In her quest to fashion HarperCollins into an entity as recognizable as some of its authors, CEO Jane Friedman is breaking the Harper Perennial trade paperback line into two distinct parts. (Harper recently closed a redundant literary imprint, Fourth Estate; see below.) Currently a hodgepodge of categories, the Perennial imprint will roll out in July as a smaller, more focused list of 6,000 literary fiction and serious nonfiction titles aimed at reading groups and other readers with a similar psychographic profile. Meanwhile, hundreds of the line's pop fiction, pop psych, sports and pop culture titles will migrate to a new catchall paperback list called Harper, set for a "soft launch" in the fall and a more formal one in 2006.
"With a clearer editorial focus, the books will be more consistently appealing to the same reader," said editorial director David Roth-Ey, who's overseeing the development of both paperback lines with HarperCollins v-p Carrie Kania and HarperPerennial associate publisher Jennifer Hart. And who are those much sought-after consumers? They read the New Yorker, surf Salon.com, listen to NPR and watch cable channels like BBC America, said these executives. The house has compiled a profile of the media tastes of more than 700,000 consumers, according to Friedman, gathered as people signed up for author tour updates and reader's newsletters.
In a marketplace where attracting crowds to book readings is a challenge, Perennial's new focus is designed to make it an attractive partner for other companies and media that target the same consumers, and which may be interested in joint promotions. "This allows us to approach companies like Starbucks and Levenger, and to say, 'Our customer is your customer, and we have a shared interest,' " explained Hart. With the old Perennial, "they would say, 'you publish Dr. Laura and Barbara Kingsolver, so who is your consumer?' Now, it's much easier to make that case." But what exactly those companies would gain from such partnering remains to be seen, as Hart had no concrete deals to report.
In developing a unique logo, a Web site with an array of reading group support materials and an independent catalogue, Harper Perennial is catching up with imprints like Vintage, Penguin and Ballantine Reader's Circle. Under the tagline "books of enduring value," it will continue to reprint hardcovers published by HarperCollins, Ecco and William Morrow, plus titles from outside the company, while increasing its output of original paperbacks from 10 to 20 a year. It will also include Harper Perennial Modern Classics, a revamped version of the classics imprint created by Friedman shortly after she arrived at HarperCollins. In addition to warhorses like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Bell Jar, the classics line will now include contemporary novels like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. The house currently has no plans to publish public-domain classics.
Vintage has arguably been the most successful of all publishers at creating an enduring brand, and Friedman, who oversaw the Vintage trade paperback line for much of the '90s, believes there's even more opportunity to brand an imprint now than in the past. "Today, the Internet offers more, not fewer, branding opportunities." Still, "branding" is somewhat controversial, and Friedman agreed that consumers are far more likely to buy books because of the author than the publisher. "But we can take some of that author power and use it to help other authors by linking them with a common brand," she said.
