Terrible company culture, weak DEI efforts, very low pay
Pros
Some of the same benefits you get at other major publishing houses (health care, dental, 401k match etc.; There is a union for junior staff, which they clearly need.
Cons
The benefits are not competitive with HarperCollins' peers. For example, many other publishing houses give the week off between Christmas and New Year, but Harper is shockingly withholding with PTO. They even took away the industry-wide (and much beloved) privilege of summer Fridays during the height of the pandemic when morale was at its lowest--a true Ebenezer Scrooge of book publishing! The salaries are so low that their junior staff go on strike for weeks or months at a time, and the general environment feels pretty strained and hostile in general. Not to mention their incredibly weak and performative DEI efforts were a joke. Anyone in book publishing knows the pay is always low for such a highly skilled job (at least if you aren't an executive) but the workload here was ridiculous. I've worked at four major publishing houses and this is the only one I would never consider returning to for future opportunities due to negative company culture and lack of competitive benefits. They care about the bottom dollar, not people--full stop.
