HarperCollins is one of the largest book publishers worldwide and a pioneer on the digital frontier. In this issue, its top executives let you ‘Browse Inside’ the company’s success and digital evolution.

By Jim Calder

Getting the Most Attention from Your Audience

Susan Katz, president and publisher of the Children’s Division of HarperCollins, has more than tripled the division’s revenue during the last 10 years.

“We’ve grown organically. We’ve signed, marketed and sold books in a very focused way that has allowed us to get key properties onto the best seller lists and stay there,” Katz says. “So the units grow, year after year, and we come out with sequels and follow-ups. I think we’ve been the most successful at doing that, and it has really made an impact on our growth.”

She explains that the teen market is a strong area of growth for the company and one in which it is investing.

“While they are very interested in the Internet—and you’ve got to capitalize on that for building communities and really going where they are—they are actually also spending more money on books,” Katz says.

HarperTeen recently conducted a writing contest called FanLit, which Katz compares to a book-version of “American Idol,” the popular TV show, where a community of 30,000 teens across the country participated.

“... they signed on to a program, they all wrote excerpts and voted on what topics they would be most interested in jointly writing a book together, and decided as a group,” she says. “Every week, the teens that wanted to participate wrote a chapter, that chapter was voted on and the best chapter was considered Chapter 1. Then everybody wrote Chapter 2 based on that set of characters, and that was voted on. We put out a short six-chapter novella.”

A winner of the whole project was declared, and prizes and scholarships were awarded.

“Doing this kind of thing, which we call the ‘American Idol’ version of publishing, that’s the kind of stuff right now that we feel is getting us the most attention [and] interaction,” she says. “We build names, we talk to those teens, they become advisers for us. They tell us what is growing, what they want more of, what they want less of …”

The novella was published only in e-book form, and Katz says teens really seemed to like the e-books.

“So, it’s going to grow—it’s definitely going to become a bigger and bigger thing. In the next five years, I think a lot of things will change,” Katz says. “I think [e-books] is a huge part of our future, and if we saw it as a threat, we probably shouldn’t be in book publishing anymore.”

“It’s an enormous opportunity. Now, will it actually convert to book sales? Well, yes,” she says. “Will it convert to book sales in a dramatic way? We don’t know.”

“… We can’t be all things. We are basically a publishing company, and I am very happy being a publishing company,” Friedman says. “But we do have to enter the digital age, so why not partner with experts rather than reinventing the wheel every step of the way?”

Friedman practices what she preaches, too, as HarperCollins has been a leader in the digital age. The company is making every effort to provide consumers with books in the format, time and places they demand them. HarperCollins Australia was among the first book publishers in the world to launch a mobile publishing platform. HarperCollins was also the first major publisher to publish a book for free online with each page of the book’s text indexed for search engines and accompanied by contextual ads. The company is also creating its own digital content warehouse. And, it was the first major trade publisher to sell e-books to libraries, and among the first book publishers to experiment with and utilize webcasts and audio and video content on their Web sites.

Friedman has made her career out of following where the market is going, and right now, she says, “We are facing the digitization of the world. And we are facing the fact that if we are going to become a digital publisher as well as a physical publisher, [we have to figure out] how we are going to derive revenues. We can’t just invest, we must take something back.”

Investing in the future
So, what’s next for HarperCollins? “We’re about to go into a budget meeting and talk about it,” Friedman jokes. “Obviously investment is necessary, and that’s investment in people to build more imprints perhaps.”

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