HarperCollins

It was a small party on Steve Rubin's roof last night, not a big party. Just two "civilians" there, as Jane Friedman, the guest of honor, put it—everyone else was either a publishing executive, an editor, a high-powered literary agent, or a member of her family.

Bob Miller, head of the Harper Studio imprint at the publishing house Ms. Friedman ran until a few months ago, said that if you bombed the terrace, "you'd lose the entire industry."

For Ms. Friedman, it was really just about friendship. Almost everyone who came, she said, except for the publicist Matthew Hiltzik, she'd known for over 20 years.  read more »

News Corp.'s fourth quarter earnings report is in, and it looks like HarperCollins made Rupert Murdoch about as much money this year ($160 million) as it did in 2007. His TV, cable, and film divisions, meanwhile, made him about $1.3 billion each! 

Sorry, sorry, just some perspective. Back to HarperCollins: earnings for this quarter ($29 million) were down slightly compared to Q3, but up by a full third compared to Q4 last year. According to the summary provided in the report, the biggest titles of the quarter were James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning, Elissa Wall's Stolen Innocence, and an updated edition of YOU: The Owner's Manual by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet Oz.  read more »

Politico was first to the line in the race for Ron Suskind's embargoed new book, reporting last night at 11:23 PM that according to Mr. Suskind's reporting, the White House had ordered the CIA to forge a "back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein" in order to strengthen the link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. The book, entitled Way of the World, had been under lock and key ever since the 500,000 copies HarperCollins ordered for the first print run had come in.

As she prepared to go home yesterday, HarperCollins publicity director Tina Andreadis braced herself for a long, nervous night.  read more »

Collins, a division of HarperCollins, agreed to pay legendary Celtics center Bill Russell, 74, over $1 million dollars to write a book about his old coach, the late Red Auerbach. Hard to know, as always, whether that figure is just someone's guess or the real thing. We heard it from two sources, but Collins publisher Bruce Nichols did not immediately return an e-mail asking whether it was high or low. 

Auerbach, who died in 2006, won nine NBA championships as coach of the Celtics, and seven more after he became the team's GM in 1967.

Mr. Russell's book will be called Red and Me; Collins intends to publish in spring 2009. Power-agent Flip Brophy of Sterling Lord Literistic brokered the deal. 

New York takes a swing at the Jane Friedman mystery at the top of this week's Intelligencer, reporting a possibly controversial decision that Ms. Friedman made in April at the London Book Fair when she moved a book party for Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany out of the HarperCollins booth because she found him too anti-Israel.

That "because" is disputed by a source close to Ms. Friedman, who tells New York that the author's politics had nothing to do with Ms. Friedman's decision to move his party out of the HC booth. The same source says that Ms. Friedman's abrupt exit from the company was not related to any of this.

Russell Brand, the British comedian most recently seen playing a sexy rock star in the Judd Apatow-produced comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, has inked a $3 million dollar book deal with HarperCollins Worldwide, according to a source involved in the negotiations. That jaw-dropping sum got the house world English rights, which means they’ll be able to publish the book—described to Media Mob as a collection of comedic “rants”—through any of their international units and sell whatever rights they don’t want to other publishers.

Because Mr. Brand is a much bigger star in England than he is anywhere else, the UK unit is covering the lion’s share of that massive advance, our source said. Stateside, the book will be published through HC’s Collins division and overseen by editor Gillian Blake.  read more »

A few months have passed since Bob Miller left his longtime post atop Hyperion to start an experimental new imprint at HarperCollins designed to avoid big advances and bookstore returns—two of the most crippling structural issues facing contemporary publishing. So far, Mr. Miller has been operating quietly by himself, using his time to meet with literary agents and retailers, figuring out exactly how to realize his plan, and interviewing potential hires.  read more »

The Times and the Wall Street Journal have Day 2 stories on Jane Friedman’s abrupt exit from HarperCollins; both have interviews with Brian Murray, the new C.E.O., who says News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has owned the publishing house for about 20 years, first summoned him about a promotion on Monday.

An unnamed Times source says Ms. Friedman didn’t discuss vacating her post with Mr. Murdoch until two days later, a couple of hours before Gawker.com floated a rumor that she’d been fired.

In the Journal, Mr. Murray reiterates what he told his staff at yesterday morning’s marketing meaning—that he talked to Mr. Murdoch and was assured that HarperCollins is not going up for sale.

"He told me that the company won't be sold, that HarperCollins is a content company and that News Corp. is a content company," Mr. Murray is quoted as saying.

Why this is all happening now is no clearer today than it was the other night when the news first broke.  read more »

HarperCollins staff are reeling today in the wake of last night's stunning announcement that their CEO of ten years, Jane Friedman, has been replaced by her 41-year-old deputy, Brian Murray. At the weekly marketing meeting held this morning in the central conference room on the second floor of the HarperCollins building, Ms. Friedman briefly addressed staff from all over publicity, marketing, sales and editorial, telling them that today would be her last day.

