More on Houghton Mifflin

The New York Times is reporting on HMH's decision to stop acquiring, for now and maybe forever. Motoko Rich points out that HMH has a fairly strong literary backlist, and that even the newest from the likes of Philip Roth can get lost beneath the commercial bus:

One of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s best authors, Mr. Roth, is a literary lion who is frequently rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Each of his last three novels have sold fewer than 75,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which reports about 70 percent of sales. David Baldacci, meanwhile, a stalwart author in Grand Central’s stable, has already sold 114,000 hardcover copies of “Divine Justice,” his latest novel, just published this month.

Some industry veterans said that such numbers belied the long-term viability of certain authors and titles. Andrew Wylie, who represents Mr. Roth, said that Hachette’s current success notwithstanding, publishers should continue in the traditional way, buying books to build a strong backlist of titles that might someday become classics and sell for years to come, rather than focusing on books that would sell in high numbers upon first release but then fall out of bookstores.

Looks like debt int he parent company is contributing to the freeze:

Mr. Dickens said that the parent company had about $7 billion in debt outstanding, on which it was paying about $500 million in debt service annually. He said that the company was generating enough cash to pay that “comfortably,” but that it was not “allocating as much capital” to the consumer book business, which represents about 5.5 percent of Education Media’s total revenues, as it had in the past.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Hachette, after publishing 104 NYT bestsellers this year is "giving bonuses equal to one week’s salary to every employee" while:

Just last month Reagan Arthur, a star editor at Little, Brown, signed a deal for a reported $6 million with the actress and writer Tina Fey to write a book of humorous essays.

I don't mean to cast HMH as some kind of self-abnegating literary press, but I would obviously take its Grass, Roth, et al., over Tiny Fey and whatever scored those bestsellers for Hachette. Too bad the markets see it otherwise.

Comments

[Levi]

But let's look at what Houghton Mifflin does with an author like Philip Roth. The implication of the Times article is that they have lost a lot of money on him -- maybe that's because they've obviously mistaken him for a cash cow, turning out a novel a year with the regularity of Harry Potter movies, each one packaged and premium-priced and hyped as an "event" publication. Readers aren't going for it, and a publishing company cannot afford to be out of touch with what readers want.

[Stephen]

hopefully the largest businesses will finally decide to stop publishing literary novels completely, leaving them instead to small publishers which are run by people who actually love books, as opposed to corporations which love nothing but the taste of cash and the smell of stock. now that we live in a world where the smallest of publishers can market and sell directly on the Internet, and where knowledge of a good books spreads at the speed of light instead of at the speed of the New York Times, maybe the end result would be better for writers and readers alike.