TWBG’s buyout: the mystery genre scorecard

I’ve been posting a lot more on this over at Galleycat but — partly for my own record-keeping, also because I know it impacts a number of people who read this blog — it seemed like a good idea to run a tally of what imprints are affected by Lagardere’s $537.5 million buyout of Time Warner Book Group’s properties, first for the US, and then for the UK.

United States

TWBG’s CEO is David Young (now reporting to Lagardere’s Arnaud Nourry) and the imprints he is responsible for are:

  • Little, Brown (who publishes James Patterson, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Kate Atkinson, Peter Blauner, Deon Meyer, Sean Rowe, John LeCarre and plenty more in hardcover)
  • Back Bay (which is basically Little, Brown’s paperback imprint)
  • Mysterious Press (authors include Donald E. Westlake, Cornelia Read, Louis Ure, Hope McIntyre aka Caroline Upcher, Cecelia Tishy, David Rosenfelt and Karen Olson)
  • Warner Books (authors include Nicci French, Robert Dugoni, Kate White, David Baldacci and Tim Green)

Britain

TWBG UK’s CEO is Ursula MacKenzie (although now she’ll be reporting to Tim Hely Hutchinson, CEO of Hachette Livre and Hodder Headline) and the imprints she’s responsible for are:

  • Little, Brown (authors include Mark Billingham, Michael Robotham, Linda Fairstein, Alexander McCall Smith, Patricia Cornwell, Frances Fyfield, Christopher Brookmyre, and Maureen O’Brien)
  • Time Warner paperbacks
  • Abacus (who publish a lot of crime writers in paperback including Jose Carlos Somoza, Jonathan Smith and others included in the L,B grouping)
  • Virago (authors include Stella Duffy and Sarah Waters)

As I said over at GC my instinct is to think the buyout’s going to have a more immediate impact on the UK (since Hachette already has Orion and Hodder Headline, and is keeping TWBG as a separate arm really cost-efficient no matter what Hely Hutchinson and the parent company is telling people) than in the US, where Hachette just wants to get some sort of foothold in this country. But it’s all early days yet…