According to several people who were present, Ms. Friedman—who normally oversees the Thursday morning marketing meetings—spoke with sadness, and left the room to a standing ovation when she was done. Mr. Murray addressed the room of shell-shocked employees immediately afterward, reassuring them that while Ms. Friedman was irreplaceable, the future of the News Corp.-owned publishing house was in good hands.

In what might have been an attempt to quell rumors about the possibility of News Corp. putting HarperCollins up for sale, Mr. Murray said he had had a reassuring conversation with Rupert Murdoch during which the News Corp. chairman indicated that no drastic changes were imminent.  read more »

That's the big question today in the publishing world, which was collectively stunned last night when it was reported that Jane Friedman had resigned as the CEO of HarperCollins after 10 years on the job and handed the reins of the company over to her 41-year-old deputy.

Did Ms. Friedman, who is 61, see Peter Olson's recent resignation from Random House and subsequent appointment to the faculty of the Harvard Business School and think, 'Gosh, that sounds nice"? Or did she make her exit in anticipation of a terrible fourth quarter?

Right now nobody knows, and many are puzzling over Ms. Friedman's exuberant behavior over the weekend at the Book Expo convention in Los Angeles.  read more »

It's official: Jane Friedman has resigned as CEO of HarperCollins, and her number two, 41-year-old Brian Murray, is taking over "effective immediately."

The news came as a shock to Ms. Friedman's colleagues tonight, though a poor first quarter performance reported in November did inspire some rumblings among publishing insiders that a change in leadership was conceivable. As we noted earlier, at least two of the publishing division heads at HarperCollins were caught by surprise tonight, and indicated that they were given no advance warning of the change. Earlier tonight, when rumors of Ms. Friedman's departure surfaced on Gawker, one high-ranking person at HarperCollins said it was someone's idea of a joke, while another said, simply, "stunned here."  read more »

The numbers are in: James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning, published by the flagship imprint of HarperCollins on May 13, sold 14,343 copies in its first week, putting it at No. 9 on the New York Times best-seller list. (It should be noted BookScan only tracks 70 percent of total sales.)

We hear HarperCollins is pleased.

The book world jumped a little in its seat last week when HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman announced that she’d hired Hyperion president Bob Miller to form an “innovative and creative” new publishing unit. It was shocking enough that Ms. Friedman had managed to hire Mr. Miller away from Hyperion after 17 years to run the new shop. But the business model the two of them had in mind?  read more »

Steve Ross, president and publisher of the Collins division at HarperCollins, is at the Ziegfeld right now, a couple of blocks from the company tower, seeing the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light with his entire staff. Mr. Ross said in an e-mail that it was a morale-boosting event—a Friday tradition, in fact, that he started when he was president of Crown.  read more »

The publishing world was stunned yesterday by two major resignations, as Rob Weisbach, founding president of Weinstein Books, and Bob Miller, founding president of Hyperion, both announced that they were vacating their positions to pursue other opportunities.

No word yet on what Mr. Weisbach's next move will be—he hasn't returned our calls, though a Weinstein spokesman told us he does have a job in publishing lined up—but Mr. Miller is heading to HarperCollins, where he will head a new, nontraditional publishing "studio" that will put out 25 short, low-priced hardcover titles per year. Mr. Miller will work with a small staff and report directly to company CEO Jane Friedman, with whom he has been friends for almost 30 years.  read more »

Robert Miller, the founding president of Disney's publishing operation Hyperion, has stepped down to take a job at HarperCollins. Hyperion's publisher Ellen Archer, who has been with the company for nine years, has been promoted to president effective immediately. Ms. Archer will report to Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.

Hyperion loses its president just three months after losing its editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe in January.  read more »

Matthew Benjamin, the editor best known for acquiring surprise blockbusters The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls, is coming back to the Collins division of HarperCollins after a seven month-long stint at the indie house Workman Publishing. He will serve as a senior editor in the wellness/lifestyle unit of the division, which has been on an aggressive hiring spree as of late, where he will report to Mary Ellen O'Neill.  read more »

The Collins division of HarperCollins had gone almost two weeks without announcing a new hire. That ended this morning when they sent out a press release about Caroline Sutton, whom they've recruited from Ballantine and installed as executive editor within their health/wellness operation.

Ms. Sutton is the fourth executive editor Collins has hired since January. (The last one was the conservative Adam Bellow.) HarperCollins is growing the Collins division really, really aggressively, and allowing Steve Ross, who was installed as president last summer with the mandate to revive the Collins brand, to spend all kinds of money on assembling a formidable team.

