Michael Pietsch

Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown and Company, has been named chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, replacing David Young, the company is expected to announce in a memo to staff on Monday.

Mr. Pietsch will take over on April 1.

A gregarious, well-liked figure at Hachette who has held his current position since 2006, Mr. Young has successfully brought the company up to speed digitally while navigating relations between the Hachette Book Group and its corporate parent in Europe. Hachette Book Group is owned by Hachette Livre, a publishing company based in France.

For months, Mr. Young, 61, has told associates that he was ready to leave his post and join his family outside London, where his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Noble, and their three children have been living for two years.

“I realized that despite loving this job, I couldn’t bear being separated from my family much longer,” Mr. Young said in an interview at the Hachette offices in Manhattan on Monday.

Mr. Pietsch, 55, is a natural successor from within the company, a hands-on editor who has proven that he can edit literary titans like David Foster Wallace as deftly as blockbuster commercial authors like James Patterson.

In March, Mr. Young told Arnaud Nourry, the chairman of Hachette Livre, that he intended to step down in a year.

Asked how long it took Mr. Nourry to find Mr. Young’s replacement, Mr. Nourry said, “It took me about a minute and a half.”

“Frankly, I did not meet with anyone but Michael,” Mr. Nourry said.

Mr. Pietsch said he accepted the job “after two deep breaths.”

“It’s a bigger transition than I’ve ever made,” he said. “The job of C.E.O. is much bigger than the job of a publisher. I get to the drive the Maserati that David has built. He really made it one company. He really made it come together.”

The succession plans call for Mr. Young to retain the position of chairman of the Hachette Book Group, spending approximately one week each month in New York. He will also take on the role of deputy chief executive of Hachette UK and chief executive of the Orion Publishing Group, a division of Hachette UK.

Mr. Pietsch, who will report to Mr. Young, will be responsible for leading the company through the digital transition that is changing the industry. But his first task will be finding his own replacement as publisher of Little, Brown. He said his search would include looking outside the company for candidates.

Several executives within Hachette said that the temperamental differences between Mr. Young and Mr. Pietsch were stark: while Mr. Young is known as charming and accessible, Mr. Pietsch can be more difficult to approach.

He is also a publisher who is deeply involved on the content level and comfortable in the arcane details of a manuscript — skills that may lessen in importance to his broader role as the executive in charge of Hachette’s direction and profitability.

Mr. Pietsch has published some of the biggest authors in the business, including Martin Amis, Michael Connelly and Stacy Schiff, and worked on memoirs by Keith Richards and Chuck Berry.

He edited “The Pale King,” the posthumously published novel by Mr. Wallace that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction this year. Mr. Pietsch assembled the book after Mr. Wallace died in 2008.

This fall, Little, Brown will release “The Casual Vacancy,” J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults, a major acquisition for the imprint. Mr. Pietsch also lured the novelist Tom Wolfe away from his longtime publisher, Farrar Straus Giroux, paying him close to $7 million for “Back to Blood,” which will be released in November.

Mr. Pietsch has been with Little, Brown since 1991 and previously worked at Scribner and Harmony Books.

According to the company’s Web site, the Hachette Book Group publishes close to 650 adult books and 125 young adult and children’s books every year. In its quarterly report announced late last month, Hachette said its revenues were down 4 percent because of weak sales of newly released books. The company said it expected the second half of 2012 to be strong enough to reverse the sales trend.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/pietsch-of-little-brown-will-become-new-hachette-chief-executive/?partner=rss&emc=rss