A Buoyant Mood in London

The often-embattled British publishing industry seemed more than usually cheerful, even bullish, as it surveyed a better-than-usual Christmas in the context of an economy that was, unlike that of the U.S., on a relatively even keel.

In the course of a visit toward the end of January, PW learned a number of things: that the retail scene, despite the collapse of the Scottish James Thin chain, was in sound fettle, with considerable store expansion planned for the coming year; that, contrary to the current American experience, big books, especially celebrity bios, seemed to be doing better than ever, while the backlist was in some difficulty; that overseas sales remained a highly significant factor for many British publishers; and that high-level moves within publishing, as here in the U.S., continued apace, as the players jockeyed for position in an intensely competitive market.

There was, of course, universal sorrow and sympathy with the U.S. about the events of September 11, but their effect on the British book economy was not at all like that at home: no particular upsurge in midlist titles about Islam and Afghanistan, no media shutout of authors of new books, and no sudden rush to print for titles relating to that terrible day. As for the economy, just as it had never reached the heights of the e-fueled mania that gripped the U.S. in the closing years of the last century, it had no comparable distance to fall; economically, the country seems to have been solid and reasonably level during the past year.

BA's Godfray: "Competition is fierce out there."

One of the great imponderables ahead for the British book industry has been the possible arrival on English soil of the euro, now universal in the rest of the European Community of which Britain is a member. The very able watchdogs at the Publishers Association and the Booksellers Association took the question very seriously--and agreed that if, as seems likely, the question is put to a national referendum during the current Blair administration, the result would probably be a vote in favor of the new currency. This would have an enormous impact on book pricing and would ultimately lead, according to Tim Godfray at the Booksellers Association, to the disappearance of printed prices on books. (This has long been standard practice in the music business, where the prices on CDs are set, and often changed in special sales, by the stores.)

The BA has already introduced euro prices for its popular Book Tokens in Ireland, where the currency is already in use, and the introduction in Britain, said Godfray, 'will make publishers think hard about book pricing. I think in the end they'd probably stop using printed prices--either that or there'd be a massive stickering operation to undertake--but that, of course, would introduce new problems.' Already publishers who export books to Europe are having to deal with the problem, and some European tourists, and returning British ones, bring euros in and are buying books with them at British stores; most retailers seem to be coping well, and are handling such deals as simple currency exchanges, but without commission, depending on a daily computerized updating of the exchange rate. (The euro is currently worth a little more than $1).

Book Pricing and the Euro
At the Publishers Association, Ronnie Williams said the appearance of the euro 'brings up the whole question of how book prices will be formulated. European customers would prefer to have no prices printed on books. Still, the European market isn't important enough to us to make us overturn everything. Most of our publishers still seem to favor having prices on their books.' He noted another significant difference between Britain and most Continental book industries: 'Most European countries are hanging onto Retail Price Maintenance [which Britain gave up about five years ago]. And European prices will have to reflect variations in tax, with some countries taxing book sales, others not.' He expects there to be a move within Europe toward tax equalization, and possibly a removal of RPM, which would make price promotions more widespread.

PA's Williams: Watching U.S./U.K. price differences.

Williams points to some fascinating comparisons between the British and American book industries, which he studies closely. The PA does a quarterly price comparison between the two countries, for instance, and finds that, particularly when a book has been competitively priced, and then discounted in the U.K., the sterling price, translated into dollars, is often considerably lower than in the U.S.; and since all British paperbacks seem to be heading toward a £6.99 (about $11.25) price point, this gives them a considerable advantage over U.S. trade paperbacks selling at $13 and $14. The respective export markets tell an astonishing story: in the January-September 2001 period, for instance, British book exports were at a level of $1,250 billion, compared to $1.273 billion for the U.S.--meaning that the British figure, from a market only about 20% of the size of the American one, was almost equivalent. The PA finds, incidentally, that although discounting is still extensive at Amazon U.K., online sales do not necessarily undercut bricks-and-mortar sales. Discounting in British supermarket chains, for instance, is intensely competitive--more so even than American price clubs--and puts severe pressure on publisher margins.

