Last week Wendy J. Strothman, executive v-p, trade and reference division, of Houghton Mifflin and former director of Beacon Press, and Helene Atwan, current Beacon director, announced that the two companies had entered into an agreement to have Houghton's trade and reference division handle sales and fulfillment for Beacon starting August 1. Beacon is now distributed to the trade by Random House.
"It's a nice match," noted Greg Euson, v-p/director of sales, at Houghton Mifflin, who added that he is looking forward to working with another Boston-based publisher. Both publishers are located within blocks of each other in downtown Boston and both have lists with strong titles for independent booksellers and academic stores.
"We're very excited to partner with Houghton Mifflin," said Thomas Hallock, director of marketing and sales at Beacon. "I think it will work well for our authors. It's a good fit for booksellers and a good fit geographically."
Hallock added that he is especially pleased to make the switch in time to have Houghton present Beacon's fall list, which he regards as "our strongest list in four or five years." It includes several outstanding memoirs, among them Lanterns by bestselling author Marian Wright Edelman; All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald; and Congressman Ron Dellums's Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power. The distribution announcement closely follows a strong fiscal 1998 for Beacon, which publishes about 97 books a year. It received a substantial grant for marketing outreach from the MacArthur Foundation in 1998, and The Healing by Gayle Jones, Beacon's first original fiction in several decades, was nominated for a National Book Award.
Beacon will be Houghton's first client since the company announced that it would be severing its fulfillment relationship with Random House. Houghton also handles distribution for select accounts for Larousse Kingfisher Chamber.
