Last year, Ben Sevier made waves when he left Dutton (an imprint at Penguin), where he was a senior vice president and publisher, to take the same job at Grand Central Publishing (an imprint at Hachette).
According to Publisher’s Weekly, Sevier’s role with Grand Central Publishing is to oversee the “direction and publishing” and “the division’s editorial, marketing, publicity, and design teams,” along with “joining HBG’s executive management board.”
Now, just over a year after leaving Dutton, Sevier has made another splash at Grand Central Publishing, this time signing one of his biggest former authors, #1 New York Times bestseller Harlan Coben, to a five-book deal.
Sevier is Coben’s long-time editor and had previously inked him to a four-book deal at Dutton in 2014. Before that, Coben’s last U.S. book deal was in 2011. This new deal reunites one of the most formidable editor-author duos in all of publishing, and Coben’s first book with Grand Central, tentatively titled Run Away, is scheduled for publication in March 2019.
Details about Run Away are, understandably, pretty scarce this far out from its release, but we do know the book will be about the disappearance of a girl battling drug addiction and how that impacts her parents — especially when the girl’s deadbeat boyfriend is found murdered and the police think the girl’s father is the one who killed him.
Coben’s deal was negotiated by Lisa Erbach Vance at the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. Harlan Coben, 56, has over 70 million books in print around the world and released ten consecutive #1 New York Times bestsellers, including his most recent novel, Don’t Let Go.