This year, Christine Ball finally took a bow on the juggling act she had kept up since 2017, when she was named the publisher of three storied Penguin Publishing Group imprints: Putnam, Dutton, and Berkley. With John Parsley tapped as Dutton publisher in May and the leadership of Putnam out of her hands since 2020, Ball, now EVP and publisher of Berkley, has her eyes turned exclusively toward that imprint, where she and her team are growing their footprint in categories that may surprise some readers.
“Most people know us for our romance authors, where we have a deep bench of authors—Emily Henry, Carly Fortune, Jasmine Guillory—and that program is booming,” Ball said. But the imprint, long a commercial powerhouse, is firmly entrenched in a number of categories, including historical fiction, where Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray, and Dolen Perkins-Valdez are among its top authors. Both Christopher Murray and Perkins-Valdez have books forthcoming from Berkley in 2025: Harlem Rhapsody (Feb.) and Happy Land (Apr.), respectively.
It also includes speculative fiction. Berkley is growing the list at the venerable Ace Books imprint beyond its impressive backlist, which boasts such authors as William Gibson and Frank Herbert. One big fantasy title on the horizon, Ball said, is The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, the author best known for the bestselling 1998 YA novel Holes. Due out next August, Berkley bills the title as “a modern fantasy classic of forbidden love, a crumbling kingdom, and the unexpected magic all around us.”
Ball also pointed to the success of Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl titles. The litRPG series was originally self-published, but Ace picked up print rights to the first six books in the series, and the four that have published since August have sold nearly 55,000 combined copies to date at outlets that report to Circana BookScan.
Horror, mystery, and suspense are also growing categories at Berkley, where the editors are “actively looking for more horror” to add to its list—which includes bestselling author Grady Hendrix, whose Witchcraft for Wayward Girls will be released next month—as well as “more upmarket psychological thrillers,” Ball said. One title in the latter category that has Ball particularly excited is The Night Hunter, acquired late last month. The thriller, by a debut author with an as-yet-unchosen pen name, follows two sisters from South Africa who return home to bury some family secrets after the death of their mother, and find themselves in mysterious and dangerous circumstances while out on a safari.
Beyond the genre space, Berkley is looking to expand into more upmarket and book club fiction, Ball said. Amanda Bergeron, VP and editorial director, is leading a number of editors in acquiring novels for Berkley’s hardcover list that Ball says are “conversation-starting, thought provoking, and emotional” but with “big hooks that borrow from the genres that Berkeley is so well known for.”
A representative recent acquisition is The Tango Dancer’s Guide to Stopping Time by Jaclyn Moriarty, the younger sister of Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty. “It has big themes like parenting and memory and sisterhood and grief that it’s tackling, but it does it through a speculative twist, of a time travel agency that may or may not be real,” Ball said. “So it feels very Berkley, but deals with bigger issues than some of our genre stuff has before.”
Berkley currently has about 60 staffers, with 30 in editorial and 14 each in the marketing and publicity departments, and publishes approximately 300 titles per year. Ball is quick to point to others when celebrating her imprint’s successes, noting SVP and editor-in-chief Claire Zion and Bergeron as pivotal figures in shaping the list on the editorial side and VP and deputy publisher Jeanne-Marie Hudson and VP and associate publisher Craig Burke as holding down the business side.
Zion, who is clearly a driving force behind Berkley’s continued success and expanded vision, also credits her team. “We built a very big and profitable list that I’m proud of, and the secret to doing it was that I didn’t personally love all the books,” she said. “I got rid of the hierarchical structure I had grown up with—where an editor couldn’t buy a book unless the editor-in-chief and publisher liked it. I thought our list should encompass a variety of tastes and points-of-view, and that means all the editors, including the junior ones, can buy books.”
Zion added: “I didn’t personally have to like all of them—if an editor could show me that they knew what the market was, they knew who the reader was, they knew what the comp titles were, they knew how to package it to reach that market, they knew how to talk to reviewers about it, then I would do the book. And that’s what my team did: they went out and bought books that they loved, and it turns out readers liked a lot of them too.”
