Launched in 1995 as a boutique literary imprint at St. Martin's Press, Picador became a separate division of parent company Holtzbrinck in 2000. Now, the house has announced that in 2004, Picador will be entirely devoted to paperbacks. The list will remain at its current level of 110 titles a year, fed partly by reprints from St. Martin's, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Henry Holt, which are also part of the Holtzbrinck group. "It's an arrangement that was evolving between the publishers. My job was to put a framework around it," said Holtzbrinck's CEO John Sargent.
The decision to drop Picador's hardcover program reflects the reality that, while the imprint has produced a well-regarded list of about 20 hardcovers a year, only a few of its original titles have broken out. Meanwhile, a number of its fiction reprints have sold 500,000 copies or more, including Anita Diamant's The Red Tent (published in hardcover by SMP, 1997), Michael Cunningham's The Hours (FSG, 1999), Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000) and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (FSG, 2001). On the strength of those books, along with the imprint's 400-title backlist, Picador's net sales have doubled in the last three years.
"By the time I arrived [in April 2000], it was clear that Picador needed to separate from SMP and become a paperback house of its own," said Frances Coady, who became Picador's v-p and publisher when the imprint's founder, George Witte, moved over to SMP as editor-in-chief. "It didn't make sense that Picador was owned by St. Martin's when its growth depended on working equitably with FSG and Holt on the paperback side, and it didn't made sense to bid against the [Holtzbrinck] group on hardcovers, since we were working across the group in paperback. The question was how to bring about the change, and that's what I've been dealing with."
For FSG and Holt, the benefits of developing a viable literary paperback division within Holtzbrinck were clear. "If you have Picador as a strong paperback imprint that can compete with Penguin, Vintage and Harvest, then the books within it can compete commensurately," observed FSG president and publisher Jonathan Galassi.
Though St. Martin's took a hit to its bottom line when the imprint first disentangled itself in 2000, president Sally Richardson has taken the long view. "We all share in the profitability of Picador. The stronger it is, the better it is for all of us," she explained, noting that the loss was made easier because St. Martin's has two other strong paperback programs, in trade and mass market.
Handing Off Hardcovers
After next year, when Picador will publish about 10 hardcovers, those authors who still have hardcovers under contract with Picador will move to Holtzbrinck's other houses, under the stewardship of their Picador editors. "We're making marriages based on the enthusiasm and passion of the houses involved," explained Coady, citing novelist James Hyne's planned move to SMP and nonfiction author Jonathan Mahler's to FSG. She acknowledged, however, that a number of Picador's most commercially successful hardcover authors do not currently have forthcoming books under contact with the house, including Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum), John Bayley (Elegy for Iris), Claire Davis (Winter Range), Naomi Klein (No Logo) and Paul Watkins (The Forger).
When it comes to new acquisitions, Coady and Picador's two editors—Webster Younce and Josh Kendall—will focus on buying paperback reprints from within and outside the Holtzbrinck group. They will also buy trade paperback originals, which Coady sees as vital to Picador's publishing program. "If you're really investing in first-time writers and building them, you can make a better case for publishing the author well in trade paperback," she said, explaining that when she launched the successful Vintage paperback imprint in the U.K., she worked intensively with paperback originals.
Coady—who is also an experienced hardcover publisher, having headed Granta Books in London and the four imprints in Random House U.K.'s literary division—will selectively make hard/soft deals as well. Last week, for example, she bought Andrew Sean Greer's second novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which will be published by FSG in early 2004 and by Picador in 2005. The buy made sense because Picador has already published Greer's story collection and first novel in hardcover and paperback.
In the coming year, Coady's influence will also become evident in the rising prominence of nonfiction on Picador's list, which she sees as essential to its growth. The division has picked up several key titles from the lists at Holt and FSG, including Atul Gawande's Complications (a finalist for the National Book Awards), Tony Horwitz's bestselling Blue Latitudes and Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future. "About 40% of the books we'll publish in 2003 will be nonfiction," said Coady, explaining that Picador's major subcategories include history, politics, current affairs, science/medicine, travel and literary essays.
A Unique Model
To balance Picador's needs with those of the Holtzbrinck houses that feed its list, Sargent created an unusual reporting and accounting structure: Richardson, Galassi and Holt president and publisher John Sterling have seats on Picador's board, along with Sargent. Coady, meanwhile, reports to the group of them.
The new division's accounting arrangement flows along similar lines. "The money generated from each Picador paperback trickles back to the company that acquired the book in hardcover," said Sargent, noting that Picador's profitability will be assessed according to the composite performance of the books on its list. "Everyone has an investment in it, and wants it to work, which is why it's a good model," added Coady.
"In this arrangement, it doesn't make a difference to my bottom line if a book goes into paperback with Picador or [Holt's own paperback imprint] Owl, though there are some additional allocations when Picador is involved," said Holt's Sterling. "This way, the question is whether Frances and I share a vision for the book. It's an editorial and publishing decision, not a financial one."
Decisions about which books will go into Picador are negotiated between Coady and the publishers of the Holtzbrinck hardcover divisions on a book-by-book basis. "I can't think of a single instance where we've had major conflict over what would go into Picador," continued Sterling, "though of course our successes have helped." For the most part, FSG's Galassi concurs: "There's a lot of freedom to it. Sometimes we don't agree, but basically it works."
Ripple Effects
Picador's redefined role has naturally created more internal competition between the various paperback imprints at Holtzbrinck. "It's made everyone feistier and sharper," commented SMP's Richardson. "If we're really excited about [acquiring] a book, we'll give it to all of them at once and get everyone reading it."
Although Picador lost out to St. Martin’s trade paperback imprint, Griffin, on the long-running New York Times bestseller The Nanny Diaries, by Emma Laughlin and Nicola Kraus, Picador will reprint Augusten Burroughs’s comic memoir Running with Scissors, which became a national bestseller after USA Today made it a book club pick last summer. "We made those decisions based on a careful assessment of each list they could have gone into," said Richardson, explaining that Burroughs’s book would have fit comfortably on Griffin’s trade paperback list as well. "We’re just trying to keep all our children happy and healthy."
At FSG, Galassi acknowledges that a lot of his lead fiction—including Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex—will go into Picador, though he plans to retain key authors for FSG trade paperbacks, including Jamaica Kincaid, Seamus Heaney and Louis Menand. "In the old days, when FSG was independent, we sold a lot of our paperback rights, but now that we're part of group, it makes more sense to publish them vertically," he said. Still, Galassi estimates that the house sells about 25% of its list to outside reprinters such as Warner, which has long published Scott Turow in mass market, and to some university presses.
At Holt, where fewer books are sold to outside reprinters, almost all of the fiction will go to Picador, including Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions. "I decided early on that it didn't make sense for Owl to do fiction, and that our nonfiction was too much of a grab bag," Sterling said. In the past few years, Sterling has narrowed Owl's focus to history (particularly American history), biography, current affairs, science and practical nonfiction, including parenting, psychology and self-help. Accordingly, several major fall titles, including Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn and Al and Tipper Gore's Joined at the Heart, will go into Owl.
"I want both lists to be really strong, since Owl depends entirely on Holt, while Picador has three streams to choose from," Sterling explained. "This way, I won't get caught forcing a book on Frances. After all," he added, "synergy only works when two people come to the table with their own self-interest squarely in mind."
