Blood in the gutters at Farrar, Straus
Posted by Teresa at 09:25 AM * 0 comments

I opened the link Patrick had just sent me, and sucked in a long hissing breath. Patrick, hearing it, came out of his office to watch.

“Oh god,” I said. “Do I have to read past the headline?”

“You’ve got the gist of it,” he replied.

It was a story in the New York Observer: Farrar, Straus Publisher Jonathan Galassi Carefully Assures Staff: ‘We Are Not Going to Change’.

Doom. “We’re not going to change a thing” is what they say when a big publishing conglomerate has bought your small publishing house and is about to gut it and assimilate its backlist. Here’s another variant: “Your jobs are safe. It’s true that we’re going through a lot of corporate reshuffling, but that’s all happening at a high level. It has nothing to do with day-to-day operations. Down at our level, we’re not going to change a thing.”

The story’s a follow-up to one published on the 16th, one day earlier: FSG Feels Icy Bite in Publishing Freeze; Layoffs at esteemed imprint bring more gloom to industry, which starts with an as-it-happened account of the layoffs, at the time rumored to amount to fifteen positions total:

The bad news came as a surprise to some, as it was only a week prior that John Sargent, CEO of FSG’s parent company, Macmillan, had issued a gravely worded memo announcing a salary freeze, which—while warning staffers that they might soon be hearing about “expense control and next year’s budget on a company by company basis”—made it sound like the freeze was as drastic a cost-cutting measure as Macmillan employees were going to see for the foreseeable future.

That reading was a bit naive. Communications from the high corporate level almost never come right out and say there’ll be layoffs, because it means people with the power to move elsewhere will start doing so. This creates chaos, and may give them time to take some of their authors with them. Traditionally, mass firings in the industry come without warning, right before Christmas.* The way I’d have read John Sargent’s line about “expense control and next year’s budget on a company by company basis” is “You should worry in proportion to how unprofitable your house has been.”

FSG has had a couple of rocky years.

Yesterday’s story, the one that starts with Jonathan Galassi saying “We are not going to change,” is about the layoff of what turned out to be 64 FSG employees, plus the merger of their children’s divison and subrights department with those of Henry Holt, and their production department and dedicated sales force into Macmillan corporate’s overall production and sales operations. That’s like pulling three legs off a beetle: it’s not helpless, but it’s not going to be making a lot of fast independent moves.

In reporting the change to the sales force, for instance, Mr. Galassi is careful to note that while FSG is technically losing its dedicated sales force, the guy who has been in charge of it, Spenser Lee, will still have the important responsibility of selling FSG’s books to Barnes & Noble.

Big whoop. Having Spenser Lee in that position means FSG’s books won’t be misdescribed to B&N, which is something; but losing their company-specific sales force is still a blow.

Interestingly, while he does assert that “the most important part” of the plan concerns all the things that are staying the same at FSG, Mr. Galassi missed the opportunity to mention that imprint’s business department—which is involved in the allocation of money for acquisitions—is being left alone and not being forced to integrate into the company-wide team that other Macmillan imprints have to deal with. In an interview yesterday morning, FSG spokesman Jeff Seroy said FSG’s business department was kept separate from the central one in order to “safeguard” FSG’s identity.

That is significant. It looks to me like FSG still has the power to acquire books on the basis of their own distinctive judgement. That means they’re still in the game. They’re not just a Macmillan imprint.

“We don’t want to be seen as the special spoiled child of the group but the Holtzbrincks love us,” [FSG spokesman Jeff] Seroy said, referring to the German family that owns Macmillan. “They bought us because they love us, and they love us because of the kind of glory we represent. They’re literary people. So I don’t think that that requires us to make a strong case for it. I think that case is a given, really, of the conditions of our ownership.”

That really is true, and not just for FSG. The Holtzbrincks really do love books for their own sake. In the first year after von Holtzbrinck acquired SMP, FSG, Holt, Tor, Scientific American, etc., they sent out a letter to all the companies saying that not every book has to be profitable; i.e., it’s okay to publish a book because it’s extremely good, worthy, prestigious, or otherwise virtuous.

Of course, if your other books aren’t sufficiently profitable, you may want to worry when December rolls around.