When Hachette Livre bought Time Warner Book Group 10 years ago, what was then called Warner Books had the biggest challenge of the new Hachette Book Group: unlike other imprints, it had to come up with a new name. "We'd always had the Warner Books name," Jamie Raab remembered. "It stood for something: it stood for an extremely commercial publisher with a strong mass market tradition. It was daunting suddenly to have a publishing program without a name."
Quickly, however, Raab took the situation as an opportunity not just to rename the imprint but to rebrand it, particularly to emphasize that the imprint aimed to expand beyond its traditional mass market publishing, an area that was already beginning to lose its power in the marketplace. Plus, Raab added with some amusement, she was very happy to change the colophon, "the big, unattractive W."
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| Jamie Raab (photo: Herman Estevez) | |
A branding company and focus groups yielded nothing that caught Hachette's imagination. At the time, Hachette was moving to offices near Grand Central Terminal--and suddenly the name of what Raab called "one of the most beautiful buildings in New York City" beckoned. Grand Central, she continued, is "a historic phrase," and both words have apt meanings. "Grand is big, and our program has always been broad based." As for Central, "I've never forgotten that America is not just the West Coast and the East Coast, but there's a whole world in the center." Grand Central also got a new colophon--part of an emphasis on the careful design of all Grand Central's books.
Grand Central has since expanded both internally and by creating imprints. Soon after the purchase, it added Twelve, "our upmarket fiction and nonfiction line that gave us a bit more range in a focused way," Raab said. Twelve has published everything from Ted Kennedy's autobiography to Dana Perino's memoir, And the Good News Is... Maureen Dowd, Condoleezza Rice and Al Franken will be on upcoming lists.
The company created Grand Central Life & Style, which added cookbooks to the life and style books Warner Books had done. Now Grand Central has become "an incredibly strong cookbook publisher in a short amount of time," Raab noted. Publishing Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow, the imprint has done diet books, exercise and is doing more self-help and more mind/body/spirit titles, all of which give Grand Central a greater range.
Grand Central also expanded its Forever romance line and added Forever Yours, a digital-only romance program. It ended the Business Plus name, which had focused on how-to business titles, so that Grand Central could do "big idea" business titles such as How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg and Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock.
"It's been 10 years of enormous changes," Raab said. "We turned a challenge into an opportunity, and it's been fun!"
Grand Central's evolution over the past decade will be illustrated in real life at an exhibition that runs through May at the Type Directors Club in New York City. The show highlights "how much the look of some of our books have changed," Raab said, "and the thought process that went into the transformation."