They say that your name is your destiny. So, if you’re going to be named Leaver, you owe it to the gods to leave something, and Marcus Leaver, President of Sterling Publishing, is leaving something: the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Der Frankfurter Buchmesse is the international publishing community’s biggest annual trade show and a major station on the industry’s Via Voluptuosa. Thus, for a significant publisher to pull out – Sterling is a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble – is momentous. “I’m not going to Frankfurt,” Leaver declared flatly. He’ll send a “very reduced team” – call it a skeleton crew? – to the Octoberfest, but as far as he’s concerned, “The trade show is over.”

Leaver’s ukase, uttered at the recent and appropriately named Making Information Pay conference, heralded a reallocation of the company’s capital. As reported by Believers Press and by Jim Milliott of Publishers Weekly, Sterling has “taken about $1 million out of our trade show, exhibition and sales conference budget” and “increased our title-by-title marketing spend 33% in a year.”

Sterling wasn’t the only publisher to announce withdrawal from trade shows. Dominique Raccah, the innovative CEO of Chicago-based Sourcebooks, announced at the same conference that she was cutting her trade show budget by a quarter of a million dollars, pushing her company in the direction of “a complete xml workflow.”

Another precinct heard from was Simon & Schuster. The firm’s CEO, Caroline Reidy, discussing S&S’s latest earnings performance, stated that “we have definitely looked at our participation in trade shows” and are “cutting back dramatically our booth and participation at Frankfurt.” She also hinted that the London Book Fair might be a target of cost-cutting: “participation there is being scrutinized as well,” she said.

Another capital-intensive practice on the chopping block for a number of publishers is paper catalogues, and though we’re all trying to enter the digital age unflinchingly, the disappearance of catalogues will be more wrenching than many other uprootings. Catalogues have long been the most familiar tool for introducing the bookstore trade to publishers’ front- and backlists. They are not merely informational and often beautiful but they are a publisher’s face to the world, its very identity. Even the spelling of “catalogue”, despite Microsoft spellcheck’s insistence on dropping the “ue”, bespeaks a stubborn and beloved tradition. Be that as it may, Sterling’s Leaver has lost his emotional attachment for paper catalogues, saying ” “it just wasn’t efficient so we’ve stopped doing that and it feels good.” Like a number of other publishers, notably Hachette, Sterling will ditch paper catalogues for digital ones.

The digital book catalogue is a relatively untested medium and the vote to embrace it is by no means unanimous among trade publishers. A recent initiative on the subject spearheaded by Hachette’s David Young was met with many polite nods but few are falling all over themselves to switch out of paper, however costly catalogues may be to produce and mail.

As long as Leaver is leaving things, he’s casting an eye on author tours. Virtual tours and “webinars” are now the way to send authors out without having to leave the comforts of home (or spend a lot of money on travel bookings). “We’re reaching a large market this way,” he said. Raccah echoed his sentiment. “Raccah is also hugely energized by emerging digital landscape,” reports Publishers Lunch.

“‘In the big picture, we’re creating new approaches to content,’ she said. They are creating 23 iPhone apps, three of which have already been released and should be in the black before the end of the year. She spoke about ‘unbundling our services’ and becoming ‘custom’ everything’ noting that ‘the customer will tell you how they want to buy something.’ She underscored that there is a ‘tremendous opportunity for partnerships everywhere–the world just got a whole lot bigger.’”

In the cascading collapse of cherished traditions created by digital disintermediation, tangible goods like books and catalogues aren’t the only victims; time and space are being reconfigured as well. For those who have not yet shifted their heads and hearts to the virtual dimension, this is a time of intense discomfort and even fear. The oft-cited analogy to the social disruption caused by the introduction of automobiles to a horse-and-buggy world is apt, but it’s no comfort to know that after a painful period of adjustment the world finally got used to it.

Richard Curtis

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

After I ran an item yesterday about the acquisition freeze at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in which Publishers Weekly used the term “leveraged”, a related news item was brought to my attention. At a panel panel conducted at last October’s Frankfurt Book Fair, Lagardere Publishing’s Arnaud Nourry observed, “within the last two or three years some major publishing companies, particularly in education, have been acquired by highly-leveraged private equity funds…. I’m sure that within the next months some of these companies will have to sell some of the assets back…”

In light of yesterday’s news, Nourry’s prescience is quite remarkable.

Or is it more than prescience? Nourry, Chairman and CEO of Hachette Book Group, which owns Little, Brown and Grand Central among other holdings, finished the above sentence thus: “…and we’ll be there…to make these acquisitions.” If he, and we, are talking about the same highly leveraged major educational publishing company, he may have been hinting that he’s got his eye on Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Is there a white knight in the offing? Watch this page…

Incidentally, Nourry also had this to say on that same panel: “I don’t see the banks pushing Borders into bankruptcy in the short term, and I’m rather confident about the next six or nine months for these big accounts.”

From his lips to God’s ear.

RC