When I met with Brenda Bowen (left) at the HarperCollins Childrens office last week, she was still settling into her new position as the head of a new, still-unnamed imprint, with no fixed idea of staff levels or the size of the frontlist. But she was excited to be back at Harper, where she had started her career in children’s publishing under the mentorship of Charlotte Zolotow. “Harper does everything and they do it really well,” Bowen said, “commercial, experimental, literary, or novelty. And what’s wonderful about having one’s own imprint is being able to take the direction of whatever interests me.”
Would she be looking for the new Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket, I wondered? “We’re always looking for that,” Bowen explained (it was, I admit, a naive question), “and Lemony Snicket was the new Harry Potter, after all. But you never know how it’s going to pop up, and you can’t construct it.” And she doesn’t even consider that the biggest innovation in children’s publishing she’s seen over the years, citing another factor that made it possible for the megasellers to flourish. “I remember before there was four-color printing,” she says. “That made picture books more attractive, got them into the chain stores, and when the big fiction started to happen, the stores were poised and ready.”
(Oh, and Bowen also set the record straight about concerning her last days at Hyperion, when her absence from the office fueled much speculation. Towards the end, she explained, she chose to work from home.)