One notable aspect of electronic publishing--its facilitation of print on demand, which, as in the U.S., is the most profitable part of the digital revolution in publishing--is that some British publishers are now outsourcing POD to plants in the U.S., to take advantage of favorable postal rates there for shipping to U.S. customers. (The notion that the U.S. has favorable postal rates will be news to some American publishers!)

Williams and Ian Taylor, his international executive, agreed that publishers in Britain don't seem much affected by either boom or recession. 'We go slowly into a recession, but we come out of it slowly, too,' said Taylor, and Williams added, 'The book market is a solid one that holds up remarkably well against other media.' The BA, incidentally, recently moved from its former offices at the bottom of Kingsway to a secluded corner near the British Museum, only a step from its former offices on Bedford Square--one of several physical moves in London publishing since our last visit a year ago.

The Booksellers' View
The changes at the Booksellers Association are internal rather than geographic. It shares quarters, and some officers, with the Book Tokens people and those who run Batch, the electronic bookseller invoicing service the BA got off the ground last year, and the threesome are turning themselves into a limited company in the next couple of months. Godfray shares the PA's optimistic assessment of the market. There were fears, post-September 11, of a recession, he said, but 'it turns out that the great British public voted with their feet,' so that the last part of the year had been 'a good trading period with a wide range of excellent titles.'

The recent bankruptcy of the James Thin chain had been 'totally dismaying' and showed how difficult it is in British bookselling to maintain a position of a medium-sized chain, between the very large and the very small and local. But otherwise, the various elements in the retail business had done well, particularly with a late rush of business at Christmastime.

Waterstone's, now under the direction of Steve Knott, who came in recently from parent EMI's HMV Music side, 'have done better than even they expected,' and the provincial, small-town Ottakar's chain, as well as Borders and W.H. Smiths, were flourishing. The latter three, in fact, have all announced expansion programs for the year, with Smiths adding 120 stores, Ottakar's at least 10, and Borders/Books Etc. planning for five (plus a big new distribution center in Cornwall)--all this in a country that has often been described as 'overbookshopped.'

Books, said Godfray, were flourishing, particularly with the Harry Potter phenomenon and the Tolkien revival, 'but I'm still concerned that profitability is too low, kept down by price competition and rising costs.' Still, he is optimistic about continued annual growth 'in real terms--but only modest growth.' And he expects, as do a number of British observers, that two of the larger chains will eventually join forces, thus further 'homogenizing' British book retailing. But the expansion of bookselling in Britain will ultimately be limited, he noted, by the number of suitable sites available and rising real estate costs.

'Competition is fierce out there,' Godfray said, but it is mostly between the large chains now. Electronic sales, which most observers estimate at 3% to 4%, 'haven't really dented the sales at High Street shops,' and he felt that the supermarkets, which had posed a threatening presence to conventional stores with their loss-leader approach to books (some booksellers bitterly noted that such outlets sold Harry Potter titles for less than regular stores were buying them from the publisher), 'seem to have plateaued, and are no longer expanding in books.'

Bookseller's Clee: Anxiety about declining backlist sales.

Another independent overview came from Bookseller editor-in-chief Nick Clee, whose company's BookTrack figures agreed it had been a very good Christmas--and who was the first of several observers to point out during the week that whereas the big bestselling authors had enjoyed particularly strong sales (Jamie Oliver, the 'Naked Chef,' sold more than a million copies in hardcover, the sort of figures not seen here since Lee Iacocca 20 years ago), there were worries about declining midlist and backlist sales.

One of the big recent stories in London retailing, Clee noted, has been the comeback of Foyles, the famous (and original) Charing Cross Road bookseller, once notably disorganized under the somewhat eccentric Christina Foyle, but now much sleeker and as well stocked as ever--and with a staff that seems to know where that stock is. The Blackwell's story continues to grip newspaper readers as a family feud tale, but Clee thought, as did most observers, that the saga would end with the company selling off its publishing operations (with John Wiley regarded as a likely purchaser) and retaining the more celebrated bookselling side. (This is larger than we had realized, with something like 65 upmarket stores in the country, many of them on university campuses.)

