HM Trade &Reference Division 'On Target'
Judith Rosen -- 2/28/00
Although it represented just under 10% of its parent company's total revenues in 1999, Houghton Mifflin's trade and reference division turned in a solid performance last year, and with sales of $89.5 million, it remains a significant player in the consumer book industry.
"In 1999, sales for the trade and reference division were up in all market channels, including the traditional book channels, chain stores and Amazon.com," Wendy Strothman, executive v-p and publisher of the unit, told PW. The trade and reference division published 75 adult hardcovers, 85 adult paperbacks, 150 children's hardcovers and 78 children's paperbacks in 1999; Strothman anticipates that the division will publish about the same number of titles this year, although she is looking to improve on last year's 7% operating margin. "Nader Darehshori [HM chairman, president and CEO] has said for years that we'd have an 8%-10% margin in 2000, and we're right on target," she noted. The division has a staff of 200 spread among its Boston, New York City and Wilmington, Mass., offices.
Backlist sales, which constitute 70% of overall sales, were fueled by several successful juvenile promotions. Last fall's festivities marking Mike Mulligan's 60th birthday resulted in a doubling of sales for books by Virginia Lee Burton about the steam shovel that could. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has been reissued in a variety of formats in advance of the movie to be released by New Line Cinema during the 2001 Christmas season, also saw a significant jump in sales.
In addition, HM's '99 results got a boost from three New York Times bestsellers--The Best American Short Stories of the Century 1999, Woman: An Intimate Geography and River-Horse: A Voyage Across America. "That's more than we had in one year ever," said Janet Silver, v-p and editor-in-chief for adult trade books. "The wonderful thing about all three books is that they are still selling." The new year, she added, also got off on the bestseller track with James S. Hirsch's Hurricane, on the life of Rubin Carter, which debuted on the NYT list at number 15 the week of February 6.
The company's Mariner Books trade paperback imprint, introduced in 1997, continued to perform well last year. "It's been a great way to launch or relaunch a career," said Strothman, singling out Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories that sold 40,000 copies in 1999 and recently won the New Yorker Prize for best fiction debut. Strothman is equally confident about the sales potential for Anita Desai's novel Fasting, Feasting, a finalist for the 1999 Booker Prize, newly released as a Mariner paperback original. It will begin reissuing Desai's backlist under the Mariner imprint this spring. HM plans to further expand the Mariner line over the coming years to include more titles from its own deep backlist, reaching back to the early 20th century as part of its From the Archives series (Book News, Feb. 7).
The market for HM's popular annuals--which bring together the best short stories, essays and mysteries--continues to grow, with the in-print total for the '99 edition of The Best American Short Stories reaching 150,000 copies in hardcover and paperback combined. In 1999, HM added The Best American Recipes to the mix, and in 2000 it will issue the first collections of The Best Travel Writing and The Best Science and Nature Writing.
In fiction, HM's '00 list includes Penelope Fitzgerald's first short story collection to be published in the U.S. and Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, to be published in May with a 100,000-copy first printing. It is the fourth Roth book in a row from HM, since he returned to the house in 1995 with Sabbath's Theater, which won a National Book Award. According to Silver, Roth and Robert Stone are among several writers who have returned to HM in recent years.
On the distribution front, Strothman said that HM, which opened its own warehouse in July 1999 for trade books in Indianapolis, Ind., will add Boston-based Element Books as a client line in April. Its other distribution lines--also of New England stock--are Beacon Press, which it started selling in May 1999, and Old Farmer's Almanac, which it added in January 2000.
Despite last summer's warehouse transition from Random House's Westminster, Md., facility to HM's own in September, HM had "the best billing month in our history," noted Teri Kelly, v-p and director of sales, trade and reference division. Similarly, Beacon, which moved its fulfillment from Random House to HM in August, experienced a big boost in sales. According to Beacon marketing director Tom Hallock, Beacon "is on pace to have a record-breaking year [for its fiscal year ending June '00]. Across the list, Houghton has gotten us higher average sales per title."
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