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You are here: Home / Archives for merger

At PRH, Producing a Publishing Powerhouse

July 28, 2018 By achuka Leave a Comment

A useful summary, 5 years on, of the Penguin/Random House merger:

July 1, 2018, marked the fifth anniversary of the completion of the Penguin Group–Random House merger, a deal that created the world’s largest trade publisher, which had $3.4 billion in global sales in 2017. That revenue total was generated by a company that has 275 worldwide imprints, sells some 700 million books per year, and publishes 14,000 new releases annually, all produced by about 10,000 employees. And PRH legacy and current imprints have published more than 60 Nobel laureates.

>>> https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/77617-at-prh-producing-a-publishing-powerhouse.html

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: business, merger

Hachette to create single children’s division with ‘no redundancies’

September 25, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

hachette

Hachette UK is to merge its three children’s businesses into one division on 1st January 2015, with Egmont’s Hilary Murray Hill (pictured) becoming its c.e.o.
The move will combine Hachette Children’s Books, Orion Children’s Publishing and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and create a “rich and specialised children’s publishing division,” Tim Hely Hutchinson, c.e.o of Hachette, said.
Current Egmont m.d Murray Hill will lead the new Hachette Children’s Group, joining the company on 13th January 2015. Marlene Johnson, c.e.o of Hachette Children’s Books, will retire at the end of 2014 after 40 years in publishing.
Hachette said the move aimed to develop “new strengths in children’s publishing” and there would be no redundancies as a result of the division’s creation.

via Hachette to create single children’s division | The Bookseller.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: division, Hachette, merger

Penguin Random House reveals new corporate logo

June 4, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Today, as part of its new “brand system,” the international mega-publisher revealed its new corporate wordmark, which is a much more elegant and understated design than those floating around the Internet. The logo, designed in a Courier-style font called Shift, will most often be paired with logos for the publisher’s various 250 brands and imprints.

via Penguin Random House reveals new corporate logo » Quill and Quire.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: design, logo, merger, Penguin, Random House

Bloomsbury US Consolidates Children’s Imprints; Easton Leaving

March 18, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Emily Easton, publisher of Walker Books for Young Readers in the US, will be leaving the company as a result of consolidation:

Bloomsbury [US] is folding its Walker Books for Young Readers imprint into the larger Bloomsbury Children’s Books. As a result of the consolidation, Emily Easton, publisher of Walker Books for Young Readers, will be leaving the company. The decision to fold Walker into Bloomsbury Children’s Books comes less than one year after Bloomsbury refocused Walker as a “boutique imprint” with most of its list of 18 books coming from Easton. Walker had been publishing about 40 books annually. At the time of the restructuring, several Walker staffers were moved to Bloomsbury Children’s Books, which expects to release 100 to 125 titles this year.

via Bloomsbury Consolidates Children's Imprints; Easton Leaving.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: Bllomsbury, consolidation, merger, publisher, publishing, Walker

Book Publishing’s Big Gamble – NYTimes.com

July 11, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

New York Times

Thoughts on the Penguin/RandomHouse merger, by Boris Katchka:

Consolidation carries costs you won’t find on a price sticker. Dozens of formerly independent firms have been folded into this conglomerate: not just Anchor, Doubleday, Dutton, Knopf, Pantheon, G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Viking, which still wield significant resources, but also storied names like Jonathan Cape, Fawcett, Grosset & Dunlap, and Jeremy P. Tarcher. Many of these have been reduced to mere imprints, brands stamped on a book’s title page, though every good imprint bears the faint mark of a bygone firm with its own mission and sensibility.

Decades of consolidation have cost writers and consumers alike. There is, for one, the persistent gripe of writers and agents: companies either forbid (as at Penguin) or restrict (at Random House) their constituent imprints from bidding against one another for a manuscript. That means not only lower advances, but also fewer options for writers to get the kind of painstaking attention — from editors, marketers and publicists — that it takes to turn their manuscripts into something valuable.

Among the imprints that survive, the tendency is to homogenize and focus on a few general fields like ambitious nonfiction, accessible literary fiction or thrillers. “Legacy” publishing does best in the first category: it commands the advances needed for research, the editing talent to shape the writing and the marketing muscle to distribute those doorstop biographies on Father’s Day.

In the more commercial genres — romance, horror, “Fifty Shades” — writers are beginning to find success in self-publishing. That’s a bit of a misnomer, because often it involves an agent who packages a book with any number of freelance editors and marketers, many of them refugees from the ever-shrinking houses. (Amazon’s publishing platform, which runs on more of a packaging model, has made inroads into these genres.)

As for literary fiction, more and more of the interesting and strange variety — the labors of love on which famous editors like Robert Giroux, Maxwell Perkins and Barney Rosset once placed their bets — may migrate to smaller presses. Graywolf, Milkweed and McSweeney’s (none of them in New York) may not have the resources of their spiritual predecessors, but they have what new owners often lack: personality, mission and focus.

So many books are published — almost certainly, more than ever — that predicting a blanket decline in quality would be ridiculous. But whether literary culture is best served by the ceaseless centralization of publishing is a question worth asking.

The Big Five have been so busy reducing old companies to brands that they’ve neglected the notion of what a brand should mean. Can any reader tell a Pantheon from a Riverhead novel? The logo doesn’t do the trick. The value of a publishing house — and now an imprint — has been its function as that dreaded straw man of the self-publishing gurus: a gatekeeper. In the hoary Model T days, gatekeepers weren’t a cabal but a cacophony, competing tooth and nail.

via Book Publishing’s Big Gamble – NYTimes.com.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: imprints, merger, NYT, Penguin, Random House

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