Three years after Hachette Book Group began an overhaul of its corporate structure, the publishing house announced a new slate of promotions on Tuesday that include the appointment of Ben Sevier as its next chief executive.
Sevier currently oversees 20 imprints and is the president of Hachette’s largest division, Grand Central, which he joined in 2017, and the publisher of the division’s eponymous imprint. Over nearly three decades in the publishing industry, Sevier has worked with authors including Colleen Hoover, Harlan Coben, Adm. William H. McRaven and the newscaster Connie Chung.
Christine Ball, the publisher of Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, will succeed Sevier at Grand Central.
At the start of next year, Sevier will replace David Shelley, who has been appointed executive chair of Hachette Book Group and Hachette UK. Shelley will also take on a role as global adviser and deputy chief executive of Hachette’s parent company, Hachette Livre.
Sevier and Katie Espiner, who will take over from Shelley as chief executive of Hachette UK, will “continue to report to David from his new international post, where he’s going to have a view into Spanish-language publishing, French-language publishing and English-language publishing,” Sevier said in an interview.
Hachette Book Group is one of the largest publishing houses in the United States, and has grown its footprint over the past several years. In a news release announcing the changes, the company said its revenue had increased 18 percent between 2023 and 2025.
Hachette has also dealt with several timely concerns this year. In March, it canceled the release of “Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard, a horror novel many people suspected was written using artificial intelligence.
Sevier said it is “really tough to make any broad statements about A.I. use in publishing.” If situations similar to the “Shy Girl” debacle arise in the future, Hachette will evaluate them on “a case-by-case basis,” he said.
Speaking in June at Publishers Weekly’s U.S. Book Show, Shelley said Hachette asks its writers to disclose whether they used A.I. to compose their work, but does not run submitted manuscripts through A.I. detection software.
“We don’t want to have any kind of culture of suspicion or disbelief in authors,” he said.
In July, hundreds of Hachette employees voted to unionize, establishing the largest union in American trade book publishing.
When asked how Hachette will work with the union, Sevier demurred, saying “there’s not much I can say, because it’s so early.” He added: “I’m optimistic that we will have a productive negotiation with the union, and that we’ll wind up in a place where our business can continue to thrive and our employees can do the same.”
Sevier maintained that he would expand his predecessor’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which he said were “fundamental to our business success, in addition to being the right thing to do from a human perspective.”
In an attempt to further globalize Hachette’s operations, Sally Kim, the president and publisher of the Hachette imprint Little, Brown, will establish a publishing program in Canada, according to the news release.
Despite the spate of changes that have rippled across Hachette and the publishing industry, Sevier is confident his company can adapt.
“In my 30-ish years in publishing, I’ve seen trends wax and wane, and categories grow and shrink,” he said. When it comes to “humans telling stories to each other, we’ve never found a technology as good as the book to do that on a mass scale. And I don’t see that changing.”
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