Man, people take this New Year's stuff seriously, at least when it comes to making changes. In the first two weeks of this year in publishing we've seen Tom Wolfe move, after 42 years, from FSG to Little, Brown, and the beloved Will Schwalbe announce his leave-taking from
Hyperion, after a decade. The Riverdeep Harcourt deal played out, leaving both Harcourt's Dan Farley and Houghton's Janet Silver out of jobs. (We've also had some painful losses here at PW, and at our parent company, RBI.) On the plus side, Becky Saletan is in as publisher at the combined Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Spiegel & Grau is launching its first list, with big pushes for Adam Langer and newcomer Steve Toltz (and a house launch party coming up). It's enough to make you think that change is more than a buzzword on the campaign trail.
But change is scary, and these are scary times, the Chinese proverb equating crisis with opportunity notwithstanding. The stock market is heading south, on its way, apparently, to meet the puddling housing market. And yet, with characteristic buoyancy, the publishing world continues—and is at least trying new things. The hiring of magazine veteran Priscilla Painton at S&S might have some people worried—she has never worked in the book business—but at least it's an attempt to reinvigorate. Besides, look at the magazine folks who've really made a difference in the book business in the past decade: David Hirshey (from Esquire to executive editor of HarperCollins), Sarah Crichton (from Newsweek to Little, Brown to an eponymous FSG imprint) and S&S's David Rosenthal himself, who has used his magazine connections (he capitalized on his Rolling Stone years to publish both Bob Dylan and Hunter Thompson) to forge a successful publishing career.
I've gotten a number of calls this past week from worried book folk, and I admit to having a couple of dark nights of the soul myself. Are things really that desperate, I wonder—or is this just another example of the book world's love affair with negativity? It's hard to tell. There's no question, looking at the numbers, for example, from Barnes & Noble, that sales this past Christmas were off—but if it's any consolation, they've been even more off in CD and DVD sales than in our beloved books. And yes, the Internet is stealing readers, but what about the thousands of book groups that have made Eat, Pray, Love such a phenomenon that Viking is now going to rerelease Elizabeth Gilbert's earlier, wonderful and underappreciated fiction, Pilgrims and Stern Men? As someone who regularly responds to the remark “When one door closes...” with the rejoinder, “Then another door closes,” I have to work hard to look for the positive. But it's there. I think—I mean I know—it is.
But maybe searching for silver linings is an overrated pursuit. It's no accident that BEA has chosen as its keynote speaker the angry and funny comedian Lewis Black, a guy not exactly known for his sunny outlook. That's what I love about publishing: we may not know how to fix the hard times, but we sure know how to marshal the right forces to talk about them.
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