The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Clare Alexander

Clare Alexander is a literary agent with Aitken Alexander Associates, and ex-president of the Association of Authors’ Agents. She was formerly a publisher at Viking and Macmillan.

Local heroes

19.06.08

It is not just the presidential election that augurs big ­changes in America. Since January, when Carolyn Reidy took over as c.e.o. of Simon & Schuster, there have been a string of high-profile changes at the top of most of America’s biggest publishing groups.

The much-anticipated departure of Peter Olson at Random House led to weeks of speculation and then the announcement of Markus Dohle as his replacement. Dohle has little experience of trade publishing or of the US market, but is a seasoned Bertelsmann operator who had successfully run its printing operations.

Less expected was the sudden departure of Jane Friedman from HarperCollins to be succeeded by Brian Murray, again a much younger man but with plenty of experience within the News Corp group.

What we are seeing is a new type of management in America. Less about big, public personalities, the major publishing groups prefer trusted executives who are comfortable within their own corporate cultures. The strengths of this new generation of industry leaders are more analytical and strategic. Hopefully they will not micro-manage their imprints, but will aim to build an efficient infrastructure.

This is the sort of work that David Young at Hachette and John Sargent at St Martin’s have been carrying on for years, quietly improving their respective companies’ efficiency and return on investment.

With the departure of much-loved figures like Friedman, a lot of the fun has gone out of the industry. But from a purely UK perspective, it is a relief to see Victoria Barnsley taking charge of HarperCollins in India and Australia after a period during which HC has been overtly America-centric, with little interest in English-language publishing cultures elsewhere.

The future of publishing in English will not simply be a case of a single edition available everywhere. On my shelf I am looking at three editions of Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes: the UK (Cape), the US (Knopf) and the Indian (Random House India). Although all three are published by the same global group, these are distinct publishers—it’s hard to imagine more different-looking covers, each bespoke for their markets.

It could be said that these differences will matter less in the digital future, but can we be so sure? It will be a long time before e-book income comes close to revenue from print editions. In the meantime, the pressure will be to think hard about the production values of books, so that they remain covetable objects in their own right.

US HarperCollins jane friedman Simon & Schuster Random House Home Carolyn Reidy Global Peter Olson