it saddens me to a great degree,” she says.

Rachel Werner, a BIPOC author and the founder of The Little Book Project WI, speaks about the bias against marginalized communities. “It’s no secret that the publishing industry has numerous issues in terms of excluding individuals from marginalized communities. This is true not only for who gets hired as writers and editors but also for the sort of content which repeatedly gets published,” she says. Rachel also talks about the snide remarks she would constantly get. “It was obvious I was less respected than several of my co-workers. Oftentimes, demeaning remarks would be attributed to my ‘lack of experience’ working in glossy editorial and my age.”

Paula Cheung, a self-published author with a Master’s degree from the UK who currently resides in Canada, shares her experience of feeling bias and wanting to give up.

I didn’t think that publications or editors would ever be biased toward BIPOC writers, but at the back of my head, I did. I felt it had something to do with my Asian surname, so I adopted a pen name. The discrimination made me question myself as a writer. A few times, I was on the verge of giving up until I realized that writing was, in fact, my true passion.

Aside from anecdotal examples, research has well-documented discrimination against non-native speakers in both speech and text.

• People with accents are often perceived with skepticism and considered to be less reliable. And, this is the case for both non-native speakers and native BIPOC speakers who are given less credibility because of their accents.
• Publishing may require more effort from non-native writers.
• Research papers and academic journals are often rejected because of poor linguistic skills.
• The requirement for ‘Native English’ in job ads, while unlawful, is still very much prevalent.

In conclusion, discrimination against non-native speakers and writers is a well-documented issue, and the steps to address it through legal means can be discussed another day. While discrimination stemming from prejudices cannot be helped, we can still take steps to mitigate discrimination against ‘inferior’ writing skills by identifying the main challenges and using language processing AI to improve quality.

Link to the rest at The Independent Publishing Magazine

From Publisher’s Weekly:

The supply chain we use for book publishing is a lot like an old house. Bringing it up to date is a labor of love that takes a lot of planning, investment, and time. Only when you visit a neighbor who has reimagined their house, do you realize how far behind your own house is.

Though the book industry has evolved with such innovations as online retailing, digital books, and new business models, our plumbing is largely the same as it was 15 years ago. That’s a problem. It limits the ability of publishers, retailers, and other partners in the supply chain to improve discovery, sell more books, and reduce costs. And it leaves too many questions that are difficult to impossible to answer.

For example, there’s no real-time data on how many books are printed each year, where they were printed, or the rate of returns by book type—such as data specifically covering children’s books—across the industry. Retailers who want to share sales data with publishers must use large Excel workbooks with hundreds of columns, which add costs for publishers to format and interpret. Publishers also have difficulty testing new marketing approaches because some distributors and retailers may not pick them up.

These everyday failures in supply-chain communications are like inadequate plumbing. They add work and cost time and understanding. In some cases, they limit what publishers can test or where they can innovate.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Our neighbors are showing us what can be done. BookNet Canada maintains a metadata repository and API that anyone in the supply chain can use. Together, they make it possible to proof metadata and create web catalogs, and even build something entirely new—like 49th Shelf, a collection of Canadian-authored content, dynamically delivered from the metadata that BookNet maintains.

In the U.K., Book Industry Communication maintains protocols called BIC Realtime that allow publishers and their partners to communicate back and forth about inventory and returns. A payments clearinghouse called BATCH also gives retailers the opportunity to pay invoices from multiple publishers with one check or wire, with the system doing the work of apportioning the payments.

The Dutch, French, German, and Norwegian markets offer a variety of solutions for improving the supply chain—some based on centralized repositories, others on implementation of existing standards for two-way communication across all industry players. The U.S. market could adapt many of these practices and solutions to improve discovery, sell more books, and streamline operations to focus on higher value-added activities.

The Book Industry Study Group is currently gathering information to build the business case for change. The priorities are likely to include creating metadata repositories of record, implementing tools to automate and broaden sales and inventory reporting, and launching a payments clearinghouse across the U.S. market. Other goals may emerge as we engage broadly and deepen our analysis.

Over the next three years, we expect to help the industry create better metadata with more effective feedback on problems and inconsistencies, ultimately delivering greater sales, as better metadata drives discovery. Other changes will increase understanding of industry trends and better establish the impact of publishers’ initiatives. Across the board, we’ll also provide a platform for greater efficiency, as labor is redeployed away from reporting and payments processing.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

PG says real tech companies could finish the job described in the OP in a few months.

