Colophon
Well, this isn’t promising news:
Hachette Book Group said on Monday that it had agreed to buy Workman Publishing, an independent company known for titles like “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and the “Brain Quest” workbooks, the latest expected acquisition in an industry whose power is increasingly concentrated in a handful of major companies. The cost of the deal was $240 million.
Workman is the publisher of The Beer Bible, the second edition of which will be published in six weeks. For the most part, Workman’s portfolio will not interest beer readers, but the company also owns subsidiaries, including Storey Books, and that will affect you. Titles published there include Mosher’s Tasting Beer, Holl’s The American Craft Beer Cook Book, and my own Secrets of Master Brewers, among others.
For writers, consolidation is generally bad news in much the way distributor consolidation is for breweries. It means fewer places to pitch books, fewer approaches to developing talent, fewer places interested in outlier projects. If you read the Times’s story, you’ll see one of the reasons they bought Workman is its backlist—the in-print books that continue to chug along generating sales years after publication. In focusing on long-term projects, Workman has always invested heavily in its authors and projects. When I’d tell people familiar with the industry who my publisher was, they’d inevitably say, “Oh, that’s fantastic. They’re the best.”
“At Workman, [the back list is] a major focus and a steady stream of reliable income. Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, said that three-quarters of Workman’s revenue comes from those older titles…. To make this happen, the company publishes relatively few titles a year and invests in them heavily. They also look for content that will be relevant for years.”
Needless to say, this is not how most publishers do it now. They buy scads of new titles each year, investing little in longshot authors and a lot in marquee names, and hope for massive rainmakers. They tolerate a lot of poor sellers because the winners earn millions. In this ADHD (or Hollywood) approach, there’s no effort to deeply support titles and build in the very audience that will allow them to sell for years or decades.
I’ve had my complaints with Workman. They are crazy slow and cautious and can be secretive and uncommunicative. But man, do they support a title. Their editing process is the most rigorous I’ve ever seen, and they always sweat the small stuff. I got a 26-city book tour for the first edition and I’m getting 18 cities this fall—Covid permitting. Book tours don’t look like good business. They definitely lose money in the short term. But The Beer Bible has sold over 100,000 copies and I have great hopes the second edition will, too. Workman earns those sales with elbow grease, leaving as little to chance as possible in this business.
Will Hachette support me the same way? I guess we’ll find out.