The plot thickens

Becky Saletan quit Houghton Mifflin Harcourt yesterday, the Associated Press reports, after only 11 months on the job. It seems like a very bad sign for the two venerable publishing names she worked for.

When Irish financier Barry O'Callaghan bought Harcourt a year ago for $4 billion in borrowed money and jammed it together with Boston-based Houghton Mifflin (which he had bought the year before for $3.4 billion -- also borrowed), Houghton's longtime trade publisher Janet Silver was pushed out and replaced with Saletan, who had headed Harcourt before the merger. Her HMH title was senior vice president and publisher of trade books.

Then last week, Houghton acknowledged that it was freezing new acquisitions in its trade division, raising suspicions that EMPG, Callaghan's debt-stressed empire, was cutting costs in preparation for a fire-sale unloading of the division, if not the whole company.

Sometimes a senior executive abruptly parts ways with a company over compensation issues, conflicts with a boss, or differences over management strategy. Sometimes, as with editor Dean Baquet's departure from the Los Angeles Times in 2006 because he could not bring himself to wreck the product by dismantling the staff, it's because the executive didn't sign on to play the grim reaper.

It's not clear which, if any, of these were involved in Saletan's decision. And she might not have had a choice. But the acquisitions freeze must have stuck in her craw. In an interview three years ago with Mediabistro.com, a book-news website, here is what she said about her profession: "My favorite part of the job is, and always will be, finding great new writers and books to bring before the public."