If the members of The Ancient and Disorderly Order of Publishing asked Amazon to do this, Zon could go from zero to up-and-running in three months. Amazon could even provide much-improved warehouses.

From Publishing Perspectives:

The timing of London Book Fair’s new Sustainability Lounge program is significant.

Rachel Martin, the global director of sustainability at Amsterdam’s Elsevier, says that the arrival of the United Nations’ latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has raised the alarm to its necessary pitch.

“We are not on track to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) or even 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit),” the report tells us.

The message has become inescapable: The level of urgency has soared in these years since the 2018 advent of these UN reports. One conclusion is unmistakable in the panel’s new Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023: Time is running out faster than we thought it was.

‘We Need the Poetry and Fiction and Children’s Books’

If there’s anyone in book publishing who’s becoming the international go-to personality for the climate crisis for the book business, it’s Martin at the publishing giant Elsevier—like London Book Fair, a RELX company.

Martin and her Elsevier colleague Michiel Kolman have worked with London Book Fair director Gareth Rapley and his associates to develop the Sustainability Lounge. And in an interview with Publishing Perspectives, it becomes evident that Martin has two assignments for the international publishing business.

• Obviously, publishing must adopt climate-crisis responses in carefully worked out plans to ensure the industry lowering emissions in its own operations, from acqusitions through distribution and sales.
• But maybe not as obviously, publishing also needs to produce the content necessary to capture, inspire, and guide the world’s attention to the racing rise of an existential threat.

“We need the poetry and fiction and the children’s books and the stories and the different perspectives around this,” Martin says, “in order to get people to understand there is a better future out there—because there has to be a better future out there.

“And so we do need publishers to be catalysts of action, we need them to be publishing on topics like what does 2030 look like? We need them to be talking about self-help, and how do you become a change-agent in your own organization?”

. . . .

The IPA also has led the way in three critical publishing responses to the crisis:

• The SDG [Sustainable Development Goals] Book Club
• The fast-growing SDG Publishers Compact, now with some 300 signatories
• With the Federation of European Publishers, the Publishing 2030 Accelerator, a project to develop systemic industry response to the pressures of climate change

. . . .

But the Sustainability Lounge at London Book Fair has the distinction of being a stage devoted all week to the question of the climate emergency, with bespoke programming throughout the run of the trade show.

. . . .

Martin—a vivacious conversationalist, full of humor and enthusiasm for her specialization—is crystal clear on what’s needed from publishing: both those best practices in sustainability but also “a vision of what we’re working toward, so people feel like they’re headed for a better life. They need to be inspired.”

This executive at one of the very biggest academic houses in the world says with a smile, “Academic publishers are very good at putting out the science, right? But we need to use every lever at our control. Every inspirational, motivational idea of cultural power to push us over a little hump when we’re not quite sure if we want to go down a path” required to ease the warming crisis.

For that, she’s turning to the trade: The role for carbon-footprint reduction is urgent–and so is the call for climate-relative literature.

. . . .

Martin tells Publishing Perspectives that she’s calculated the carbon footprint on the Elsevier stand. “And what are some of the lessons learned,” she asks rhetorically, “in terms of carbon emissions at book fairs? We’re thinking about something a bit like the ‘carbon label,’” she says, “something that RX and London Book Fair might give their exhibitors to calculate their own stands’ carbon footprints” in the future.

Rachel Martin stops herself in mid-conversation, thinks about it. Then she decides to go ahead: “Okay, what we found out—spoiler alert—is that it’s more about who is on your stand than it is about some of the materials on your stand.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG will welcome the reactions of visitors to TPV, but for him, the scent of virtue-signalling is strong in the OP.

He wonders if a consistent push to reduce the number of physical books published by these enormous companies each year and a rapid transition to electronic-only publishing wouldn’t do more good than having a sustainability display at a physical conference that involves hundreds of book people flying from all over the world, more than a few on corporate jets.

PG suggests allowing a great many of the trees that are pulped for paper books each year to continue to live by absorbing lots and lots of carbon dioxide might be a more significant contribution to diminishing global warming. Think of the amount of pollution the trucks, ships and planes involved in moving physical books and their components around spew into the air each day?

PG is not an expert on global warming, climate science, etc. However, he has seen enough virtue-signaling over the years of his adulthood to recognize the difference between saying the right things and doing the right things.

But as always, PG could be wrong.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Writers are the lifeblood of the publishing industry. I would expect agents and publishers, who work with them every day—and whose livelihood depends on them—to understand and respect writers. Most agents and publishers would claim that they do. But an industry practice that began some time ago, and has increased dramatically in recent years, belies that. This practice is not bothering to respond to rejected queries and submissions.

