HarperVia will roll out a line of pocket-sized paperbacks under the new Nomad Editions imprint this November. The Nomad format, inspired by Japanese pocket novels, aims to balance portability and aesthetics in mass market paperbacks, according to the publisher. The imprint is headed by HarperOne Group publisher and president Judith Curr, who joined Harper in 2018 and launched HarperVia in 2019 as a home for international literature, often in translation.
Nomad will launch on November 4 with redesigns of three HarperVia bestsellers: Almond by Sohn Won-pyung, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee; Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi, translated by Emily Balistrieri; and A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur. Each Nomad title will feature a softcover case with a hidden interior design, a compact trim size (4 1/8" x 5 7/8"), and what the publisher calls “comfortable typefaces for on-the-go reading.”
In a release, the publisher called Nomad “HarperOne Group’s answer to the decline of mass market paperbacks”—which in recent years have seen sputtering sales, leading some publishers to abandon the format all together. Format tweaks have helped combat stalling mass-market sales in the past, though more publishers have given up on this sort of experimentation in recent years.
Curr cited the popularity of small-format books in Japan, whose compact size encourage screen-free reading, as the seed for the new line. She noted that manga, for instance, is already published in a variety of print formats, and that there is some overlap between readers of the genre and HarperVia’s catalog, which features many East Asian authors.
In addition to the inaugural three-title list, three more Nomad titles are currently planned for 2026. Plans for future lists are open-ended, and Curr noted that the Nomad format won’t be restricted to HarperVia. She is optimistic that the format can become standard for the most popular titles from across the HarperOne Group, such as Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist.
