When Mary McAveney took over from Michael Jacobs as CEO of Abrams Books in November of 2022, the publisher was finishing up a string of solid annual sales gains helped by the boost to book sales during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through her first full year in 2023, sales “didn’t hold up,” McAveney told PW, and were down across most of all of Abrams’ businesses. After a sluggish beginning to 2024, sales have since overperformed expectations, and McAveney is confident that Abrams will finish 2024 with sales up over a year ago.
Despite her confidence for a rebound, McAveney said that Abrams is at “a pivotal moment” as the industry deals with changes caused by the pandemic. Like many other heads of large publishers, McAveney has been proactive in dealing with the new publishing environment, with some of the decisions she made proving both difficult and far-reaching.
In spring of 2023, Abrams eliminated an unspecified number of jobs in a number of different departments. That summer, the publisher implemented a restructuring of its marketing and publicity groups that unified the departments across its adult and children's book imprints. And this past July, McAveney oversaw another restructuring of the marketing department, this time with the goal of putting more emphasis on data and analysis when developing marketing campaigns.
In naming McAveney as Jacobs’s successor, Abrams pointed to her background in data collection, direct-to-consumer relationships, and digital discovery as some of her strengths, and she has indeed brought that expertise to Abrams. “We need to better understand what consumers want,” she said.
To that end, McAveney—who came to Abrams from Open Road Integrated Media, where direct-to-consumer marketing is the bread and butter—is eager to drive more readers to Abrams’ website. “Information from consumers is critical if we want to give them something that is different than going to Amazon,” she said. And she believes that promoting directly to consumers will create a “flywheel effect,” encouraging readers to buy books not only from Abrams’ site but at bricks-and-mortar stores as well.
McAveney said that she is encouraged by the quality of Abrams’ lists, and hopes to keep building on those assets. She noted that being deeply involved in all aspects of the digital world is especially important for publishers at the present moment, especially considering the role social media influencers have in sparking book sales. A recent example at Abrams was one of its newest hits, Spooky Lakes by TikTok star and educator Geo Rutherford, which has sold 30,000 copies since its September 24 release.
For all of McAveney’s interest in improving Abrams’ digital marketing capabilities, the company’s publishing program remains rooted in print. Abrams’ illustrated book list remains a solid performer, and McAveney said that no company is better positioned to take advantage of the growing books-as-object trend than Abrams, which has long been admired for its strong production values.
Drawing on its ties to Marvel, in October Abrams published a $175 deluxe edition of Marvel Studios: The Art of Ryan Meinerding, which includes a matte print signed by Meinerding, the head of visual development at Marvel Studios. The book has a limited run of 500 copies. Another ambitious project is a $150 deluxe edition of The Art of DreamWorks The Wild Robot. For YA readers, Alex Aster’s Lightlark saga has a host of special features in a $34.99 package.
McAveney has also focused on expanding Abrams’ frontlist and backlist offerings. To address the latter, in May the company bought Taunton Books, whose 900-title list includes books in the crafts, food, gardening, homebuilding, and woodworking categories. In addition to added titles that compliment Abrams’s list, the purchase also brought more direct-to-consumer data and distribution channels to the publisher.
This fall saw the launch of the first books from Abrams ComicsArts since McAveney announced last year that the imprint was becoming a new division of the company, where it now sits alongside the adult and children’s groups. Fall titles included Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation and Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, both published in September, and the expanded edition of the national bestseller Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross hit shelves in October. The season also saw the first release of titles from Abrams ComicArts’ new Kana manga imprint: Frank Miller’s Ronin Rising Manga Edition by Frank Miller and Manhole Volume 1 by Tetsuya Tsutsui.
McAveney and the entire Abrams team cheered when Jeff Kinney’s Hot Mess, the 19th book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, hit number 1 on the November 20 USA Today bestsellers list as Skyshade by Alex Aster hit number 2, marking the first time Abrams had titles hold those spots. (For the week ended November 16, Skyshade and Hot Mess were in the first and second slots on Circana BookScan’s overall bestseller list, where they sold about 62,000 and 57,000 copies, respectively.) Kinney has been a major author for Abrams for years, and new titles are reported to be in the works.
In a note on one of the biggest topics in book publishing, McAveney added that she is taking a measured look at AI, which she sees as best being used mainly for administrative tasks, where it can help save time. “I don’t see AI becoming a creative force,” she said. “There won’t be any AI covers coming from Abrams.”