As for Waterstone's, always the favorite subject of conversation among British bookpeople (it represents only about 22% of the market, but is vital to the kinds of quality, below-the-radar books independents do well with in the States), Clee thought that it was now focusing more on front-of-store promotions, and it has certainly improved its figures, though there remains much to be done in improving its supply chain.

It's Now Time Warner U.K.
Clee received strong agreement in this from David Young at Little, Brown, who wondered aloud why the chain is still ordering from something like 25,000 different suppliers--'They should have far fewer; obviously they can't keep up with it'--and also still accepting handwritten invoices, a relic of the days when Waterstone's welcomed books direct from hundreds of small publishers.

Little, Brown, incidentally, has just become Time Warner U.K. 'The many new retailers we deal with had no notion of who or what Little, Brown was,' Young said. 'One asked me: 'Why not Big, Yellow?' so we decided it was absurd not to trade on the very real recognition of the Time Warner name.' The old Bostonian name will be retained as an imprint. Meanwhile, he feels that relations with Larry Kirshbaum and Maureen Egen at Time Warner in New York are stronger than ever, 'and that suits us very well.'

He and Ursula McKenzie, recently aboard (from Transworld) as editorial director, described a 'fantastic' Christmas, with 'a record December by a mile.' Hot authors have included TV star Ann Robinson, Tiger Woods, Mary Lovell (for The Mitford Girls), Sally Beauman, Beryl Bainbridge and, of course, Margaret Atwood, whose latest sold half a million in paperback. And the house's record sales have been based on 20% fewer titles than the previous year; it has pruned perhaps more severely than any big London house, down over the last two years from about 590 to no more than 370. This kind of paring, he said, is essential to prevent 'cot deaths'--books that are essentially stillborn for lack of promotion.

The pair are particularly excited to have captured the two-book Rudolph Giuliani package (from Talk Miramax in the U.S.). It was a hot auction in the U.K. following September 11, with the former mayor's book on leadership, as exemplified by his post-attack efforts, having quite outstripped his memoir, the other half of the deal, in interest. Theirs was not the highest bid, but, said Young, '[Giuliani] liked the company he would keep on the list.' Time Warner U.K. plans to tour him widely, even taking him as far afield as Australia and Singapore.

The Virago list is now quartered here, and new publisher Lenny Goodings, recently brought in from Transworld, is, said Young, looking at a lot of new possibilities for the line, including history, science and politics, as well as the literary and commercial women's fiction for which it had become renowned. He also sees a resurgence in the company's Warner paperbacks, and a great deal of effort is going into rebuilding the line, especially getting stronger covers.

Young is very keen on the kind of data the Book Track system supplies to British publishers, especially the ability it offers to track selling prices. 'I'm astonished you can't do that over there,' he said. 'It would be enormously valuable if Book Sense could do that.'

Janson-Smith: "Waiting for the post-Xmas tristesse."

Patrick Janson-Smith at Transworld assures us he is not really a Luddite (in fact, he sent a picture of himself via e-mail), but he regards the general collapse of lavishly funded e-publishing efforts by large companies, particularly in the U.S., with some glee and a trace of 'I told you so!'

As a longtime senior staffer at what the Bookseller's Clee regards as 'still the strongest commercial publisher,' he has adapted without difficulty to being part of the Random family, but maintains a stubborn pride in the house as an entity. 'We've got a solid staff, and most of us have been there a very long time,' he noted. 'That's something authors appreciate. It worries them when there's too much moving around of the familiar faces.'

Transworld has been buying more than usual from the States lately, he thinks, notably Dennis Smith's Report from Ground Zero¸ about the WTC disaster from the firemen's viewpoint (Viking in the U.S.), as well as Leif Enger's Peace Like a River; the legal thrillers of Tess Gerritsen; Jimmy Lerner's You Got Nothing Coming, about life in jail (Broadway); and Steven Pressfield's Amazons.

As the editor who helped launch the current crop of high-ticket, big-selling celebrity books by buying Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell's memoir for s small fortune two years ago, he's now somewhat anxious at the prices they command--and their rather parlous impact on the bottom line. 'Even if you do very well with them, they leave a huge hole in the budget for the next year,' he wryly observed.

