For the third time in a month, Penguin Group USA has announced a new imprint. The newest entry will be run by Laureen Rowland, a HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster veteran who's spent the last four years as an agent with David Black. Rowland has a reputation as something of a generalist; her pedigree includes business biography, self-help, college advice and narrative nonfiction. "My hope would be to create an imprint of enlightening, intelligent works that integrate art and practicality, skill and wisdom," she said.
Rowland will concentrate on hardcovers at the not-yet-named line. But the reason for this imprint, and, in fact, a number of the other new ones at Penguin lies with the company's strategy to feed its paperback list. Rowland said one of Penguin's only requirements of her is that there be a "strong connection" between her hardcovers and Plume, which will release many of the books in trade paper.
Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy told PW that this connection flows from a larger corporate effort. "It's not as easy to buy quality books in the reprint market as it once was," she explained. She pointed to the vast size of the Penguin paperback imprints that the hardcover lines can help fill, and added, "And in paperback a book can last forever." The addition of all these imprints gives Penguin a fresh crop of new titles—about 30 per year here, 15 at Adrian Zackheim's new conservative line and dozens of new titles from Ann Godoff's Penguin Press.
Asked if more announcements may be forthcoming, Kennedy said, "We are done for the time being," but she quickly added, "Unless someone really great suddenly becomes available—or we decide that there's a gap in our publishing program."
