Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins worldwide, seconded that, and called the speculation about a brewing rivalry “coffee talk.” “HarperCollins’ market share is probably 10 percent, so that’s 90 percent of the market out there that we need to go after. I’m very focused on our external competitors.”
Both Mr. Ross and Mr. Nichols noted that there are rules about this kind of thing anyway. It happens all the time that multiple imprints belonging to the same house express interest in the same books. “If Morrow sees a project at $200,000, and if we’ve run our [profit-and-loss diagnostics] and we think it’s worth $300,000, we’ll put in a house bid and bid together up until $200,000, at which point they’ll drop out and we’ll continue,” Mr. Ross said.
In the event that both imprints are willing to pay the same amount of money for a book and prevail in the auction as one, the agent will generally arrange for the author to meet with both publishers and decide which is a better fit. This ritual is known as a “beauty contest,” and it is widely considered a very unpleasant experience because, as one publisher put it, “at the end someone is humiliated.”
According to Mr. Ross, Harper and Collins have not been involved in any beauty contests. And even if they ever are, he said, a little internal competition is no big deal.
“I think we’ve all acknowledged that we’ll be competing, that we will share interests in various projects, and that we can still maintain our collegiality,” he said. “We have put that to the test over and over again, and I don’t think there are any bruised egos or ill will that I’m aware of.”
Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham agrees. “There’s definitely an area of overlap with Collins in non-fiction, but it’s not large,” he said in an e-mail. “Much of our list is fiction, which Collins does not do; and much of the Collins list is prescriptive non-fiction and diet books and so on, which we don’t do. The margin of overlap is going to create some internal jostling and competition, but I can’t see that as a bad thing.”
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