HarperBusiness Takes Its Own Advice

With titles like In Search of Excellence and Barbarians at the Gate, HarperCollins helped to pioneer the business bestseller--but at first the firm did not fully exploit the possibilities of this increasingly popular genre. Then its publisher, William Shinker William Shinker , decided to take a leaf from his own books.

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]]> Shinker in 1992 established HarperBusiness, an imprint devoted exclusively to business books. As a result, Harper has continued to build on its 1980s success. Of Forbes.com's 20 most influential business books of the past 20 years, seven were published by Harper, including the current bestseller Good to Great. No other publisher placed more than three books on the list. (Harper also lays partial claim to an eighth, The Innovator's Dilemma, because HarperBusiness publishes the paperback edition of this book.)

Harper dominated, filling the top four slots on our list. Among these, HarperBusiness Editorial Director Marion Maneker singles out In Search of Excellence (No. 1) and Barbarians at the Gate (No. 4) as having been especially influential. "They are the founding texts in the trade," he says.

The Only Bestseller List That Really Counts Source: Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2002 report from Simba Information

Publisher	Estimated 2001 Consumer Business Book Revenue
HarperCollins [A News Corp. unit]	$42.5 million
McGraw-Hill	$38.5 million
John Wiley & Sons	$37 million
Random House (A Bertelsmann unit)	$35.5 million
Simon & Schuster [A Viacom unit]	$30 million

Excellence, published in 1982, "opened up a category that was undiscovered," Maneker says. As for Barbarians, which came out in 1990, "it made business sexy," says Lisa Berkowitz, HarperBusiness' director of marketing and communications.

Both those books preceded the establishment of HarperBusiness as a standalone business imprint, but over the last decade HarperBusiness has upheld the tradition with highly regarded and highly profitable books by such business gurus as James C. Collins James C. Collins and Peter F. Drucker Peter F. Drucker . Competition gets more intense in this category every year, but in 2001 HarperCollins had the most consumer business book sales, according to the research firm Simba Information.

HarperCollins may not have been the first major publisher to establish a business imprint, but Maneker says it was the first to carry this concept to its logical conclusion by combining the editorial, marketing and publicity functions in one self-contained unit for business. He credits former HarperCollins publisher Shinker for the innovation.

"Shinker is the guy who launched this," Maneker says. "People saw a market, but Shinker is the one who moved out in front of it."

The idea was that a dedicated, business-only imprint could be nimble and remain closely focused on the category, while still having the heft of a major publisher behind it.

"Harper & Row was the premier publisher of trade business books," recalls Shinker, who these days has his own imprint at Penguin Putnam, a unit of Pearson .

After Harper was acquired by News Corp. and became HarperCollins, "we were looking for areas to grow," Shinker says--and business books presented a clear opportunity for a more focused approach.

Why is nimbleness so important? Maneker points to the sudden change in the business-book market since the economy turned sour. For example, Jack Welch Jack Welch 's autobiography was a big hit last year for Warner Books, a unit of AOL Time Warner . But this year there is less demand for adulatory books about superstar CEOs.

"I don't think we live in that era any longer," Maneker says. That's one reason why the upcoming HarperBusiness book by former IBM chief Louis Gerstner Louis Gerstner , Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, will focus more on IBM than on Gerstner himself.

If all else should fail, Maneker can continue to issue new editions of all those classic Harper business titles. "We're very lucky," he concedes with a smile. "We happen to be sitting upon this treasure trove." Not a bad position to be in: When Maneker goes in search of excellence, he need look no further than his own backlist.