David Zinczenko, fitness guru. (Getty Images)

David Zinczenko, former Rodale Executive and EIC of Men's Health, just signed a deal with Random House which the publisher is calling "unprecedented in scope."

Not only will Mr. Zinczenko, BFF of Dan Abrams and author of the hugely succesful series Eat This, Not That, be penning new titles for a Random House imprint under his new contract, but will be getting his own, separate imprint as well, along with a publishing partnership for his new company's titles, and, oh yeah, a swoonworthy amount of cash. And guess what? He's totally worth it.

According to The New York Times:

The first part of the deal is that Mr. Zinczenko...will now write three yet-to-be-titled books on exercise, diet and nutrition for Ballantine. The first book will appear in 2014.

Mr. Zinczenko has also entered into a partnership with the Random House Publishing Group to form a new imprint — Zinc Ink — which will publish six to 12 general nonfiction and lifestyle books annually, beginning next year. He and the publishing house will share in profits.

Additionally, Random House will distribute books created and packaged by Galvanized in association with magazine publishers and other media clients. The first announced partner is American Media Inc., a publisher that owns Shape and Men’s Fitness. As distributor, Random House will keep a percentage of book sales.

Galvanized Brands being the company that Mr. Zinczenko started with another former exec after he left Rodale at the end of 2012. Though the exact amount that Random House is paying for these three new health books has yet to come out, it's been put in the multimillions. And that's just for the Ballantine books.

So why the huge amount of interest (and cash) directed at The Abs Diet author? Well, look at the facts: the Eat This, Not That books sold a total of seven million print copies, which, to put it in perspective, is 14 times the amount that Lena Dunham's book would need to sell in order for Random House to turn a profit after paying the first time author $3.7 million. If Mr. Zinczenko has the track record of selling such an enormous quantity--and has a built-in market to boot--the multimillions start to make sense.

The really smart move isn't the books, but the Zinc Ink imprint deal, which will allow both Random House and Zinczenko to share the profits from whatever titles the Oprah of Fitness puts his stamp of approval on. Not to mention the partnership with the magazine publishing company behind Men's Fitness, which should stick in Rodale's craw for awhile. And really, is there ever a better incentive to make a deal than being able to stick it to the former employers with whom you notoriously did not get along with?

Ms. Griffin, who got her start on the sitcom Suddenly Susan, stars in a successful reality TV show on Bravo (My Life on the D-List) and has a passionate fanbase that includes lots and lots of gay men.

Carol Schneider, director of publicity at the Random House Publishing Group, declined to comment, as did Ms. Keating. Pamela Cannon, the Ballantine editor-at-large who acquired Ms. Griffin's book, did not return calls seeking comment.

The length and complexity of the memo—written by RHPG’s president and publisher Gina Centrello—said it all: This reorganization really hurt, and a lot of people from the group are losing their jobs.

While Ms. Centrello did not specify how many positions would be eliminated in her memo, she did acknowledge the need for staff cuts and devoted a paragraph to expressing gratitude to those who have been let go. Notably, such a paragraph did not appear in analogous memos sent out yesterday by Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta or Crown president Jenny Frost. Asked whether this difference in approach signaled that cuts at the Random House group were more extensive than they had been at the other two divisions, Ms. Schneider said it does not.

"We always do that," Ms. Schneider said. "It's a courtesy to people who have left the company."

As far as who those people are: several sources said Judy Sternlight, an editor at Random House's Modern Library who recently worked on Peter Matthiessen’s National Book Award-winning novel Shadow Country, has been laid off.

Ms. Schneider would not confirm or deny this or any other specific staff change, but noted that control of the Modern Library list—previously under the jurisdiction of RHPG trade paperbacks publisher Jane von Mehren—is being handed over to recently appointed Little Random editor-in-chief Susan Kamil as Ms. von Mehren’s job expands to include oversight of trade paperback operations for Bantam and Spiegel & Grau (mass market at Bantam and Ballantine will be run by Nita Taublib and Libby McGuire, respectively).

Ms. Schneider said that John Flicker, who has been editing non-fiction at Bantam and running its classics line, is moving over to Modern Library as a senior editor and will report to Ms. Kamil. Asked whether the staffing changes at Modern Library—the once-proud classics line that Bennet Cerf ran for two years before opening Random House in 1927—indicate that the character of the books published through the imprint will change, Ms. Schneider said that Mr. Flicker has the background to maintain the brand. She added that most curatorial decisions are made in collaboration with the authors who make up Modern Library's advisory board, which includes Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more than a dozen others.

