After five years at the head of Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp has announced his intention to step down as CEO to launch and lead a new imprint, Simon Six. He will continue to serve in his current position as the company conducts a search for his successor alongside executive search firm Spencer Stuart.

“When KKR acquired Simon & Schuster, I agreed to stay on to lead our company through the transition, but my north star has always been our authors and their books,” Karp wrote in a letter sent to S&S staff on Tuesday. “I have decided it’s time for me to return to the part of publishing that animates me the most.”

In a statement, S&S board members Ted Oberwager and Richard Sarnoff noted that, “under Jon Karp’s exceptional leadership over the past five years, Simon & Schuster has demonstrated remarkable resilience and growth in an evolving publishing landscape. His strategic vision and commitment to literary excellence have strengthened the company immeasurably, attracted new/renowned authors and reinforced its legacy as a premier global publisher.” They added: “We are thrilled to launch the new Simon Six imprint under Jon’s leadership. There is no better shaper of books.”

In an interview with PW, Karp remarked further on the timing of his decision. “We’re having a good year, and it could be a great year,” Karp said. “Like a lot of book editors, I love a good ending, and I think this is the right time to end.”

An Eventful Tenure

Karp arrived at S&S’s top leadership position through an unconventional route, rising through the publishing ranks via editorial positions rather than managerial ones. He started off as a local news reporter before beginning his career in publishing in 1989 as an editorial assistant at Random House, where he spent 16 years, and was eventually promoted to editor-in-chief of the imprint in 2004.

In 2005, Karp left Random House for Hachette Book Group to found Twelve Books, which is now well-known for its nonfiction by politicians and other public figures as well as for fiction by such authors as Colson Whitehead. Karp joined S&S in 2010 as publisher of its flagship imprint, and was promoted to president and publisher of S&S adult publishing in 2018. In May 2020, he was named CEO of S&S, succeeding the late Carolyn Reidy, who died that month from a heart attack after leading the publisher since 2008.

Karp’s five-year tenure at the helm of S&S has been an eventful one. He took over the CEO role under challenging conditions, between Reidy’s sudden death, the onset of the pandemic, and S&S parent company ViacomCBS’s decision to put the publisher up for sale. In late 2020, Penguin Random House parent company Bertelsmann was named as the winning bidder to purchase S&S, but the acquisition was ultimately blocked by the Department of Justice in 2022 following a closely-watched trial in which Karp emerged as a key figure in support of the sale.

Amid the legal tumult, S&S continued to post impressive financial results. In 2022, revenue topped $1 billion for the first time as a standalone trade publisher—and while sales cooled in 2023, the company continued to do well enough to draw a $1.6 billion price from the private equity firm KKR, which closed its purchase of S&S in late 2023. For his steady leadership of the publisher, Karp was named a PW Notable in 2023.

The purchase by KKR gave S&S’s roughly 1,600 employees the chance take part in an employee ownership program. In his keynote address at the 2024 London Book Fair, Karp noted that this means that when the company is sold by KKR—in “five to 10 years”—all employees will receive a cash payout. “The new model has sent a jolt of electricity through the business,” he added. “A lot of innovation has been unleashed.”

Karp also said, during the keynote, that KKR’s ownership provided S&S with the opportunity “reinvest in ourself” rather than pass along profits to a parent company. This has indeed proved to be the case: in 2024, which marked the company’s centennial, S&S relaunched its Summit Books imprint and launched a bilingual imprint, Primero Sueño Press, under Atria Books. The publisher also unveiled a new audio-first imprint, Simon Maverick, earlier this year.

Speaking with PW, Karp reiterated that S&S is “having a good year—the company is on a growth trajectory, and is solidly profitable.” He pointed to what he called S&S’s “epic fall season” as another reason he feels bullish on the company’s prospects, including forthcoming titles by such authors as Mona Award, Janet Evanovich, Sanjay Gupta, John Irving, Walter Isaacson, Kamala Harris, Allen Iverson, Shonda Rhimes, Arundhati Roy, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Sheen, and Malala Yousefzai.

The choice to leave on a high note, Karp added, was strictly personal. “My first day as CEO, my mantra was, ‘Let’s talk about the books.’ And I that's really all I've ever wanted to do. I wanted to be CEO for five years. I wanted to have a legitimate run at it. But it was never my final destination.”

In his letter to staff, Karp added: “Years ago, I asked a retired publishing CEO how long he thought someone should stay in this kind of job. He responded, ‘About five years. That’s enough time to make your mark—and if you haven’t gotten it done in five years, you’re probably not going to get it done.’ Having completed my fifth year as your CEO, I see the wisdom in that view.”

Meet Simon Six

The original name of the Simon Six imprint, Karp told PW, “was going to be X Books, but Elon Musk ruined that.” Each of the six books published annually by Six, per the website, will feature “an X-factor”: “Extraordinary stories. Exciting voices. Exclusive access. Exemplary individuals. Excellent accomplishments. Exquisite prose.” The titles will come from “all kinds of authors: novelists, journalists, thinkers, artists, historians, futurists, philosophers, humorists, experts, leaders, and anyone else with a unique perspective or a great story to tell.”

“As the founding publisher of Twelve, I published one book per month,” Karp wrote in a note on the Simon Six website. “For Simon Six, I will acquire and edit half as many books each year and publish them with twice as much emphasis.”

Karp called the Twelve imprint “one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done in my life—being able to paint on a blank canvas. I want to get back to that.” He added: “The people who I have really always wanted to follow in the tradition of are the great editors I’ve known, people like Kate Medina and Anne Godoff and Bob Bender and Alice Mayhew and Jason Epstein and Michael Korda. I hope, when my career is over, that I’ll have books of the same quality that they’ve they championed.”

Simon Six is likely to launch its first list sometime next year. The imprint, Karp told PW, will have two employees, himself and an assistant, and will operate in partnership with S&S’s existing imprints. “I’ll be partnering with whichever imprint wants the book the most, and whichever imprint the author and the literary agent want to be with—so it will be Simon Six in partnership with Avid Reader Press, or with the Simon & Schuster flagship imprint, or with Atria or Gallery or Scribner,” he said. “It will be a chance for me to acquire, edit, and publish books with whichever part of Simon and Schuster is best for the author.”

While the idea for the imprint had been percolating for some time, Karp said that he ultimately decided that now was the time to make the jump earlier this year. “On March 15, I came back from the London Book Fair and realized that I never wanted to go to another book fair again for the rest of my life,” he said. “One of the reasons I wanted to announce this so publicly, the imprint, is because literary agents have mostly stopped emailing me since I've gotten this executive job I wanted to remind them that I’m still alive—and I’m looking for things to read.”

This story has been updated with further information.