THIS WEEK
Chantal Restivo-Alessi on HarperCollins’ foreign language programme 10 years on, ‘glocal’ publishing and her hopes for Frankfurt
S Lauren Brown @laurenrbrown95 95
ince Chantal Restivo-Alessi took on the role of c.e.o., international foreign language at HarperCollins,
the publisher’s foreign language programme— launched following the 2014 acquisition of Harlequin, which added more than a dozen international publishing offices to the company’s operations—has expanded to span from Brazil to Japan, with offices across Europe. Restivo-Alessi says of the launch of the programme: “We really didn’t have much of a trade [foreign language] business at all, and we’ve gone to $100m revenue from nothing, prety much.” In the beginning, the company was “really focused very much on having big authors (such as Daniel Silva and Karin Slaughter), all coming from the ‘motherships’, I call them, the UK and the US”, she explains. But in the subsequent decade, Restivo-Alessi is proud of the decentralisation from the UK and the US.
“All the businesses are run independently 99% of the time,” she adds. “There is total respect for local culture. They are absolutely publishers in their own right [and] they’re growing from small bases, but they’ve grown enormously. “One of the things I’m most proud of is that the majorit of our publishing, 75%, is now local. Local doesn’t mean domestic, it doesn’t [just] mean a French author in France. It means that they buy rights. They’re totally making their choices independently of the ‘mothership’, with the difference that occa- sionally there might be a project where we all work together. Everyone has their own creativ- it and their own teams, but what we try to do is communicate and share and optimise.”
08 4th October 2024
Frankfurt Book Fair Preview Chantal Restivo-Alessi profile
HarperCollins is speaking our language— and many others from around the globe
CHANTAL RESTIVO-ALESSI
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