Envelope, Please
By Andrew Grabois - Dec 17 , 2007
In book publishing’s version of the Golden Globe Awards, Publishers Weekly has singled out people and companies in the industry for professional recognition. There are a few that are worth mentioning here.
For its most glamorous award, Publishers Weekly has selected Perseus Books Group as its Publisher of the Year.
Jim Millot of PW writes:
“It may take a village to raise a child, but it’s taken 630 employees scattered across the country to build the Perseus Books Group into what is arguably the most important independent publishing company in the nation…”
Perseus was founded in the mid-1990’s by Frank Pearl, a reclusive Washington deal-maker who loved serious nonfiction and was frustrated by how quickly those titles went out of print. He thought it was bad business and saw an opportunity to squeeze an annuity out of backlist titles. Perseus has built a very successful backlist niche that today generates 70% of its annual revenues.
No matter how successful his backlist was, though, Pearl knew that he needed to do something else to insure Perseus’ long-term competitiveness. He had to build sufficient scale to weather the ups and downs of the publishing business, and capture large-enough market share to be taken seriously. The fastest way to do this, Pearl concluded, was to get into the distribution game and to acquire other publishing companies.
Perseus broke into the distribution business in 2005, when they acquired CDS. Earlier this year they took on the 124 distribution clients of bankrupt PGW, making them the country’s largest book distributor. Their giant 1.2 million square foot warehouse in Jackson, Tennessee, holds over 40 million books.
Perseus cobbled together a growing publishing business much the same way. Since its founding, Perseus has acquired Basic Books, Westview, Da Capo Press, Running Press, Vanguard Press, Seal Press, and, most recently, Avalon.
Pearl has not done all of this alone. He has been helped by an excellent management team, including Joe Mangan, the C.O.O., and David Steinberger, the president.
Perseus may have been founded with the backlist in mind, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t had their share of bestsellers. This fall, Perseus has seen a number of its titles hit the bestseller lists, including Skinny Bitch, The Sneaky Chef, This Moment on Earth, The Portable Atheist, and Blackwater
In the category of innovation, Publishers Weekly selected Jack Romanos, the outgoing C.E.O. of Simon & Schuster (S&S). Romanos is retiring after 22 years at the company, but he is going out on top.
According to PW, S&S will post record earnings in 2007, and sales of almost one billion, surpassing marks set in 2006. S&S has almost cornered the market on political memoirs from Bush Administration defectors, and also made a pretty penny from Bob Woodward’s trilogy of Bush war histories. Topping all S&S bestsellers, of course, is The Secret, a blockbuster spiritual self-help title with seven million copies in print and more than 900,000 audio units shipped.
Ramonos is credited with pioneering the use of mass market techniques to sell hardcovers, creating an S&S audio division, and inventing the premium mass market paperback format. As impressive as these accomplishments are, however, his greatest legacy might end up being in the digital arena. S&S has undertaken a massive digitization project, and hopes to have 14,000 titles completed by the end of this year. According to Romanos’ annual letter to S&S employees, they have also created an Intellectual Property Management System, a searchable digital contact database, and a syndication server.
Finally, PW gave posthumous recognition to Jan Nathan, the long-time director of the Publishers Marketing Association (PMA), who died in June.
Jan was a tireless advocate for small publishers. It was because of her that the Book Industry Study Group began to account for small and independent publishers in their industry sales estimates and projections. I had the pleasure of serving with Jan on the board of BISG, so I was able to see her in action.
How good a job did she do? When the PMA was founded more than twenty years ago, there were only fifteen members; as of 2007, there were more than 4,200.
