HarperCollins occupies floors 1 through 22 of a giant steel-and-glass box on 53rd Street. But up on 26, the receptionist for a tiny offshoot of the company sits alone, gatekeeper to a few drab rows of empty cubicles. A glass container on a table holds a mysterious pile of bright-yellow lightbulbs.
|
|
"Welcome to our temporary home," says 51-year-old publisher Bob Miller, ushering me into a colleague's more inviting office. Inside, he and his staffers prepare to impart a cheery message: They're going to fix publishing!
But first, a horror story. Debbie Stier, Miller's No. 2 at HarperStudio (as this little imprint is called), has been collecting videos for their blog. "You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?" she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York's publishing machine.
Everyone's eyes widen, as though watching some viral YouTube gross-out. "It's like Wall-E," says marketing director Sarah Burningham. "It's depressing," Miller adds. They had sent in a Flip camera with a warehouse worker. "You can see our books go through there," says Stier. "The Crichton, the Ann Patchett."
Miller recently left Hyperion, which he founded seventeen years ago, to start his own imprint at the urging of HarperCollins's then-CEO, Jane Friedman. She was replaced in June, but HarperStudio lives on. For all its ambitions, it's a modest outfit: Miller and three women, two of them in their twenties, hope to publish two books a month starting next May, having convinced 25 authors to forgo big advances in return for half of their books' eventual profit. The books they'll be doing aren't particularly outré--Emeril Lagasse on grilling, 50 Cent is collaborating with The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene--but they're hoping that their process will be revolutionary.
Leave a comment