Women on top

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Caroline Michel a leading light at HarperCollins

When I left Penguin in 1997, it was not because my new boss was to be a woman. Far from it. Rather, as women were beginning to preside over the editorial side of publishing, so power was shifting to the more male-dominated areas like sales and marketing.

In fact, when I finally moved on from publishing to become a literary agent, it was in large part because publishing decisions were increasingly taken by a committee and the editorial voice was rarely the strongest one.

Editors were often seen as essential, but rather subjective and unbusinesslike. We were just too involved with the authors. As an agent, if you like a writer, you don't have to consult anyone at all: you simply offer to represent him or her. So when I left publishing entirely, it felt literally like becoming a free agent at last.

Now, HarperCollins, one of the three giant publishing corporations, has just announced that Caroline Michel is to head up a new upmarket division to incorporate such wellknown imprints as Fourth Estate, Flamingo and HarperCollins non-fiction.

She has been generally credited with the emergence of Vintage as the dominant paperback publisher of literary fiction over the past few years, and will be leaving another of the three publishing giants (Random House) to take up her new post at the end of the month.

Random House in the UK is run by Gail Rebuck, while the general publishing side of Penguin, the third of the giant trio, is run by Helen Fraser. Both started in publishing as editors, both are highly effective managers, and the head of Pearson, which owns Penguin, is Marjorie Scardino, one of the most successful businesswomen ever.

Actually, it is not new for women to run publishing houses. Norah Smallwood ran Chatto and Windus back in the Sixties, when Livia Gollancz was also running her family firm, and Carmen Callil rose to prominence in the Seventies with Virago and in the Eighties running Chatto.

The glass ceiling only came into being when publishing became more corporate and there was a perception that it was necessary to bring in a tier of (mostly male) managers over everyone's head. This often resulted in friction as accountants tried to quantify a process that is often no more than a combination of good taste and good luck.

It's not too hard to predict the likely revenue to be earned by a new John Grisham novel, which is why corporations with high overheads like brand names so much, but altogether tougher to assess the value of a first-time novelist.

Where things have indeed changed is that Michel has been hired by the managing director of HarperCollins's general division, Amanda Ridout, who reports to chief executive officer and publisher of the UK company, Victoria Barnsley, who in turn reports to the American head of Harper-Collins publishing worldwide, Jane Friedman. Four women on top!

When Friedman moved to head up HarperCollins, she was famously quoted as saying she wanted to surround herself with short bossy women. In fact, Michel is rather tall and glamorous, and far too graceful ever to be considered bossy - but she is certainly formidable. And so are Ridout, Barnsley and Friedman,too.

And the point about this extraordinary hierarchy of formidable women is that HarperCollins is prospering mightily under them.

A little over five years ago, when Friedman took over at the helm, HarperCollins had a notoriously macho culture, and was the subject of frequent rumours that Rupert Murdoch was on the point of selling the imprint as insufficiently profitable.

While this year's figures are yet to be announced, it is thought that HarperCollins's revenues will be well over a billion dollars. In fact, in the time that Friedman has run Harper-Collins she has increased profits by a truly amazing 500 per cent.

So what differentiates these women from the men who came before them? Perhaps the fact that they represent "joined-up" publishing. The new hierarchies comprise editors who understand business, or business people who appreciate books. Unlike their predecessors, they can safely be introduced to an author without saying anything embarrassing.

On the contrary, they can talk about their books with real interest and appreciation. Natural " multitaskers", women make the ideal managers in a business that requires one part of the brain to be making a qualitative judgment (how good is this?), while another is thinking about jacket design and promotion and yet another is assessing how much money has to be spent on marketing, and how many copies are likely to be sold.

If I try to predict the sort of impact they will have on publishing, I would speculate that, as most of these new bosses come from a sales or publicity background, there will be even more focus on the marketing of books. But it is worth noting that these women also tend to come out of literary rather than commercial houses and that informs their taste, so that one might expect to see more energy being put behind high quality fiction and non-fiction than was seen from the male-dominated conglomerates of yore, who were more delighted than their female counterparts to sell piles of thrillers, sagas and other genre novels.

Even if we do see better books more aggressively marketed, publishing will always be about profit. The fate of Ann Godoff, a well known and highly respected figure, illustrates this point. She has just been fired as head of Random House for "failing to meet financial targets". She published some extremely successful and important writers, but it is said she was just not bringing in the revenues.

Now, instead of being the putative boss, while reporting to "the suits", the new breed of women bosses in publishing have actually to wear the suits themselves. And as anyone who knows Michel or Ridout or Barnsley or Friedman will tell you, we are definitely talking up-market designer suits here. But their eye will be firmly on the bottom line.

•Clare Alexander was publishing director of Viking and Hamish Hamilton and then editor-in-chief of Macmillan, before becoming an agent four years ago.

 

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