Stephenie Meyer announced on Good Morning America a “surprise” new novel in the Twilight series, LIFE AFTER DEATH: TWILIGHT REIMAGINED, released today as bonus content bundled with the original book’s 10th anniversary edition. (The publisher had billed the anniversary edition as offering hundreds of pages of unspecified “bonus content”; this is the bonus.) The new 442-page story is a “reimagining” which flips gender, where Bella is now Beau and Edward is now Edythe.
Meyer said in the novel’s foreword that she wrote the story as a response to comments that Bella was a “damsel in distress,” saying: “My answer to that has always been that Bella is a ‘human in distress,’ a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and villains. … I’ve always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and vampire female — it’s still the same story. So I thought to myself, ‘Well, what if I put that theory to the test? That might be fun.'”
Apparently the gender-flipping of character was “really fast and easy,” wrote Meyer: “It turns out that there isn’t much difference at all between a female human in love with a male vampire and a male human in love with a female vampire.”
Jaimee Callaway has been promoted to director of digital marketing & strategy for the Perseus Book Group.
At Open Road, Jennifer Jackson has been promoted to editorial director, community sites; Matthew Thompson has been promoted to editor of The Lineup; and Jack Palmer moves up to senior analytics manager.
Distribution
Penguin Random House Publisher Services will take over sales and distribution for Parallax Press as of April 2016.
Perseus Distribution will handle sales & distribution for Humanix Books, the book division of Newsmax Media.
Initiatives
Rodale and Rodale Books have jointly launched e-commerce site Rodale Wellness, which builds on two prior Rodale Books properties, Fitbie (for fitness) and Rodale News (on health & wellness.) The new site, which company president Scott Schulman is “another way for us to help our customers lead better lives and further assert our authority in the landscape we helped create,” features access to a suite of health & wellness product, a daily newsletter, and ongoing video segments.
Shelved
Waterstones will no longer stock Kindle devices in most of its stores, reported the Bookseller. Managing director James Daunt said Kindle sales “continue to be pitiful” so they are “taking the display space back in more and more shops. It feels very much like the life of one of those inexplicable bestsellers; one day piles and piles, selling like fury; the next you count your blessings with every sale because it brings you closer to getting it off your shelves forever to make way for something new. Sometimes, of course, they ‘bounce’ but no sign yet of this being the case with Kindles.”
Blackwell’s ceo David Prescott also noted the sales decline of reading devices: “We’re not seeing a great deal of people who are buying an e-reader for the first time now. People are buying e-reader replacements, but that’s it.” A spokesperson for Amazon in the UK, naturally, countered the booksellers’ concerns, saying they were “pleased with the positive momentum and growing distribution of Kindle and Fire tablet sales.”