Less than a year after Houghton Mifflin bought Harcourt, the new entity – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – seems to be collapsing. Two weeks ago, it was announced – and then retracted, and then sorta-kinda reannounced – that HMH was freezing acquisitions (i.e. not buying anymore books). Yesterday, Rebecca Saletan, who unseated longtime Houghton publisher Janet Silver last spring, resigned as publisher of HMH.
Today, Galleycat reports that executive editor Ann Patty has been fired, along with an unspecified number of other employees.
Rumors point to an eventual sale of the trade division, which publishes luminaries like Philip Roth and Umberto Eco, as well as new stars like Padma Viswanathan, by its Irish owners, Education Media and Publishing Group.
This comes as major restructuring is announced at Random House and Knopf, leading one to ask, inevitably, was Chicken Little right?
