After beginning an open sales process in fall 2015, Perseus Books Group has announced a deal with Hachette and Ingram, with the sale to close by the end of the month. If this deal sounds familiar, that may be because a nearly identical sale was expected to take place in August 2014 before it was canceled at the last minute.
Founded in 1996, Perseus Books Group is a New York–based publisher and distributor. Its publishing arm includes the imprints of Basic Books, PublicAffairs, Running Press, Avalon Travel, and Seal Press, among others—an estimated 6,000 titles in all, representing sales of about $100 million a year. (You can find a list of Perseus imprints here.)
Perseus also runs a significant distribution business serving 600 publishers, with estimated sales of $300 million a year, including the distribution operations of Publishers Group West, Consortium, Legato Publishers Group, Perseus Distribution, Perseus Academic, and Constellation digital services.
Hachette Book Group (one of the Big Five publishers) has committed to purchasing the publishing arm; Hachette’s CEO, Michael Pietsch, called the Perseus purchase “a realization of Hachette’s continuing plans to grow and to expand our nonfiction and backlist publishing programs.”
Meanwhile, Ingram Content Group is set to purchase Perseus’s distribution business. Ingram is best known for having the largest book inventory and warehousing system in the United States—serving as a major distributor to bookstores—but it also has a distribution division, Ingram Publisher Services, with more than 100 clients.
Ingram CEO John Ingram told the Tennessean that the deal marks a shift “away from our roots as a wholesaler,” and he told the New York Post, “We expect there will be only minimal layoffs.”
At Digital Book World yesterday, it was pointed out that a substantial part of Ingram’s revenue now comes from businesses it wasn’t in a decade ago. John Ingram explored this transformation, saying that both Amazon and publishers have been successful in warehousing and logistics, and they don’t require Ingram’s traditional services as much as they once did. “So what do you do? You look for opportunities,” he said. Perseus distribution is focused on sales and marketing service for publishers, while Ingram comes from an operational standpoint. “It gives us enough scale that we can look at [how] to help publishers run their business better … to help them get their content discovered more effectively or marketed more effectively,” Ingram said.
Bottom line: This is yet another step in the ongoing consolidation in the publishing industry—among publishers and distributors. Hundreds of independent publishers will be affected by the distribution sale, especially literary presses (for example: Grove Atlantic, McSweeney’s, and Copper Canyon Press). Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch commented (subscription required), “Most of the publishers who will move to Ingram under the Perseus umbrella will be bound by short-term agreements of less than three years. As a general rule, client-publisher agreements are assignable (so the clients have no say over the transfer of their business in a sale), though at least a couple of select publishers in the Perseus Distribution network—such as Grove/Atlantic—have a contractual right to opt out if they wish.”
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.
