THE most powerful woman in British publishing comes down eight floors to the foyer to greet me — nice touch. After three decades handling the insecurities of writers, Gail Rebuck, chairman and chief executive of Random House, is a dab hand at the personal.
We pick up coffee at the ground-floor canteen, and cram with six others into a tiny lift to the top. Random House’s modest London base in Pimlico is being renovated: scaffolding, banging, only one lift in use.
Working as normal around the renovations, she mutters, may have been a mistake.
It’s been that kind of a year for Rebuck, the first woman to head a major British publishing group and currently boss of one of the biggest general publishers in the country.
In February, Hachette, the French media giant, added Time Warner’s books division to its own, relegating Random House to the No 2 slot after years at the top here. A month later, Rebuck found herself sitting side by side with her bestselling author Dan Brown in London’s High Court, watching two more of her writers sue Random House for damages.
They alleged that Brown’s Da Vinci Code, one of the most successful books ever published, had plagiarised their work. They lost, but the business looked painfully messy for Rebuck, even if the resulting publicity did drive sales even higher.
“It was bonkers,” agrees Rebuck, settling into an armchair in her book-crammed office.
“Non-fiction authors suing a fiction author was bizarre, nor did I think the case had any worth. I tried to reason with the two authors many times, I met them and their agent, offered facilitation. I tried and tried, but it was like sand running through my fingers. I even tried to stop it while the case was going on . . .”
She scrunches her mournful face. Aged 54, tall and confident, Rebuck is unlike many of the female bosses at the top of big companies. There’s no power dressing, no watchful caution. Instead she accentuates the feminine — skirt, jumper, cleavage, loose hair, lots of mascara — and drives conversation forward with a disarming mix of energy, frankness and blunt evasion.
How did she try to stop the High Court case while it was still going on? “I’m not going to go into details, but as one does,” she retorts, waving away the question. Such steeliness beneath the charm is pure Rebuck, so pity those authors who took Random House to court. They have to pay 85% of the publisher’s costs, and nobody’s letting them off a bean.
“It’s not my decision,” shrugs Rebuck, when I suggest that goes against her author-friendly instincts. “It’s our insurers’ money.”
This week it’s business as normal for the Da Vinci Code, now an acknowledged publishing phenomenon. The Hollywood film version, starring Tom Hanks, opens worldwide — cue yet more book sales.
Random House already has a new jacket for the paperback, and an illustrated screenplay to follow. The success of Brown’s book in this country, published by Transworld, one of Random House’s subsidiaries, made last year the group’s most profitable ever.
How profitable? We don’t know. Random House, which is estimated to take 14% of the £2 billion British book market, was bought by the German media giant Bertelsmann in 1998 and doesn’t break out regional revenue figures. But Rebuck, whose empire covers Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, says its profit was “significantly up” on its usual target of a 12% margin. “The normal margins in the publishing world are around 5%-10%,” she smiles.
This year could be different, however, as Random House faces up to life as No 2 after years of market dominance. “It gives us something to fight for,” says Rebuck, who describes the challenge as “refreshing”.
Others in the industry predict a rapid fight-back. “Random House has superb managers, while Hachette still has things to settle,” says one rival. But with fewer easy pickings for acquisition, the group will have to re-learn how to grow organically. That, after years of buying others, may not be simple.
Nobody underestimates Rebuck’s competitive nature. It has underpinned her rise in an industry where business efficiency has not always been publishers’ prime motivator. Rebuck, whose father ran his own garment business, is unusual: she is at ease with both balance sheets and authors.
She started as a production assistant, worked her way up to editor, helped to found Century — later sold to Random House — and has done just about every job involved in bringing a book to market. Yet unlike many bosses who have come up that route, she has always kept control of the figures.
She is also formidably well connected: married to Philip Gould — now Lord Gould — who is a close adviser to Tony Blair. If successful publishing is about balancing creativity with profitability, and making sure you have the connections to get things noticed, then Rebuck seems to have all ends covered.
Actually, she counters, most of the speculation about her connections is exaggerated. “Philip has his life and I have mine, and then we have our lives together. He is not desperately interested in what I do. I am probably more interested in what he does, but only as a spectator.”
Even so, her political links remind some in the industry of past publishers such as George Weidenfeld and Paul Hamlyn, outsiders who got inside the power elite — except that Rebuck’s business is far bigger, making her control of detail all the more impressive.
“Gail has the best zoom lens in the business,” says veteran literary agent Ed Victor. “She goes from macro to micro in a second.”
She needs that to cope with a marketplace that is changing rapidly — new ways of selling books, new formats for printing, closer links to cinema and television, more surprises. Publishers increasingly have to hedge their bets against an uncertain future.
Random House, like all the big groups, is run as a collection of subsidiaries, split into imprints (Heinemann, Hutchinson, Cape, Vintage, Bantam, Corgi and more) but bound together by shared services where economies of scale count: sales, distribution, production, HR, IT, finance.
That multi-imprint approach, each run by its own publisher, has worked better for Random House than for some other groups. Rivals put that down to Rebuck’s feel. Bosses at her level are actively discouraged from picking authors and ideas, but they set the tone. At Random House, high-end literature and blockbuster novels co-exist to mutual benefit.
“We’re very profitable,” says Rebuck, “we have been consistently, and it means that we are able to invest in huge numbers of new writers and poets and areas of specialist non-fiction that many competitors can’t cover.”
Ironically, while it encourages diversity and builds stronger bonds with authors, it doesn’t make the business of spotting winners any easier. If anything, says Rebuck, publishing is becoming less predictable every year.