He's happier with such stalwarts on the list (not all as well known in the U.S. as they should be) as Terry Pratchett, Andy McNab, Lee Child, Robert Goddard, Mo Hayder and Joanna Harris. One who does make the ocean crossing is Bill Bryson, and Janson-Smith rejoices that he has a new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything , set for next year.

As far as Christmas business was concerned, he was optimistic, though, of course, returns are not yet back on the doorstep: 'We're waiting for the tristesse' is how Janson-Smith put it. Then he was off, out of the Holland Park wine bar where we met (kindly saving us a trip out to Ealing headquarters) for a local dinner with a scout--his day's work never done.

'An All-Round Publisher'
Richard Charkin at Macmillan proudly shows off new offices, located on a dingy back street behind Kings Cross railroad station, but in a beautifully converted and spacious old warehouse building, and overlooking part of north London's picturesque canal system. (The company had been priced out of its old quarters not far from Buckingham Palace.) The space is lavish, and lucky staffers are provided with a free canteen as a perk, since the grimy neighborhood offers little in the way of salubrious restaurants. Macmillan--meaning its extensive reference and educational publishing operations--occupies one building, and the dashing trade lines renowned on both sides of the Atlantic (and once the home of Knopf's Sonny Mehta), Pan and Picador, have another a few hundred yards away, under the leadership of David North.

For Charkin, it was also too early to have the final word on Christmas, though sales into the stores had been excellent. 'In trade publishing terms, the industry is healthier and better managed, and with better books, than for a very long time,' he declared. 'I think we're all doing a great job.' That said, he felt book clubs were having a difficult time, and college text sales were 'slower than they should be.' For Macmillan, trade sales are about a third of its worldwide total. 'We're an all-round publisher, including elhi, and there aren't many of us left, certainly of our size.' He finds the company's high trade profile helps with the rest of the business, 'especially with the authors.'

As part of Germany's von Holtzbrinck group, he and John Sargent in the U.S. are the only non-German members of the board, and he flies frequently to Stuttgart headquarters; twice a year they all have their meeting in New York. 'It's a real family company, nonintrusive and good to work with,' Charkin noted. As an international company, he concurs with the PA's Williams and Taylor about the greater strength of Britain's international publishing market. As an example, because of the weak Australian dollar and the strong American one, Macmillan has been doing very well selling Australian titles into the U.S. The business in India is excellent, and even Japan is doing well.

Charkin is one of those who rejoice in the end of the Net Book Agreement five years ago. 'It's meant a great deal of extra business,' and he cited Roy Jenkins's recent biography of Winston Churchill as an example: a hefty, serious book that has sold 60,000 copies--'the sort of sale you'd once get for Wilbur Smith.'

Charkin: "We're all doing a great job."

The company does a lot of distribution for third-party clients, as Random and Harper used to do in the States, with notable clients including Bloomsbury, Faber & Faber and the Guinness titles. Fulfillment and warehousing (but not sales and marketing for them) are done out of a warehouse in Swansea, Wales.

Charkin's worries include escalating advances, particularly for the currently strong celebrity books: 'If you win, you just about break even; if you lose, you can lose a fortune.' And he sees a situation where the smarter authors are beginning to realize that they may do better in the long run by taking a lower advance up front in return for higher royalties. He is also concerned about the squeeze on retailers, with escalating rents, and on printers, with paper costs currently at an all-time low.

He was one of the few publishers in London who seemed enthusiastic about the electronic side. Currently, Macmillan has revenues of $6 million to $7 million in electronic subscriptions to such products as the massive Grove's Dictionary of Music & Musicians and the magazine Nature. 'We have to be the best of our class in electronic publishing,' Charkin said.

