Sixty four people lost their jobs today at MacMillan as the bloodshed continues in the NY publishing world.
Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Thomas Nelson also have announced layoffs in recent weeks. Staff reductions are likely at Random House Inc., which is undergoing a significant consolidation. Other publishers, including Macmillan, have frozen wages or deferred raises.
[…]Macmillan's publishers include St. Martin's Press, Henry Holt & Co. and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Macmillan is owned by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, based in Stuttgart, Germany.
This is bad news for writers. The job losses in the executive suites will undoubtedly lead to dropped book contracts, fewer manuscript acquisitions, and smaller advances. I don't mean to sound too pessimistic, but this is a tough time to be a writer.
I don’t necessarily see it as doom and gloom. It’s only 4% of the workforce and most big companies have fat far in excess of that amount, fat that can usually be trimmed without notice by the outside world. Also, the CEO also said there would be no cuts in the budget for acquiring books. I’d view it more as a prudent belt tightning than a move to suspenders.