The Babe Went Out With the Bath Water
America’s Most Influential and Successful Book Publisher was Axed, and a Few Days Later, Her Company Ceased to Exist.
February 2007 By Denny Hatch
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In the News
Even Bitches Have FeelingsJudith Regan is a walking cartoon, an equal-opportunity bigot—and hardly the only villain in the sordid O.J. publishing scandal.
Even after everything happened with the TV show and the book—after tabloid headlines excoriating her for consorting with the most notorious murderer of the past quarter-century; after Rupert Murdoch and her immediate superior at HarperCollins, Jane Friedman, let her twist in the wind; after even she herself had realized that it was best not to go forward with the book—she wasn’t going to abandon her diet. She went back to Los Angeles, to her life as a “hotel slut,” as she liked to call herself, in a twenties hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and tried to focus on what was important: moving on.
—Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York Magazine, Feb. 5, 2007
“Say what you want about the fearless, foul-mouthed former publisher of ReganBooks,” wrote Steve Kettmann in the San Francisco Chronicle, “it would be hard to deny she has probably been the single most influential force in publishing over the past decade.”
She was also hugely successful. In 2001-2002, ReganBooks had 18 titles on the best-seller list. In August 2004, three of her titles were on the best-seller list at the same time—which was unheard of for a small publisher.
ReganBooks regularly brought in between $80 million and $120 million in annual revenue with 22 percent pre-tax earnings—in an industry that was lucky to eke out six percent. Her imprint was responsible for a reported 25 percent of the bottom line of HarperCollins, of which she was a subsidiary.
And she did it with just 40 employees. That’s a stunning $2 million to $3 million per employee—the equivalent of the #2 ranking in Fortune’s 2006 list of 100 Fastest Growing Small Companies.
Regan’s boss was Jane Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins, a division of News Corporation that is comprised of Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Television, DirecTV, 27 newspapers on three continents and a bunch of Web sites including myspace.com. In 2006, News Corporation had annual revenues of $25.3 billion.
But Judith Regan—with her $100 million revenue in the context of a $25 billion corporation—was in reality, a flea on the elephant.
So when Regan pissed off Jane Friedman and News Corporation’s Big Boss, Rupert Murdoch—I mean really pissed them off big time—they summarily fired her, shuttered her company and left a bunch of authors twisting in the wind.
It is the tale of an idiot savant—full of sound and fury—signifying much in terms of how big business deals with a rogue entrepreneur.
Modest Beginnings
Regan was the third of five children. She spent her childhood on a Massachusetts farm with her mother’s parents, who had emigrated from Sicily. At the age of 10, she moved to Bay Shore, a middle-class town in the middle of Long Island, where she graduated from Bay Shore High School at the top of her class and won a scholarship to Vassar College.
Takeaway Points to Consider:
* Jane Friedman has royally screwed the authors of all Judith Regan’s forthcoming books by shutting down ReganBooks. Instead of the cache and sex appeal of coming out under Judith Regan’s imprint, they are being shoveled into the massive maw of HarperCollins, which, together with its various subsidiaries worldwide, publishes 5,000 titles a year. Without the Regan mojo, these books and authors are likely to disappear without a trace.* In researching this story, I wanted to find a list of books published by Judith Regan. The imprint has been stripped clean from the HarperCollins United States Web site.
* Towson University Political Science Professor Martha Joynt Kumar said, “If it hasn’t happened on television, it hasn’t happened.” Similarly, if a person or company does not exist on the Internet, it does not exist.
* Apparently, HarperCollins New York did not communicate this to HarperCollins Australia, which has available on its Web site a complete list of ReganBooks.
* No one has the right to abuse co-workers and get away with it.
* If an entrepreneur—no matter how brilliant—is known to be a loose cannon, it is probably a bad idea for that person to go to work for a large, publicly-held corporation in any capacity other than a freelance consultant.
* With an unpublished novel sitting in my computer and no agent and no contacts in the book-publishing world, I can only say this. If I had the choice of being published by Random House, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, HarperCollins or the Judith Regan Redux Publishing Company operating from a garret in SoHo or a Watts slum, I would go with Regan in a heartbeat.
Web Sites Related to Today's Edition:
ReganBooks Australia—A List of Titleshttp://tinyurl.com/2mbc2v
Judith Regan’s Apologia
http://tinyurl.com/y5o73w
Friedman-Regan Contract for O.J. Simpson’s Book (PDF)
http://tinyurl.com/2p5c8s
Update on Hillary Clinton’s Run for the Presidency
The Jan. 30, 2007 edition of this e-zine was titled, “Hillary Clinton as a Sock Puppet.” This past week an astonishing YouTube clip surfaced showing Senator Hillary Clinton addressing the Democratic National Committee Winter Meeting in Washington last week in which she proclaims:
The other day, the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy … alternative and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence.
This statement and this video clip will do to Senator Clinton’s candidacy what “I voted for it before I voted against it” did to John Kerry’s in 2004.
It will so frighten every American that owns a share of stock, that the Democrats would be fools to nominate her.
Hillary Clinton will not be elected president.
You heard it here first, folks.
Web Site Related to This Story
Hillary Clinton on the Subject of Oil Profits
http://tinyurl.com/2vtxnr
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