PRH, the biggest of the Big Five publishers, has acquired Callisto Media, a startup publisher that’s fallen on hard times after their venture capital funding dried up. Callisto will be managed by Sourcebooks, which is partly owned by PRH, and will shed employees in the transition. (Callisto laid off about 75 percent of its staff last year already.)
Callisto is known for its data-driven approach to publishing as well as outright ownership of the content that it publishes (authors agree to work-for-hire arrangements). It has a catalog of 3,000 prescriptive nonfiction titles and ranks as a top 15 publisher based on US sales. In Publishers Lunch, Michael Cader notes (sub required) that the pairing of Sourcebooks and Callisto creates the largest general trade publisher in the US outside of the Big Five (based on unit sales) and the second-largest trade publisher outside the Big Five after Scholastic. Read the press release.
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.
