I think the hardcover divisions of the conglomerates often have a lot of autonomy; I've heard that the structure at William Morrow, for example, is that they still usually sell off the mass market paperback rights, even if it is to another division of Harper Collins. Supposedly the other divisions of Harper Collins are only on an equal footing with other publishers to bid for the rights; otherwise you could get a lot of ways where an internal "sale" is disadvantageous to the hardcover imprint, that is, it's "forced" to take the deal. Of course, I imagine they keep it in house when they can. And I imagine that other hardcover imprint divisions have less autonomy.
This is simply not true. A large publisher like Harper buys the right to publish in book form--which means in any format it chooses. The contract will make provision for all formats, from hardcover to electronic, even if the publisher doesn't plan to exploit them all. Smaller, specialist publishers may buy hardcover only or softcover only, and allow the author to retain whichever rights it doesn't want. But the big houses can do everything, so they want everything. And their divisions do not bid against one another for re-issue rights. It's all done in-house, even if under different imprints.
(Why wouldn't it be possible, if you had a good agent, to negotiate to keep whatever rights the big publisher wasn't planning to use? For instance, if the publisher wanted to do mass market only, why couldn't you hold onto your hardcover rights? Two reasons--the publisher wouldn't want the competition; and if the book becomes successful, it wants the option to re-issue in a more profitable format. Also, even if you could overcome those hurdles, what other publisher, knowing that a large house was doing a mass market version, would be interested in issuing in another format? You're better off letting the book run its course, reverting the rights, and trying to re-sell.)
I sold two books to the Eos imprint of Avon/Morrow in 1997, before Avon/Morrow was bought by HarperCollins. Even though those books were issued as mass market paperbacks, Eos (which at that time was under the Avon umbrella) bought hardcover and trade paperback rights as well; if the books had been published in either of those formats (which does sometimes happen if a book does well and is re-released), I would have gotten royalties. (I did retain a good number of subrights, though).
I sold two more books to Eos in 1999, after the Avon/Morrow sale to Harper. For those books, I got a hard/soft deal, with initial issue in hardcover and re-issue in mass market paperback. Once again, Eos bought "the right to publish in book form," and the contract covered all print formats, including trade paper (they had to come back to re-negotiate when they decided to issue an electronic version). As it turned out, while the first book was re-issued in mass market, the second one was re-issued in trade paper. Eos is moving away from mass market, and it was felt that trade paper was more appropriate.
Eos now falls under the Morrow umbrella. Some authors acquired by Eos are issued in hardcover with the Morrow imprint, and in softcover with the Eos imprint. Some are Eos/Eos. Some are Eos/HarperTorch. Some of the YA books acquired by Harper's children's imprints--which are part of an entirely different division of Harper--are issued under the Eos imprint.
While imprint distinctions are important when you're submitting, they are largely illusions in the publication process. Having bought all rights, the publisher can put re-issues wherever it wants.
The big restriction on these divisions of conglomerates I've heard is in bidding. I heard that for example Random House only allows one of its divisions to bid for a particular book at a time, so they don't end up bidding against each other and pushing the bids up themselves. I can't say for certain, because I never had that problem
It depends on the company, but generally it's not a good idea to approach more than one imprint within a division or group when you are trying to sell a manuscript.
Here is Random House's structure. So if you approached Knopf, you wouldn't also approach Pantheon. But if Knopf rejected, you could then go to Bantam Dell.
- Victoria