Penguin's Olympian View
Another publisher in new quarters, which are widely suspected among colleagues to be a little rich for any publisher's blood, is Penguin, which six months ago moved into palatial quarters in Shell Mex House, a landmark prewar office building on the Strand, next door to the Savoy Hotel, with a stunning view of the Thames, its bridges, the South Bank and the Houses of Parliament in the distance. According to CEO Anthony Forbes Watson, Winston Churchill, who often stayed at the Savoy during the war years, used to come here to gaze at the view, and it's easy to see why. Penguin's parent, Pearson, having bought into the building for its headquarters, brought Penguin in as well, from its former much cheaper quarters off Kensington High Street, and there is much speculation that at least some of the rent will affect the company's bottom line--and also that Dorling Kindersley, which Pearson bought last year, will be a fiscal problem as well.

Forbes Watson: DK's been "a rather unruly plant."

Forbes Watson has decided notions about DK's problems and how to solve them. Throughout the company, he said, the thrust will be on focus and growth--'a substantially reduced number of titles, and a concentration on getting more sales out of each title.' DK had been, he said politely, 'a rather unruly plant,' with its own direct selling methods, lots of multimedia product and a plethora of local titles in local markets, as well as a number of curriculum-based educational products. He continued: 'We've decided DK is not an educational publisher, though it can work well with Pearson Education, which can offer its marketing clout and syllabus expertise, while DK offers its unique visual style.'

He explained, 'A downturn in the digital markets has persuaded us not to continue in multimedia; so DK has stopped doing CD-ROMs, though it will work with Pearson Broadband for emerging markets. On the selling side, the existing direct sales channel was based on the wrong model, and was losing money; but direct to consumer is still a great way to market, and we're working on our own approach to that. We're going to pull back on titles for local markets, and only do titles where there is real international potential--we want to massively refresh the global family reference operation, and I think many foreign license holders are delighted by this change of approach.'

Forbes Watson said there had been warehouse and information systems problems in the U.S., but the operation there is now 'a great team' under Chuck Lang. He acknowledged it has been 'a tough time' for illustrated books, so the unique quality of the DK product has to be stressed. Yes, they'll do more Star Wars, but more cautiously this time, and upcoming are a big Rolling Stones book, as well as one on flight in conjunction with the Smithsonian Museum and a new series of Top Ten travel guides.

For the company as a whole, it was a strong year, building on a number of strong bestsellers, but a tough year for backlist--significant for a company like Penguin. 'There's a slight tendency,' he joked, 'for a year to be either overly bad or overly good, and then you overcompensate the following year.' Still, the strength of the frontlist had offset the weaker backlist in 2001, with children's publishing especially strong; Roald Dahl is being repackaged, and a new Artemis Fowl installment is on the way from Puffin. Forbes Watson sees the consumers' mood as 'upbeat but brittle.' He added: 'I think the industry's concentrating now on how we can take more cash out of the supply chain, and liberate it for more constructive uses.'

Penguin has been a player in the celebrity stakes, with Naked Chef Jamie Oliver, now working his wiles in the U.S.; Spice Girl (and footballer bride) Victoria Beckham, with Ready to Fly; from the States, Fast Food Nation has been an unexpected hit; and Clive Cussler, whom the house recently took on, has outperformed expectations. On the more literary side--an essential part of the Penguin list--is Embers, a posthumous Hungarian novel translated by Carol Janeway, 'which should be huge in paperback'; a new William Boyd novel; Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist; W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz; and a new novel in the fall from White Teeth author Zadie Smith, called The Autograph Man.

S&S: Striving for a Larger Share

S&S's Chapman: After "a credible alternative."

Ian Chapman at Simon & Schuster, who has just celebrated the completion of his second year at the head of the London outpost of the U.S. giant, said his aim is still to get 'bigger and better' as a player in the British market, and can report considerable progress toward that goal. The company, he said, has achieved 20% growth in each of the past two years, and is looking to an ambitious 25% growth in revenues in 2002, which will mean he has doubled S&S turnover since coming into office. He's also grown the firm's head count, although with a number of staff changes in editorial, sales and accounting.

Chapman is keeping the title count steady, and aims to grow by 'publishing better books and marketing them more effectively.' He cited as examples David Baldacci, whom he has brought up to a 40,000 sales level; Jackie Collins, whose sales have doubled; Alan Titchmarsh, a popular TV garden authority currently high on the bestseller list; and he's very high on a pair of first novels: Good and Bad by Jennifer Weiner and Paperback Raita by William Rhode.

