Publishers Pull Back From Ambitious Plans

Hit by heavy returns of unsold books, Addison Wesley Longman announced plans to cut nine staff positions and limit the company’s output to parenting, business and other nonfiction areas in which it has been most successful. No more history, for example.

HarperCollins decided to fold the much-respected Basic Books, which has published intellectual and public-policy titles by Sigmund Freud, Stephen Carter, Amitai Etzioni and other thinkers, into the parent company. This development was followed by published reports in the past week that HarperCollins, which announced a loss of $7 million in the fiscal quarter that ended March 31, has become the latest major house in recent years to kill a number of books that it had signed up and planned to publish. Of the more than 100 contracts canceled, most were for books long overdue from the authors, a HarperCollins spokeswoman said, and 36 involved books for which enthusiasm had waned (and these latter projects may prove difficult for the authors to place with other publishers).

“I wish the publishing industry was more buoyant these days, but it is not,” Anthea Disney, the president and chief executive officer of HarperCollins, said in a statement. “Therefore we have decided to deal with reality by trimming our lists - mainly by buying in a more focused and disciplined way, and secondarily by canceling titles we did not think we could publish well.”