Malaviya begins to reshape PRH US

In big corporations, new c.e.o.s almost inevitably are brought in to correct perceived mistakes, improve the bottom line, or make major changes that owners deem necessary: to shake things up, while maintaining enough stability to keep them running. Those changes may start small; they may be new waves of kinds already implemented in the past; or they may be precursors of much larger restructuring or downsizing to come. Nihar Malaviya, whose past strengths at Penguin Random House centered on numbers and tech, has now held the top job there for half a year, and is starting to show his hand.

The first week in June, PRH announced that it intended to centralise production, managing editorial and production editorial in the US. Now a buy-out offered to long-time employees (aged 60 and older, with at least 15 years at the company) will result in the departure of many well-known staff members, from editors to production and publicity personnel (49% of those offered the buyout are taking it). Some, happily, will be able to continue to work among their long-time authors even after leaving the company at the end of the year. This week another penny dropped when layoffs were announced of other, younger staffers. There have also been whispers that book contract cancellations will almost surely follow.

One observer said that “people were upset” about the plan to consolidate production, worried about the look of the books being “under threat"

Taking the early retirement package are Viking editors Paul Slovak, whose authors include Amor Towles and Elizabeth Gilbert; Wendy Wolf, whose author Beverly Gage recently won just about every biography prize imaginable, including the Pulitzer, for G Man, her tome on J Edgar Hoover; and Ric Kott, who’s worked with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Raymond Kurzweil. The Knopf group has been particularly badly hit by the buyouts: editors Victoria Wilson, Anne Close, Jonathan Segal, Shelly Wanger and Altie Karper are all going (collectively, think of authors such as Lorrie Moore, Lawrence Wright, Alice Munro, Roger Cohen, Joan Didion, Dexter Filkins, and you get the idea); so are Knopf Doubleday managing editor Kathy Hourigan; senior vice-president of production and design Andy Hughes; and publicity vice-president Nicholas Latimer. Hourigan and Hughes were essential "helpmeets" to the late editor Bob Gottlieb in publishing Robert Caro, and it was their old-school, long-term relationship that was celebrated in the recent film "Turn Every Page", in which Hourigan appeared. Reportedly, she will continue to be able to work with Caro.

One observer said that “people were upset” about the plan to consolidate production, worried about the look of the books being “under threat". There was also concern in various quarters about the new model of “using numbers and analytics” to “find out what people want in books", rather than “finding the talent, and making the market for the book", as Sonny Mehta was want to do. But the bulwark that Mehta provided ended with his death. And whether he could have maintained it had he lived is somewhat moot, for what is certainly true is that right now, much frontlist is struggling, with sales numbers for many books, one long-timer said, “grotesquely small".  Lots of them were acquired “using a different paradigm. Now, they can’t come close to earning out.” We seem to be going into “a rough time", the long-timer said. “Now it will be up to the younger generation to figure out what to do.” But with so much experience disappearing by year’s end, most of them will have to do so without benefit of the historical, cultural, institutional memory their elders represent.