Ms. Sutton starts at Collins on April 14th.

Adam Bellow, the conservative editor and author known for publishing books like The Bell Curve, David Brock's The Real Anita Hill, and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, has left Doubleday for a senior position at Collins, the once quite invisible reference imprint of HarperCollins that has, in recent months, been taking aggressive steps towards recasting itself as a major player in non-fiction narrative.  read more »

Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Frank Bascombe Trilogy, has left Knopf, his home of 17 years, and signed on to write three books for Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. The acquiring editor at Ecco was the publisher, Dan Halpern; Binky Urban of ICM, Mr. Ford's longtime literary agent, brokered the deal.

Two of the books will be novels and the third will be a collection of short stories.

According to the announcement from Ecco, the first of the novels to come out, tentatively titled Canada, will be a story of "revenge and violent retribution set on the Saskatchewan prairie, in the early 1960s." The book will be out in 2010.

HarperCollins will rush the paperback edition of Roger Director's I Dream in Blue, an anguished love letter to the New York Giants from the perspective of a frustrated lifelong fan, to stores at the end of this month, according to Harper Perennial publisher Carrie Kania.

Ms. Kania said Mr. Director will add two chapters to the book, which came out in hardcover last September, to reflect the fact that the Giants actually won the Super Bowl on Sunday. Ms. Kania said Mr. Director, who has written about the Giants for this Web site, saw the game live and in person, along with his editor, HarperCollins executive editor David Hirshey.  read more »

Former Ballantine editor-in-chief Nancy Miller has been made an executive editor and vice president at Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, according to a memo sent to staff this afternoon.

Ms. Miller is only the latest new hire at Collins, which is growing and undergoing a makeover at the hands of its relatively new publisher and president, Bruce Nichols and Steve Ross. Mr. Nichols and Mr. Ross were both brought in to refashion the imprint into a destination for major narrative non-fiction, and they have been acquiring titles and hiring staff aggressively in recent months.

Ms. Miller was most recently an executive editor at Random House’s flagship imprint; she left the house in October.

Full memo from Mr. Nichols after the jump.  read more »

HarperCollins has pushed up the publication date for Benazir Bhutto's book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West by two months, in the wake of the former Pakistani prime minister's assassination on Dec. 27, reports The New York Times.

According to Publisher's Weekly, which first reported HarperCollins' intention to move the publication date, Bhutto had finished the manuscript for the book a week before she was killed.

According to an announcement from HarperCollins, Reconciliation will come with a "short afterword" by Bhutto's husband and children written after her death.

Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, will publish a new novel this fall by Tom Robbins called B is For Beer.

According to HarperCollins executive editor David Hirshey, who is editing the book, it is about 100 pages long, and takes the form of a "hallucinogenic hymn to beer, children, and the cosmic mysteries that sustain us all."

Mr. Robbins, author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, has not written a novel since 2003's Villa Incognito, and B is for Beer will be his first since leaving Bantam Books, his publisher of almost 30 years.  read more »

Collins, the once-stale imprint of HarperCollins currently in the process of reinventing itself as a destination for major narrative non-fiction, has signed up Brandeis psychologist Irene Pepperberg to write a memoir about taking care of and studying Alex, the "world's most famous parrot."

Alex the parrot died in September after 30 years in Ms. Pepperberg's care. Ms. Pepperberg studied the bird extensively and believed it had the intelligence of a 5-year-old human being. Her research found that Alex could not only speak but understand what he was saying, and that he could grasp certain abstract concepts and distinguish between colors, shapes, and quantities up to 6 (including what reports have called "a zero-like concept"!).  read more »

Collins, a division of HarperCollins once known mostly for publishing reference books and how-to guides, announced two new editorial hires today: Bill Strachan and Serena Jones, both of whom specialize in narrative nonfiction.

Mr. Strachan was most recently a senior-level editor at the Avalon Publishing Group, a job he lost when Avalon was folded into the Perseus Books Group this past spring. Before that, he was at Hyperion, where he edited, among other things, a heap of history books and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.

Ms. Jones, meanwhile, moves to Collins from an associate editorship at Simon & Schuster, where according to Collins publisher Bruce Nichols, she worked with legendary politics editor Alice Mayhew.

Not long ago, literary agents shopping big narrative non-fiction wouldn’t have thought to submit to Collins. That changed this year, with the arrival of new president Steve Ross—who previously ran Crown at Random House—and Mr. Nichols, who had been an editor at Simon & Schuster’s Free Press for 15 years.

Mr. Ross, who had had enormous success at Crown during the ten years he spent at its helm, and Mr. Nichols, who had proved himself a master with books on politics, history, and current affairs, were charged with expanding Collins’ general non-fiction list, and in so doing, broadly recasting the shop in a new image.  read more »