He acknowledged, however, that this is 'not an easy market--it's much more competitive than it has been'--and that there's great pressure on the backlist, where S&S is not as strong in fiction as he'd like it to be. S&S in London, despite his efforts to grow it, has still only a tiny fraction--less than 2%--of the market, and he wants, with his newly rebuilt staff, working in a good environment, to offer authors and agents 'a credible alternative.'

Hodder: Change at the Top
At Hodder, the big change is, of course, the departure of Hodder Headline managing director Amanda Ridout for HarperCollins (see below), but Martin Neild seemed, as ever, cheerfully on top of things. He has brought in a family member, Jamie Hodder Williams, as managing director of Hodder while he searches for a Ridout replacement, though he seems in no rush about it, and said he wants to thoroughly understand the Headline operation, so as to find the best person for the job.

As usual, Neild had a good line to characterize the post-Christmas mood: 'We're nervously emerging from our trenches,' he said, 'but feeling bullish on the whole.' Like others, he found that backlist sales have become increasingly elusive.: 'We have to work very hard at it, and we have to find them, and be as aggressive as we are with frontlist.'

The company, he said, is rethinking its marketing strategies, because the sell-in to stores has not lately been as high as it used to be; it is important to try new formats, and repromote the books, as Hodder has been doing with increasing success. He acknowledged that it was his company that probably began the current trend to swollen advances for celebrity bios or memoirs when it paid £1 million for footballer Alex Ferguson's story two years ago. 'There can be huge rewards--and we had one with Alex--but there can be big risks, too,' especially as newspapers and magazines are these days more cautious on the big serial rights deals that helped defray the costs of those large sums up front (the serial market in the U.K. has always been much more significant than in the States). 'The top six players here all have deep pockets, and mandates to grow, so it's become a bit of a high-wire act,' he noted. There is also considerable caution, Neild said, about September 11 titles in London.

The thing that most pleases him is when books take off by word of mouth, as has happened to a pair of titles in the past year: Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone, which is selling 15,000 to 20,000 a month in trade paperback, and Pete McCarthy's McCarthy's Bar, in which the author retraces his Irish roots ('He's a sort of heir apparent to Bill Bryson'), and which has already sold half a million in paperback. Both have been sold in the States, O'Farrell to Viking, McCarthy to St. Martin's Press. Among the known authors, Jonathan Kellerman has come over recently; the new le Carré, The Constant Gardener, is his best yet in terms of the attention it has generated; and Stephen King's Dreamcatcher put him back on the British lists before Christmas. Jeffrey Deaver has made 'great leaps--he's a tireless promoter,' and Hodder has put Janet Evanovich on the British lists for the first time. In nonfiction, Jack Welch has done very well, not only in Britain but also in South Africa (an astonishing 18,000 copies there), Singapore and Hong Kong.

What Neild calls 'mind-body-spirit' books are a growing hit for the company, in its Mobius imprint, about two-thirds of them from American authors like Susan Jeffers and Neale Donald Walsh (Conversations with God), as well as Richard Carlson and the Dalai Lama titles bought from agent Ralph Vicinanza; such titles do especially well in Australia and South Africa.

Neild's last thought: 'Mass market paperbacks are undervalued in this country, and I want to rethink our mass market campaigns. We have to recruit new readers, and that's the way to do it.'

A Bouncy Bloomsbury
The ebullient mood at Bloomsbury was signaled by the greeting of the PW visitor with copious glasses of champagne in a little boardroom at its Soho Square headquarters. Drink was poured not, however, to celebrate our arrival, but that of Anthony Bourdain, charismatic author of Kitchen Confidential, originally published by Bloomsbury USA, and now making a brief British visit for his newer A Cook's Tour, interrupting his extensive American promo effort. He was such lively company that it was not until he had gone off to dinner that managing director and co-founder Nigel Nicholson was able to take us off to a much more lavish boardroom across the street to talk about the company and business in general.

To get the obvious question out of the way first: yes, J.K. Rowling is 'happily writing away' at her new Harry Potter installment, and 'everything is on course,' but there is no likely publication date yet. Meanwhile, the editor who discovered her, Sarah Odedina, has been appointed to the Bloomsbury board, on which there are now six women to three men.

