In a letter to the staff of the Hachette Book Group that looked back over 2018, CEO Michael Pietsch cited a “strong year” that “achieved our budget for revenue and profit and surpassed 2017’s results.”
Pietsch noted a long list of bestselling titles for the year, beginning with the The President is Missing, written by James Patterson and former President Bill Clinton. He also called out novels by Nicholas Sparks, Sandra Brown, J.K. Rowling (aka Robert Galbraith), and Joyce Meyer, as having all had “great runs on bestseller lists.” Nonfiction bestsellers, in the form of political books, included such titles as Shade and Obama by Pete Souza, and Liars, Leakers, and Liberals by Jeannine Pirro.
Other nonfiction successes included David Sedaris’s Calypso and In Pieces by Sally Field.
Backlist sales, he said, were “a major highlight” of 2018; as one example, he pointed to HBG’s bestselling paperback of the year, Jen Sincero’s You’re a Badass. The book, he noted, sold “more copies in its fifth year than in any year prior.”
Pietsch also highlighted a string of literary prizes HBG's books won: a fiction Pulitzer for Andrew Sean Greer's Less (Little, Brown); an Edgar Award for best mystery for Attica Locke’s Bluebird, Bluebird (Mulholland); a Hugo and a Nebula won by N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky; and World Fantasy Awards for Fonda Lee’s Jade City. On the nonfiction side, Basic Books earned the Bancroft History Prize for God’s Red Son by Louis Warren.
Despite the revenue and profit gains, Pietsch said the biggest “frustration” of the year was printer delays; he claimed that, in the second half of 2018, they "affected all major publishers.” Nevertheless, Pietsch went on, HBG achieved “95% of our on-sale dates.”
HBG also continues to grow through acquisitions and internal expansion. Pietsch cited the acquisition of Christian publisher Worthy Books, which joined the Hachette Nashville division in September. HBG launched two new imprints—Spark for health and wellness titles, and Running Press Studio for gifts—and restructured others. Da Capo was moved to Hachette Books, the FaithWords staff were relocated to Nashville as part of the Worthy acquisition, and the Life & Style imprint was closed with food and health publishing shifted to Grand Central.
The year also featured the installation of software for a new title management system, a new financial system, and new Author and Retailer Portals. These changes will allow authors to more easily access sales and royalty information, and retailers to track orders.
Looking forward into 2019, Pietsch called out some authors the publisher expects big sales from, among them Ronan Farrow, former Governor Chris Christie and Malcolm Gladwell. In his conclusion, Pietsch called out the work of the HBG senior management group and its effort to make the publisher "a more inclusive employer.” Diversity, he said, continues to be a “major focus.”
