Masters of Re-Invention

In publishing's version of Musical Chairs, most players get seats

by Sara Nelson, Editor-in-Chief -- Publishers Weekly, 4/11/2005

The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there were no second acts in American lives.

You'd think that, as an author, he'd have known more about publishing.

In the past four weeks, a good many senior level executives—people with 10, 20, 30 years of experience—have up and left big important jobs, sometimes because they got offered even better ones—but sometimes, well, just because. Jonathan Burnham departed the still-up-in-the-air Miramax Books and starts this week as senior vice-president and publisher of HarperCollins, an announcement that came right before the London Book Fair. In the same general time period, Carole Baron, a publishing veteran of 30+ years, left Putnam simply because, she said, she was "tired of looking at publishing the same old way" and soon turned up at BookSpan. Ivan Held, associate publisher of Warner, jumped to the presidency of Putnam, working for his old mentor Susan Petersen Kennedy. Rob Weisbach, who'd been strangely quiet in his three year tenure at S&S, was tapped to run what he calls "WeinsteinCo," the new publishing concern to be built by Miramax refugee founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein. And just last week, Scholastic announced that Barbara Marcus, head of that very successful house, would be stepping down—so far without a job—from her 22-year tenure at Scholastic, where she oversaw the publication—no, make that phenomenon—that is Harry Potter. Nobody seems to think she'll remain idle for long.

This seems like an awful lot of activity in an industry often characterized as "sleepy." What does it mean?

It strikes me that perhaps it's not the amount of recent personnel shuffles that is significant, but the people doing the shuffling. Like most "creative" businesses, publishing lives by the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately school of rewards, and neither Held nor Weisbach has been recent flavors of the month. Both one-time wunderkinds, their stars, according to common wisdom, haven't shone so brightly of late—and yet both have seemingly been handed enormous promotions. Baron and Marcus are both women "of a certain age"—that is, not the one that usually inspires people to up and start something new. Yet both have given up control of their respective empires more or less voluntarily.

It's easy to suggest—and many have—that these editors simply jumped before they were pushed, and that the new lives Baron, Held and Weisbach are going to aren't so enticing as they might at first appear. (Marcus has yet to announce specific plans.) While the nominal chief of Putnam, Held may not have quite the clout formerly held by Baron; the house now has a committee of overseers, including publishing director Dan Harvey, publicity chief Marilyn Ducksworth, associate publisher Katherine Lynch and publisher Neil Nyren. Baron has joined BookSpan, by all accounts a business in flux. And while Weisbach will run the new Weinstein imprint, he will—as did his predecessor, Jonathan Burnham—report to Harvey Weinstein, who is, shall we say, just slightly hands-on.

Still, schadenfreude aside (as if!), it seems to me good and interesting news that so many major players are switching sandboxes. After a seemingly endless era in which all deposed or disgruntled editors who didn't leave the business entirely turned up as agents, it seems heartening that editors, and houses, keep wanting to try again. How much easier it might have been for the Weinsteins to walk away from publishing altogether; they surely aren't staying in the book business for the money. And somebody like Baron might well have retired impressively. But no: for the time being, at least, she's going to try to breathe new life into a dinosaur.

Whether any of these new pairings will "work out" in the long run remains, of course, to be seen. Almost exactly three years ago, PW presciently pointed out that Weisbach's then-new mandate to bring pop culture to S&S had "echoes of Talk [Miramax]"—and look where that got him. But no matter what happens, at least you can't say publishing people give up easily; against all odds and, sometimes, in the face of the best advice, they keep trying to reinvent themselves and their business. As the Jazz Age chronicler also observed (albeit in The Crack-Up), "Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over."