Agents and publishers who don’t respond will point to the warning on their submission page that says something like, “If we have not responded to you within x number of weeks or months, assume we are not interested.” In what other situation in business or personal life would such a practice be acceptable? If you sent out a party invitation that asked for an RSVP, would a response reading, “Assume that if I don’t respond by the day of the party, I’m not coming,” be considered anything but rude?

A writer has much more at stake than someone hosting a party. By nature, a writer has an active imagination, so this “negative option” approach can play havoc on the writer’s mind. Once the stated number of weeks or months passes, the writer, knowing that agents and publishers are busy, will begin to speculate that the agent or publisher hasn’t had time to read what was submitted. Or the writer will imagine—and hope against hope—that it’s taking so long because whoever read the query or submission first then passed it on to someone else at the agency or publishing house, who is still considering it.

All it takes to relieve the writer of this illusion, to prevent the writer from hoping against hope, is to send a rejection letter—something that was long a standard practice in the industry. Receiving a rejection letter is painful, of course, but at least it provides closure for the writer. It means a lot to a writer just to know for sure that the agent or publisher is definitely saying no. Someone once wrote that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, and the indifference to a basic need of writers displayed by many agents and publishers today shows a disturbing lack of love for writers.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

But a rejection letter would cost 63 cents for the stamp! Add to that the cost of a publishing peon who pulls out a form rejection letter, puts the letter in an envelope, addresses the envelope and drops it into the outgoing mail box where another peon puts it in a sack with all the other outgoing mail and drops it off at the post office.

Even an SASE would only save the 63 cents and the peon’s time spent hunting and pecking out the return address. The peon would still have the burden of putting the rejection letter in the envelope and dropping it in an outbox.

The practice of not responding reeks of entitlement, scorn for authors and a paper-thin profit margin.

Plus a total lack of class or consideration. It’s a sleazy business up and down the line.

From Jane Friedman:

Ask five different industry members and you’ll get five different answers. But what really is “upmarket” fiction?

Upmarket fiction is a blend of commercial fiction and literary fiction, but how it gets blended is where writers and industry members can’t always agree.

The nuances of upmarket fiction are confusing because the lines are blurry to those who don’t see it every day, but I have a method to share with you to better understand the category. Here’s a definitive guide to upmarket fiction.

It has universal themes everyone can connect to, with a hyper-focused plot.

Universal does not mean meandering and expansive. Universal means ideas that travel. Love, loss, grief, trauma, family secrets, and identity show up in upmarket fiction because these are the books that start hyper-specific, like a dust bowl fiction called The Four Winds, and ends up traveling around the country and the world (selling translation rights as they go).

Like Mika in Real Life, we get into them for the plot and end up being swept away by how it makes us feel and then we want to go tell everyone else about it!

Like The People We Hate at the Wedding, we all love the drama of a messy wedding, especially one that includes international travel.

Foreign rights agents never truly know what will sell, but emotionally gripping, universal themes are the books they always want to share with their foreign contacts because they’re not geographically bound. Upmarket novels have potential to sell well in translation because we’re all human.

The aim is thoughtful discussion of real world application.

Ripped-from-the-headlines books often fall into this category. Books where the topic is already being discussed in pop culture or the news and captured in fiction like Girls with Bright Futures (social satire of the 1%), We Are Not Like Them and Such a Fun Age (both hold a mirror up to society’s social justice conversations) are great examples. Books that make readers think about “What would I do in that situation?” or “What if that happened to me/my sister/my family?” are ways that readers are pulled into the book in a nuanced way that inspire deep thought about how the reader feels about the subject matter or character conflict and their own personal relationship to it.

It’s a blend of literary and commercial: quality writing with a high-concept hook or unique structure

So here’s where the blend comes in. The literary part is that the quality of writing is high (doesn’t need to be capital L literary, though, and actually shouldn’t be), and the commercial part is the hook. You immediately get why you need to read it and read it now, but you’re going to keep reading because the writing is really strong.

What is a high-concept hook you might ask? The Guncle, One Day, The Midnight Library and This Time Tomorrow come to mind. A high-concept hook is a premise or hook that you can immediately wrap your head around and see how it can drive a novel: a “what if” hook, a hook that might be about an existential question but is captured in a brilliant single line.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

PG’s definition: Upmarket Fiction is a buzzword used by less than 1,000 people in the world and understood by none of them.

PG is now going to practice his high-concept hooks.