Bertelsmann owns Random House Inc. and Random House Inc. owns Crown Publishing Group and Crown Publishing Group owns Broadway Books. You follow? But Bertelsmann also owns Random House Publishing Group which owns Little Random House. You still with me? Crown Publishing Group owns Crown Business, which incorporates Doubleday Business. Somewhere in there is WaterBrook Multnomah which incorporates Multnomah and WaterBrook Press. And let’s not forget Potter Craft, Back Stage Books, Lone Eagle Publishing, and Wendy Lamb Books.

What’s that? Your head is exploding and you’re begging me to stop? Darn, I was just getting started and have a hundred more Random House divisions to go. And I haven’t even gotten into Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin and Macmillan.

The good news is that there is at last an organizational chart for major publishers, their divisions, imprints, subsidiaries, affiliates, their sisters and their cousins and their aunts, along with charts for about a dozen smaller publishers with multiple imprints. All thanks to Publishers Marketplace, an affiliate (or is it first cousin once removed?) of Publishers Lunch, the invaluable online publishing industry newsletter created by Michael Cader. The announcement states:

Spurred by recent realignments at a number of the largest publishing companies, we have finally launched a feature at PM to answer many member requests: a live, and fully-linked, list of large publishing companies and their many divisions and imprints (which also notes corporate parents)…We also linked in now-defunct imprints absorbed by other lines.

These family trees are accessible to subscribers of Publishers Lunch including bewildered agents needing to know whether ESPN Books is a division of Random House (it is), Hudson Street Press is a division of Macmillan (it isn’t), or Simon & Schuster is owned by Penguin (not yet).

Mr. Cader added a special feature that will further endear him to agents. He has tied his list “directly to Top Dealmakers, so that it reveals imprint size according to deals reported and clicks through to individual imprint Dealmaker pages.” Thus we learn that Berkley Books, a division of Penguin Group USA, was involved in 401 deals reported in Publishers Lunch, whereas Jove, a member of the same group, reported but one deal. How agents process that information depends on whether they are from the glass-half-full school (Berkley’s buying! Jove is starving for product!) or the glass-half-empty school (Berkley’s overbought! Jove isn’t buying!).

In any event Publishers Marketplace’s innovation will go far to reduce confusion for all denizens of Publishingland, but we hope Mr. Cader has retained a full-time data entry specialist to keep up with the mergers, acquisitions, deacquisitions, consolidations, spinoffs, reorganizations, reconfigurations and retitlings that seem to have been our daily portion for the last few decades.

RC
Dinosaur family tree Copyright © Australian Museum, 2002