Who, she asks, would have thought Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time would have been a big hit in America? Then she rummages through the 40-odd hardbacks piled across her coffee table and pulls out Mao, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. “170,000 copies in the UK and export territories.” Next she throws me Suite Française, translated from a manuscript written by a woman who died in a concentration camp. “Over 60,000 hardbacks sold.”
And then there is glamour model Jordan, drawing hundreds of women to book signings. The point about publishing, says Rebuck, is precisely its unpredictability.
Has she read Jordan? Rebuck grins. “I’ve dipped into it, but I will read her novel, coming out in July.”
Rebuck is an inveterate author plugger. That loyalty is repaid by those who have written for her.
“She’s remarkable, she’s indefatigable and she’s got very good taste,” says Ruth Rendell.
Robert Harris, who she has championed, describes her as a whirlwind. “She’s got huge amounts of energy, and she’s very well attuned to the zeitgeist.”
Rebuck’s drive was instilled at birth. Her father ran a dress-making business, her mother a hairdressers. Her Latvian Jewish grandfather had arrived in London as a teenager, and sold clothes from a wheelbarrow. Her maternal grandfather was a greengrocer.
“There was always the work ethic, you went out and worked hard,” she says. Brought up in London’s Paddington, Rebuck, the elder of two, was sent to the French Lycée so she could become fluent in a second language.
She ascribes that to the immigrant’s fear of losing everything. “There was always that sense that you had to be prepared for every eventuality, that it might all be taken away from you.” Yet she was not earmarked to move into the family business, which eventually went bust. That was her younger brother’s burden.
Did that make her more determined to succeed? She winces.
“Families are complicated. There was an understanding that I had to earn money, but on the other hand there was the impetus that a good Jewish girl makes a good marriage. My mother’s fantasy was that I would go in as a PA somewhere and get lucky, marry a millionaire.”
In fact, she read intellectual history at Sussex University, one of the most radical campuses of the 1970s, and leapt into publishing with a first job at a children’s book specialist. There followed a string of job jumps as she worked her way up the business, until she joined Anthony Cheetham and his wife, Rosie, setting up Century in 1982. She remortgaged her flat to put in £5,000, a leap that proved she could take a risk.
Cheetham remembers her as singularly focused, returning to the business after the birth of her first child to sort out an impending cashflow crisis. “She set out to get the cash back and she pulled it all round. When Gail is focused on something, she goes for it.”
After Random House bought Century, she replaced Cheetham as boss in a move that some thought overly ruthless. Since then she has developed a reputation as a tough chief executive. Cheetham, who until recently worked as a consultant to Rebuck, is phlegmatic. “Maybe you do have to have sharp elbows to get to the top, but I didn’t feel the imprint of them.”
Now Rebuck has been at the top so long that many wonder whether she wants a fresh start. There was speculation she might be interested in running the BBC, or that she will set her sights on the top job at Random House in New York, currently held by an American, Peter Olson.
Bertelsmann, which gives its subsidiaries a freer rein than most, is still virtually a woman-free zone at the top. Isn’t it time that changed?
“It’s a cultural thing, but they are aware of it, and trying to address it,” says Rebuck. Or maybe she has one last big fish to reel in over here. Has she signed up Tony Blair to write his memoirs? She flicks back her hair and sighs. “I very much doubt that the prime minister is thinking of writing his memoirs at this point,” she says.
So how much could Blair get? “Newspaper editors keep ringing up to ask me this and I really haven’t given it a lot of thought. You only worry about these things when they come in the door.” Has she signed spin doctor Alastair Campbell up for his memoirs? She hesitates. “Pass,” she says.
Ooh. She laughs. Then it’s over.Later she lavishes praise on me – she is a world-class flatterer – and apologises for cancelling our first meeting at short notice. She hadn’t liked the salary line in our vital statistics box. Her pay is not revealed by Bertelsmann and she wanted a promise that we wouldn’t run an estimate. Then she’d said okay.
Why the sensitivity? Who knows. But Rebuck doesn’t mess around. I left thinking she’d be terrific to write for, but you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.
Vital statistics
Born: February 10, 1952
First job: production assistant at publishing house
Salary package: undisclosed
Home: Regent’s Park, London
Car: blue Mercedes A-class hatchback
Favourite book: 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marques
Favourite film: Gone With The Wind
Favourite gadget: Blackberry
Last holiday: Paris
Gail Rebuck's working day
THE Random House boss wakes at 6.45am at her house near Regent’s Park and goes to the gym with her daughter. Gail Rebuck is then picked up and driven to Random House’s base in Pimlico for 8.30am. She breakfasts on espresso and an apple. “I’ll clear up what didn’t get done the night before. Then sales come in at 10am. After that, each day is different.”
She has monthly review meetings with her imprint bosses, weekly meetings with her seven top executives, and ad hoc meetings with agents and authors. She rarely lunches. “I admire those who do long lunches and still get through their work. I wish I could.”
She frequently finishes the day attending a couple of book launches. “The only important person is the author. If I happen to see someone else, that’s it.”
Downtime
“DO I have any downtime?” asks Gail Rebuck. “I’m not sure I do.” She spends her time out of work mostly reading — “I don’t consider it a chore, it’s an upside of the job.” When she goes on holiday she takes a small suitcase of clothes and a large suitcase of books. She is looking forward to the day when she can read a variety of titles on one e-book.
She also enjoys shopping — Sundays at the farmers’ market in Marylebone, or weekends with her daughters buying clothes. “You’ll find me hard to pin down, I buy from everywhere. I do get a lot from a shop called The Cross that Carmen Callil [the founder of Virago Press] introduced me to.” She spends “a few thousand pounds” each year on art. “I’m on the council of the Royal College of Art and I always buy from their shows.”
