Random House CEO Dohle Addresses Performance in Letter

Random House Group U.K.
Although they faced ongoing retailer consolidation and felt the impact of the slowdown in consumer spending, the London-based Group once again outperformed their marketplace and increased their market share. They hold a 30-percent share of the Sunday Times bestseller lists, and their books reached No. 1 75 times through late June. Among the latter were “Delia’s How to Cheat at Cooking” by Delia Smith, “On Chesil Beach” by Ian McEwan, “Jordan: Pushed to the Limit” by Katie Price, and “7th Heaven,” the first title in their James Patterson publishing program.

The U.K. Group’s potential biggest fall titles include “Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities” by Nigella Lawson, “Business Stripped Bare” by Richard Branson, and memoirs by Dawn French, Jonathan Ross and Paul O’Grady.

Verlagsgruppe Random House
Our colleagues in Germany achieved growth across all their paperback divisions in a flat-sales marketplace. Our #1 paperback for the half year was “Die Letzte Spur” by Charlotte Link, which has sold more than one million copies, and “Wer Bin Ich—und wenn ja, wie viele?” by Richard David Precht was our biggest-selling hardcover.

Verlagsgruppe Random House has big expectations for the fall’s “Der Katalane,” the long-awaited novel from Noah Gordon, and “Ausser Dienst,” the memoirs of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

Random House Mondadori
Sales and profitability at our Spanish-language company are up significantly over the same period last year with record profitability results and increasing market share in both the hardcover and paperback markets. They have sold more than one million copies of the Ken Follett hardcover “Un Mundo Sin Fin” since January in Spain and Latin America. The company also dominated the national paperback bestseller lists for many weeks of the half year.

They recently acquired world Spanish-language rights for John Grisham’s backlist and will publish “La Apelaclîn” this fall. They are also planning a major holiday marketing campaign for their edition of Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture” and for Pulitzer Prize winner Junot D’az’s “The Brief Wondrous Life OF Oscar Wao.”