Houghton Mifflin Harcourt “Temporarily” Stops Buying New Books

In a move that made a few agents anxious, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts,” according to a spokesperson. As Publishers Weekly reports, a few executives were informed of the policy “verbally,” but a spokesperson confirmed the dramatic policy.

Josef Blumenfeld, Vice President of Communications at the publisher, explained to PW: “In this case it’s a symbol of doing things smarter; it’s not an indicator of the end of literature … We have turned off the spigot, but we have a very robust pipeline.”

In the article, a few agents fretted about the change. One agent told PW that they had recently seen a book rejected according to the publisher’s temporary policy. Blumenfeld stressed it was “not a permanent change.”

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