HarperCollins Puts Its Money on New ‘It Books’ Imprint
By MOTOKO RICH wriuting in the New Yrok Times, March 4, 2009

Just a month after announcing a restructuring that led to layoffs and the shuttering of an entire division, HarperCollins Publishers hopes to jazz up its book lists by opening a new imprint.



Librado Romero/The New York Times
Carrie Kania (pic left) will lead HarperCollins’s new imprint.

This fall the company will publish 21 new hardcover and paperback original titles under the It Books imprint, focusing on pop culture, sports, style and content derived from the Internet, like a planned collection of Twitter posts called “Twitter Wit.”
The imprint will be led by Carrie Kania, who is currently publisher of HarperCollins’s paperback unit, Harper Perennial. Last month she also inherited oversight of Collins Design, a unit of the Collins division that was closed during the restructuring. Some other planned titles for fall include “The Style Strategy” by Nina Garcia, a judge on “Project Runway,” and “Chocolate, Please,” a memoir by the comedian Lisa Lampanelli.
During the past few years the publishing industry has gone imprint happy, creating logos for book spines and focusing on readers in special-interest categories, from African-Americans and Latinos to Christians and political conservatives. In other cases the imprints have been clearly designed to reward particular editors or publishers with their own fiefdoms.
Michael Morrison, president and publisher of the HarperCollins’s general books division for the United States and Canada, said that he and Ms. Kania had been discussing the It imprint for about six months, and that she and her team had been acquiring books during that period.
Full story at the NYT