Bloomsbury's Newton: Working well with the U.S. side.

The British trade, declared Nicholson, was 'feeling dramatically better' after Christmas--including his own company--and 'the retail scene seems to me stronger than ever,' with Waterstone's having apparently regained confidence and in an expansive mood, Ottakar's doing very well on its smaller scale, and W.H. Smith having also 'settled down.'

He took a dim view of the concentration on celebrity books, which tended, he thought, to the kind of 'homogenization of offerings' that Bloomsbury was set against. Books he was particularly excited about included Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides, just bought from Janklow & Nesbit (and to be done by FSG in the U.S.); this will be a fall title. Another major effort that Bloomsbury has packaged as a multimedia production in partnership with Economist.com is Business: The Ultimate Resource, described as a one-stop reference about all aspects of business. This will be done by Perseus in the U.S., with a promotional push from author Daniel Goleman. There will also be a new novel from Joanna Trollope, set for the first time in the U.S.

A recent acquisition was A.C. Black, with its Who's Who, its ornithology list and its nautical reference, and this has now moved into Bloomsbury's new building. 'We still have an entrepreneurial spirit here, so our main strategy is one of organic growth,' Nicholson said. Meanwhile, the U.S. branch continues to work well, with the help of New York publicist Rosemarie Morse (much praised by Bourdain and the London publicity staff), and 'most of our most successful books last year were ones we did jointly with them.'

Another smaller publisher, but this one part of a large group, is Virgin, recently rechristened Virgin Books instead of Virgin Publishing, but still a significant part of Richard Branson's music and travel empire. Here K.T. Forster, who has been in charge for about 18 months, has set a manageable goal of a carefully promoted list of about 200 titles a year, only 60 of them in hardcover, and has seen it 'work sooner than I could have hoped,' with results that are currently 'way ahead of budget.' In fact, Virgin has a top bestseller in a health and diet book, Carol Vorderman's Detox Diet.

The list is dominated by music and show business titles, with some series reference publishing (which Forster plans to expand), some sports and show business celebrity titles, some travel guides and the Black Lace line of paperback erotica. There is already a presence in the U.S. with distribution by CDS, and this will be continued with a showing at the CDS stand at the BEA show, which sales manager Julia Bullock will also attend.

Forster noted that the paperbacks are going well, but the handful of business books have been sluggish, and she is doing fewer illustrated books, in accord with a general tendency away from them. She is keenly aware of being part of a brand name, but comments: 'Brands are a funny thing. They can open doors, but you have to be very careful with them.'--as she is with hers.

HarperCollins's New Look

Harper's Ridout: Excited by 'global reach.'

Ever since Jane Friedman came aboard to lead HarperCollins in New York, the U.K. operation, to which she is very close, has been in a state of constant transition, but now seems to be settling into its new shape. Victoria Barnsley came in from Fourth Estate as CEO 18 months ago, bringing her old imprint with her, and has just hired Amanda Ridout away from Hodder Headline as chief of the company's trade division.

Ridout describes a company now reorganized into two distinct entities: the Collins reference lines, dictionaries, etc., now under Thomas Webster, newly imported from Oxford University Press; and the consumer division which she heads, consisting of adult trade, Fourth Estate, children's and Thorson's New Age-ish titles. 'It's a way of helping the groups keep their smaller identities,' said Ridout, who, as a notable acquiring editor in her old job, will be involved in all acquisition decisions.

She said she was attracted, when Barnsley approached her to take the job, by the company's 'global reach--it's really world publishing, and that's exciting.' And she finds it a 'fascinating challenge to be able to focus on the future--and to learn more about the importance of children's books.' As soon as she is thoroughly settled in, she'll be visiting New York in the spring.

Meanwhile, she can take pleasure in a particularly strong position over Christmas: 'We've moved up our market position to No. 1 if you could separate Random and Transworld,' she noted, citing the big bestseller on popular comic Billy Connolly by Paula Stevenson; the Tolkien books, pushed by the movie, which Harper has in much of the English-speaking world; a Fourth Estate humor book, Ally G.; and, of course, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which Harper publishes in Britain.

