More than 1,000 people came out on Tuesday night in Manhattan to nibble on steak, dance to Britney Spears and play Ping-Pong in celebration of the 100th anniversary of one of largest book publishers in the United States, Simon & Schuster.
The company’s milestone, reached this week, comes amid a growth spurt and new sense of optimism after one of the most tumultuous periods in its history.
“We are going to have to sell a lot of books to pay for this party,” Jonathan Karp, the company’s CEO, joked in a speech on Tuesday. “But that’s OK!” Last fall, the publisher was acquired by KKR, a private equity firm, for $1.62 billion. The deal marked the company’s seventh change in ownership in a century, and some in the industry were wary of a private equity firm taking the reins of one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious publishing houses. But KKR has invested in the company, starting new imprints and hiring editors, which has boosted morale and set Simon & Schuster apart at a moment when most publishers are looking for ways to cut costs.
Simon & Schuster was founded in 1924 by Richard L Simon, a piano salesperson, and Max Lincoln Schuster, an arts and culture columnist. (The pair became friends when Simon tried and failed to sell Schuster a piano.) Their first title, a book of crossword puzzles, became an instant bestseller, and the company quickly expanded, eventually growing into a sprawling publisher with 50 imprints and a backlist of treasures such as the works of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Edith Wharton.
In 1944, the company was sold to department store magnate Marshall Field III. About three decades later, it was bought by Gulf & Western, which was restructured into Paramount Communications in 1989, and then acquired by Viacom. Viacom later merged with CBS, making Simon & Schuster a small corner of a huge multimedia conglomerate.
In 2020, ViacomCBS, which later became Paramount Global, agreed to sell the company to Penguin Random House for $2.175 billion, but the deal was blocked by a federal judge on antitrust grounds.
Last year, when KKR swooped in and bought the publisher, the sale was initially met with scepticism in industry circles. Some wondered whether a financial firm that makes money by buying and selling companies would be a good cultural fit for a 100-year-old company that sells books.
Suzanne Gluck, a literary agent at WME, said she’s been encouraged to see Simon & Schuster hiring editors and launching new publishing lines.
“What’s happening over there is wonderful for the overall publishing ecosystem because their mandate is to grow,” she said. “It feels like a very good place to put your authors right now.” Richard Sarnoff, chair of media for KKR and chair of the Simon & Schuster board, said KKR plans to grow Simon & Schuster by acquiring other media businesses and publishers, expanding its audio and distribution businesses and increasing its footprint internationally. Karp, Simon & Schuster’s CEO, said the company is hiring editors in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, and plans to publish more local authors in those countries and in India.
Simon & Schuster has relaunched its Summit Books imprint, hiring Judy Clain from Little, Brown to be its publisher, along with Josefine Kals from Knopf as associate publisher and Laura Perciasepe from Riverhead as executive editor. In the past three months, it has also created a handful of new publishing imprints, including Simon Acumen, a business imprint, and Primero Sueño Press, a bilingual English and Spanish imprint dedicated to fiction and nonfiction works by Latino authors.
Michelle Herrera Mulligan, vice president and associate publisher of Primero Sueño Press/Atria, said she was encouraged by KKR’s commitment to expanding the company. “The last thing I expected was that there would be this real openness to investment,” she said.
The growth spurt is strategic for KKR, which will eventually sell the publisher. But it also sets Simon & Schuster apart at a moment when most publishers are streamlining operations and shedding jobs through layoffs and buyouts.
“We didn’t buy this so we can slice out a whole bunch of costs, curtail frontlist publishing and bleed the backlist,” Sarnoff said.
“To some extent, that is the fear around private equity, that they’re going to do what, maybe, the 1980s version of private equity was reputed to do,” Sarnoff continued. “But that’s not how you deliver a return on investment in the current world. You do it by making a business better — by growing, not shrinking.” — The New York Times
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