After offering voluntary separation to selected staff, PRH has now laid off dozens of people. The CEO wrote in an announcement to employees that while the book market has grown, so have inflation and costs.
Due to the respected figures who are now departing—either voluntarily or not—major media outlets such as the Associated Press, New York magazine, and ABC are covering the news. And of course so are the publishing trade outlets Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch (sub required). Cindy Spiegel of Spiegel & Grau (who departed PRH in 2019 to start an independent publishing house) tells New York magazine, “What is unusual is that these people have been in the same place for so long and hadn’t moved around, and that feels like an old-fashioned, but good, thing. They were part of a culture of a place and helped to make that place and give it its identity, and I don’t think you’re going to find, in 40 years from now, anybody at the same place anymore.”
Author Sarah Weinman commented on Twitter, “Remember the days when authors had an editor throughout their entire careers? Those days have been over a long time, but they are for sure never coming back.” While she has a point, this is more of a warning for the Joyce Carol Oates or Lorrie Moores of the world, and not your average author.
Meanwhile, Maris Kreizman took issue with New York magazine’s take on the situation, tweeting, “It’s awful that so many people at PRH have been laid off or bought out all because of an ill-advised failed merger [with Simon & Schuster]. And then this entirely out-of-touch piece adds insult to injury.” She partly refers to the final paragraph or so, where an unidentified “youngster” is impatient for the old guard to leave the building.
Related, agent Dana Murphy is critical of the New York magazine story for not identifying how privileged, rich, white editors did not do right by the younger generation of editors. She writes, “I have spent a decade watching this industry throw valuable talent aside, forcing them out of publishing altogether, for the sake of some bullshit memory of a golden era. When everyone came from the same pedigree and the books they published reflected that.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