Barnsley herself talked of other new faces joining the company: John Bond from Penguin in sales; Lynn Drew, formerly at Random, to improve the house's position in women's commercial fiction; and Courtney Hodell, also from Random (in the U.S.) for the Fourth Estate imprint that will be launched there in May, with a new novel by Carol Shields as its lead title. Trade editorial director Adrian Bourne has left for Orion.

As for the British market, Barnsley concurred with most observers that all backlist areas had suffered recently, and complained that with the apparent changes in Waterstone's buying patterns, 'there's a lack of differentiation among retailers today.' Independent stores, she lamented, were probably less significant in the U.K. than in the U.S.--which she attributed, at least partly, to the existence of a national press, and therefore less attention to books of local interest. In the long run, she was of the opinion that Britain would eventually adopt the euro as its currency, though the resultant stickering 'would be a nightmare.'

PW saw Barnsley on the day that the defection of Susan Isaacs, a longtime Harper U.S. author, was announced, but she responded with a smile: 'Change can be a good thing.'

A Confident Random House

Random's Rebuck: "No reductions here."

Gail Rebuck at Random House found the whole trade sector 'buoyant, despite threats of a downturn,' but wondered aloud if the present trade velocity could be sustained. The house was on budget for January after a strong Christmas and already £2 million ahead of this time last year. Its compound growth in the past two years had been about 13%, and it continues to enjoy 'solid growth.' Over the past year, Random scored 25% of the top sellers in all categories, and was proud, she said, to be breaking out new talent as well as bringing new strength to established authors like Ian McEwan.

Two American books she was particularly keen on were Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me with Apples and Stephen Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park, which Random is publishing this spring after a hotly contested auction (and for which the house has prepared a highly elaborate and elegant blad, unusual for a novel).

She, too, senses a weakening in backlist sales, mainly in mass paperback, and has her own view of why this is happening: 'The trend in bookshops for front-of-store price promotions tends to focus people away from exploring in the back of the store. Then you get returns of those backlist titles because there's a lack of energy in the selling of them. We have to get together with the retailers to market these titles better.' Returns have generally stabilized in recent years, Rebuck said, 'but they could go up again if the shops start returning a lot of stock.'

In the context of the anxiety expressed by executives in the States about Random's sales in the year ahead, Rebuck was confident. 'Bertelsmann expects each marketplace to respond according to the conditions existing within its own market,' she said. 'We haven't been asked for any reductions here, and we haven't made any,' she declared, adding that after going through two recessions in the past 20 years, 'we went through our cutting eight or nine years ago, and we've trimmed as much as we need to.' Now, she feels, the house is in a position 'to innovate and experiment.'

She was not interested in trimming the list, either. 'We don't want to do a smaller number of titles; we feel we're part of the focus of Britain's cultural heritage'--an unusual sentiment to encounter in these bottom-line-centered times. The ability to do a wide range of titles was the reason Random kept its large number of separate imprints (there are about 25 in the London operation). 'It provides us with cultural diversity, with each imprint focused on what it does best, within the larger division,' she explained.

Since several publishers have moved, or contemplated moving, does Random plan to remain separate from Transworld, way out in West London? Rebuck said they have considered the possibility of moving into one central building, but the company owns the headquarters building in Vauxhall Bridge Road, near the Tate Britain gallery, as well as several other properties around London, and Transworld pays extremely low rent and is happy where it is. She said, 'As long as we can communicate well, we can stay where we are. I'm wedded to multi-sites. I don't want to be spending our money on rent. I'd rather spend on acquisitions.'

Maybe it's a sign of the times, with agents buoyantly riding an expansionist mood in publishing, but one of the moves that came to fruition as PW was making its rounds was a management buyout at Curtis Brown. A team of five of its leading agents, led by Jonathan Lloyd, bought themselves out from their owner, an investment company.

And another footnote: it was a sign of the increasing significance being given to children's books everywhere that Philip Pullman won the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year award for The Amber Spyglass, the first time it has ever gone to a children's book (see following feature).