Among the others laid off at the Random House group as part of today’s reorganization is Bruce Tracy, the widely admired editorial director of Ballantine’s Villard imprint. When asked whether Villard would continue as an independent imprint within Random House, Ms. Schneider stressed that she could not confirm the elimination of Mr. Tracy’s position but said that the Villard imprint will continue to exist regardless of whether there are editors dedicated to acquiring for its list.

"No imprint is being eliminated," Ms. Schneider said. "All of our editors feed all of our imprints. Libby McGuire continues as publisher of Ballantine Books, which incorporates Villard as well as several other imprints. We will continue to publish under the Villard imprint."

Other editors laid off as part of today’s reorganization are Anika Streitfeld—who was brought over to Ballantine after she discovered Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, and more recently worked on Amanda Ward’s How to Be Lost—and Liz Scheier, an editor who specializes in sci-fi and genre fiction and who joined Del Ray in the spring of 2007.

Cuts also took place elsewhere in the company—at least one person was laid off in the art department—but the specifics of those changes could not be confirmed.

Finally, while Paul Bogaards, the publicity director at Knopf, emphasized to reporters yesterday that the reorganization in his division would not require editors there to reduce the number of titles published every year, Ms. Schneider said she could not rule it out for RHPG.

"Our answer to that is too early to tell about title counts," she said. "Those decisions are going to be made over time by each of our publishers."

Full text of the memo from Gina Centrello below:

I called the waitress. “I think there’s been some mistake. I ordered oysters.”

“Those are oysters,” she said. “The chef pounds them flat between sheets of cling film. He shapes them into a square and he binds it together with gelatin.”

Of course.

I was having dinner at WD-50, Wylie Dufresne’s cutting edge, Michelin-starred restaurant on the Lower East Side. Of all the wild food I have tasted there (it was topped with diced apple, dried black olive and daubes of pistachio purée), this was the one dish that I will never forget.

Chefs like to improve upon oysters. At Per Se, I ate Caraquet oysters floating on top of tapioca custard garnished with Osetra caviar, a Thomas Keller signature dish called “oysters and pearls.” I had fried Malpeques with scallions and a barbecue vinaigrette at Rib, a diner on the far West Side. I had oysters served warm under a potato crust loaded with wasabi at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s recently closed steakhouse V. At Kurt Gutenbrunner’s Thor, Kumamoto oysters came with caviar and diced tuna. Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar served a “deconstructed Oysters Rockefeller” with puréed watercress and spinach crumbled with pancetta.

All well and good, but as far as I’m concerned, nothing beats a raw oyster, eaten from the shell, that tastes as though you’d dipped your head into the sea. I don’t even bother with lemon—just a little cracked pepper sometimes.

I ate my first oyster in New York City, at the age of 17, the day I arrived in the United States from England. I had sailed in on the Queen Mary, having stayed up all night to see the ship dock at dawn, and my mother took me to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. I sat at the counter in a daze, confronted by a dozen bluepoints, which we ate with a glass of cold white wine (my parents were oblivious of underage drinking laws and had served me wine with dinner since I was 13). It was the most nerve-wracking, exciting meal I have ever eaten (we wound up with cheesecake, which I’d never tasted before either). But I wasn’t really sure what an oyster was.

For a start, until I saw the menu at the Oyster Bar, I had thought oysters were simply oysters—one kind. So I was deeply impressed when a young man I went out with one evening boasted to me about a skill he’d learned in Paris. Blindfolded, he could tell the difference between a Belon and a Portugaise, a Marenne vert and an Ostend. Bets would be exchanged among his friends and the money triumphantly pocketed after he identified each one. I wonder how he’d make out at the Oyster Bar today, which now has over two dozen oysters listed on its menu.

Sadly, none of them come from New York, which a century ago was the oyster capital of the world (the closest they’re harvested now is Long Island).

In a fascinating new book, The Big Oyster, due out from Ballantine Books in late February, Mark Kurlansky (the author of Cod and Salt) traces the story of the New York oyster and the city’s world-famous oyster beds off Ellis Island, which in the 1880’s produced 700 million oysters a year. They were shut down in 1930 because of pollution. Before then, oyster bars were as ubiquitous as hot-dog stands, and on Canal Street, you could get “all you can eat” for just three cents.

