In a lengthy year-end letter to staff sent on Friday, Simon & Schuster president and CEO Carolyn Reidy told employees that the year, after a rough start, is "ending on a much higher note." Opening with the bankruptcy of Borders, which she called "disturbing news," Reidy said the company has met the challenging demands of a rocky year. She wrote: "While the shifting retail and publishing landscape made for a year in which we were constantly adjusting to changing reality, because you stayed focused on our core mission--to profitably achieve the maximum possibe distribution for each of our authors' titles--and embraced the new opportunities of digital publishing, as we approach the last weeks of the year Simon & Schuster is poised to deliver excellent financial results including significant growth in profits over our 2010 levels."
Noting the successes--Reidy said S&S published 233 books which hit the New York Times bestseller lists, with 29 of those titles reaching #1--and highlighted a number of particularly good-performing biographies and memoirs, like Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, Jaycee Dugard's A Stolen Life and Gabrielle Giffords's Gabby. E-books in general were another success, with sales of digital content expected to account for 17% of S&S's total in 2011, double that of 2010.
In the literary acclaim column, Reidy called out, among others, Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda (which made the Times's 10 Best Books of 2011); Susan Orlean's Rin Tin Tin (which made PW's Best Books list); and Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies (which won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction).
Speaking to the future, Reidy said she is "excited about the potential for digital publishing to reshape our international business, reducing the friction of shipping physical editions overseas, improving our ability to reach readers around the world, and critically, helping us to grow the audience for our authors in the far corners of the globe in markets that are currently underserved by physical book distribution." The publisher is already selling e-books in more than 150 non-English-speaking territories.
Reidy noted that houses like S&S need to "make the publishing experience...the best it can be" in the face of growing options in the self-publishing world. Reidy also called out Bookish, the marketing and sales platform the house joined in May that is supposed to now launch in 2012. (Reidy did not mention the executive changes at Bookish, or the fact that the launch date for the site has been pushed back.)
