When the Book Business Cuts the People Who Make the Books
In February, Bloomsbury announced record profits. This week, 55 of its employees were told their positions no longer exist.
The publisher — known for Harry Potter, serious academic titles, and a remarkably successful pivot to food writing — completed a global restructuring that consolidated operations across its U.K., U.S., and international divisions. The company described the move as a necessary realignment after a period of significant expansion. In publishing, significant expansion followed immediately by significant restructuring is what economists call a cycle and what editors call a bad year.
Fifty-five jobs is not catastrophic in the context of a company employing hundreds across multiple continents. But in publishing, where editorial and marketing teams are already lean — where a single editor routinely carries forty titles — each redundancy creates a gap that quietly swallows the kinds of books no algorithm would greenlight. Mid-list literary fiction. Debut poetry collections. The slow-burn nonfiction that takes four years to write and four months to sell.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, roughly twenty employees at Catapult Book Group have filed for union representation with UAW Local 2110. Their petition, submitted to the National Labor Relations Board on April 13, cited “job security, wages, and a need for greater transparency” — three things publishers have historically been reluctant to discuss with the people who actually build their lists. Catapult, which publishes genuinely distinguished literary fiction and nonfiction, built its identity on being a different kind of publisher. The staff are now asking whether that identity extends to how it treats its own people.
The timing is pointed. The Catapult vote comes days after Bloomsbury’s cuts and in the same week that the Bologna Children’s Book Fair hosted panel after panel on artificial intelligence and its implications for creative professionals. The book industry is not, at the moment, giving its workers many reasons for confidence.
None of this is particularly new. Publishers have been restructuring, merging, and quietly eliminating middle management since the early 2000s. What has changed is the willingness — among editorial assistants, publicists, and rights coordinators — to name the problem in public and organize around it. HarperCollins workers successfully negotiated a new contract last year. At Catapult, the process is just beginning. Whether the union drive succeeds or not, it signals something real: the people who build the literary culture are no longer willing to absorb the costs of the industry’s inefficiencies in silence. That seems, by any measure, a reasonable position to take.