Harvard University Press Signs New Partnership with Columbia

Amid recent and pending retirement of several key sales representatives, Harvard University Press announced that it is signing with Columbia University Press for sales this fall.

Starting this September, HUP will be partnering with its counterpart at Columbia to cover sales in Canada and the United States. This agreement will formalize a preexisting arrangement that provided joint coverage between the two organizations in the Southeastern U.S.

HUP’s current partners of 25 years, MIT Press and Yale University Press, will maintain a three-school consortium by adding the Princeton University Press to their joint sales force.

“We had a little relationship with Columbia because the Harvard, Yale, and MIT deal didn’t include coverage in the Southeast,” Susan M. Donnelly, director of sales and marketing at HUP, said. “HUP worked with Columbia [in that region] for the past three or four years and we liked them.”

Donnelly cited differences in the trajectory of the publications of the three presses as a primary reason that Harvard will no longer be a member of the consortium with Yale and MIT. A primary difference, she noted, is that art is not a large part of HUP’s portfolio but a significant portion of both the Yale and MIT lists.

Jay Cosgrove, sales director of the Yale University Press, also recognized this difference in the composition of the publication lists of the two organizations, noting that more than half of YUP’s books every season are from the art list.

“Secondly, while [HUP] publish[es] books that are used as textbooks in the upper level courses and we publish a lot of books that are used as secondary readings in college courses, we don’t publish books that are set out to be assigned textbooks in college courses,” Donnelly said. “But both Yale and MIT do.”

According to Donnelly, partnering with Columbia was a natural formalization of an ongoing relationship due to the fit of their respective lists and the profile of the sales group.

The president and director of the Columbia University Press, Jennifer Crewe, agreed that the strengths of the HUP and CUP publishing programs complement each other well.

“Our presses have worked together for a long time in an informal way, so this is a really nice way to formalize the very collegial relationship we have,” Crewe said.

Recent and pending retirements of two of the three sales representatives of the consortium with Yale and MIT provided an opportunity for HUP to reconsider its current business model, according to Donnelly.

Another factor was the drastic changes in the publishing and bookselling industries over the past decade, she said.