Last week, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY dropped this nice summary of BPH finances:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...ublishers.html
They call these rough times for the big publishers.
Quote:
January–June Financial results, 2015–2016 ($ in millions)
2015 2016 Change
HarperCollins
Sales. $792.0 $791.0 -0.1%
EDITDA $89.0 $86.0 -3.3%
Margin 11.2% 10.9%
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade
Sales. $71.2 $70.2 -1.4%
Adjusted EDITDA ($0.7) ($3.4) –
Lagardere
Sales. €968.0 €970.0 0.3%
EDITDA €36.0 €36.0 0%
Margin 3.7% 3.7% –
Penguin Random House
Sales. €1,697.0 €1,516.0 -10.7%
EDITDA €207.0 €185.0 -10.6%
Margin 13.9% 10.0% –
Simon & Schuster
Sales. $344.0 $332.0 -3.5%
Operating profit $37.0 $39.0 5.4%
Margin 10.7% 11.7% –
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(The EDITDA thing is probably a PW typo and they probably meant EBITDA. Still, it lends itself to a joke or three so I'm not fixing it.)
Rough times or not, those are some pretty profitable companies. But, apparently, 10% profit margin isn't enough for the randy penguin.
In this week’s KKR column,
http://kriswrites.com/2016/09/07/bus...sdealbreakers/
she shares this insider nugget:
Quote:
“Besides, traditional book publishers are actively cutting their book lines right now. They’re drowning. The numbers I recently heard from Random Penguin/Randy Penguin/whatever they’re calling themselves just in the past month are this: They’re cutting their titles from 900 to 250.
“Think there’s room for your book in those 250 slots? Um, no. Writers I know who have been cut this past year include a large number of New York Times bestsellers. Only those writers weren’t mega bestsellers.
“That 250 is for Big Guns and people who “write” novelty books, like the Kardashians.”
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A two thirds cut in the US (fiction?) front list is pretty drastic.
Cutting that deep probably means staff cuts.
Back around 2009/10 there was a similar purge where the BPHs cut most (all?) authors selling less than 30,000 copies. It could be they are either raising the bar or, more likely, culling to the same standard again. And since being a “bestseller” these days takes much lower sales, the culling is digging into what was previously considered to be a sign of success.
It'll be interesting to see what the ripples look like. Will those 650 titles show up at a different tradpub? Fail to hit the market? Show up as small press/indie?
And what of the other BPHs? Will they cut back too?
Not sure the times are that rough but they sure are curious.