As far as describing what an oyster actually is, before going into detail himself, Mr. Kurlansky quotes the nineteenth-century British Darwinist Thomas Huxley: “I suppose that when the sapid and slippery morsel—which is gone like a flash of gustatory summer lightning—glides along the palates, few people imagine that they are swallowing a piece of machinery (and going machinery too) greatly more complicated than a watch.”

Huxley lived in London, where in the late nineteenth century, according to André Launay, the author of Posh Food, an oyster brought fame and fortune to the owner of a restaurant. Awakened during the night by repeated whistling from the kitchen, he went downstairs armed with a stick. Eventually, he traced the whistle to a barrel of oysters in the corner. One oyster had a small hole in its shell. When it breathed, water was forced through the hole, causing the whistle.

“The next night,” Launay wrote, “the oyster set fashionable London alight, and its owner was host to Thackeray and Dickens, among a stream of other celebrities who came to listen to the musical mollusc while gobbling up dozens of its less talented cousins.”

Apart from the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, one of my favorite places in New York for oysters is Balthazar, where they’ll run you $14 a half dozen (as opposed to three cents for all you can eat). As for Mr. Dufresne’s famous oyster “tile” at WD-50, it’s not on this winter’s menu, alas. But there are mussels. Not moules marinière—these mussels come in an olive oil soup with coconut, water chestnuts and orange powder.

Sources inside the company said Ms. Godoff had spent too much on acquisitions in the last year--in one instance, she paid $3 million on a two-book deal for the authors of The Nanny Diaries , based on three sample chapters agented by Suzanne Gluck of the William Morris Agency.

In an unusually brusque memo to staffers, Mr. Olson announced his fiscal displeasure with Random House: "They have been the only Random House Inc. publishing division to consistently fall short of their annual profitability targets," he said.

Random House employees were generally blindsided by the announcement. "Holy shit! Holy shit!" said one editor, upon opening Mr. Olson's memo. Members of the publishing industry had about the same kind of reaction. "I was surprised by it," said Esther Newberg, the senior vice president of ICM, who had done siginificant business with Ms. Godoff in the last year. "I'm a huge fan of Ann Godoff. She's got keen instincts, she's a standup editor and she's got a closed mouth in a business where everybody thinks its okay to prattle on." Ms. Newberg characterized Ms. Godoff as "an author's publisher."

While at Random House, Ms. Godoff published best-sellers like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , The Alienist , White Teeth and A Short Guide to a Happy Life .

Others in the company had suspected a change was imminent, considering the reports of big losses. But they were taken aback by how it was done. "Some of the shrewder people in the company have been predicting this," said one staffer. "But there are ways of dealing with this short of axing a highly visible and accomplished publishing figure. The shock is the way it's been done. It feels like they're spiritually downsizing the Random House imprint. You've got to wonder about the wisdom of that."

The conventional wisdom immediately declared Ms. Godoff's ouster a victory for Alfred A. Knopf publisher, Sonny Mehta, the chain-smoking president and editor in chief who was thought to be in an ongoing intra-company competition with Ms. Godoff, as he was with former Random House president Harry Evans, who hired Ms. Godoff. Now, said sources in the company, the up-market soul of Random House falls squarely to Knopf. Lumping Random Trade with Ballantine, a decidedly downmarket imprint, is seen as a clear sign of Mr. Mehta's prestige primacy.

As it happens, Mr. Mehta was featured in a two-page spread in Vanity Fair this month, pictured with a gaggle of his famous authors, including Lyndon Johnson biographer and National Book Award winner Robert Caro and novelist Richard Ford.

Reached for comment, Mr. Evans took a dim view of the merger. "There are more important things than the fate of an individual," he said, referring to Ms. Godoff. "It's the fact that the house has been sacraficed. I think it's a mistake. From the accounting standpoint it may make a point, but underneath that is a reputation and that will come around and hit the accountants on the head."

The changes arrive just as the entire company was moving into its new headquarters at 1745 Broadway. According to a company newsletter, Random House was to reside on the 16th and 17th floors, Ballantine on the 22nd and 23rd, and Knopf on the 21st. How the merger will affect the new seating charts is not known. Random House spokespersons declined to comment on it.

One publishing executive who declined to be named--and they all did--wondered if Ms. Godoff's ouster and the merger signify a tectonic shift in how much money will be spent on books in the future. "If Random House is not going to pay the money that they've been paying," he said, "it changes what people are going to be getting for books in a big way."

In his memo, Mr. Olson announced that the Random House Ballantine Group will now be headed by Gina Centrello, the president of Ballantine Books. Ms. Centrello was formerly the president and publisher of Pocket Books.