Hachette Guide Group laid off seven staff at its Little, Brown imprint on Wednesday, in keeping with the corporate, in a shake-up that was the most recent instance of turmoil within the publishing business.
The layoffs, which the corporate described as a part of a company restructuring, come as main publishing corporations have been buffeted by sluggish print gross sales and rising provide chain prices, and have struggled to search out new methods to get books in entrance of consumers who’ve migrated on-line.
The seven folks being laid off embody the editors Tracy Sherrod, Pronoy Sarkar, Jean Garnett and Ben George, in keeping with an individual with information of the state of affairs who wasn’t approved to debate personnel issues.
To many business observers, the departure of Sherrod, a high-ranking Black editor, is a troubling signal that publishers are faltering of their promise to diversify their corporations, notably inside their government ranks.
A Hachette spokeswoman stated the restructuring was a part of an effort to higher serve readers and was not a cost-cutting measure. As a part of the restructuring, the corporate stated, it’s going to rent in new roles. The information was reported earlier by Publishers Weekly.
Final month, Penguin Random Home let go of two publishers of its most prestigious literary imprints, removing Reagan Arthur, the writer of Alfred A. Knopf, and Lisa Lucas, who was the writer of Pantheon and Schocken and had been the primary Black writer at Pantheon in its 80-year historical past. Their departures had been a part of a cost-saving restructuring, in keeping with an individual in publishing accustomed to the choice.
Penguin Random Home is the largest publishing home in the USA, and the layoffs which have hit high-level editorial employees counsel that executives are feeling stress to squeeze out extra income wherever they’ll.
At Hachette, the layoffs have adopted a collection of modifications on the firm after the arrival of a brand new chief government, David Shelley, who was the chief government of Hachette UK. He now oversees the Hachette publishing operations in each the USA and Britain, with the objective of aligning the 2 corporations.
The next reshuffling resembled a recreation of musical chairs. Little, Brown’s former editor in chief, Judy Clain, left to run an imprint at Simon & Schuster, and Sally Kim, who beforehand labored because the writer of Putnam, joined Hachette as the brand new president and writer of Little, Brown.
When Sherrod got here on as a vp and government editor at Little, Brown in 2022, her mandate was to publish fiction and nonfiction by Black authors, and lots of noticed her hiring as an encouraging signal of Hachette’s dedication to variety. Sherrod went on to amass notable books, together with “pores and skin & bones,” the grownup debut novel from Renée Watson, a best-selling youngsters’s writer, and “Renaissance Males,” Harriet Washington’s narrative biography of three African American physicians.
On social media, some reacted to information of Sherrod’s departure as extra proof that the push to diversify publishing had stalled.
“A lot for diversifying management in publishing. #byebye2020,” Leslie Harris, a professor of African American Historical past at Northwestern College, wrote on X.
