Archives for March 2007

Waterstone’s Still Looking for a Working Model Waterstone’s still can’t pull it together. Parent company HMV reported that same-store sales at the bookstore chain withered by another 6.1 percent for the nine weeks ending March 10 (and bear in mind that at this point, the comparison is to weak results a year ago — the bar gets lower and lower, and they remain well under it.) New CEO Simon Fox announced a plan that seems to have little or nothing to do with being a better bookseller. But in his own words, “The three-year transformation plan which I will outline […]

Personnel News Children’s publishing veteran David Ford has returned to London to set up book packaging and literary consulting firm Brubaker & Ford, in conjunction with magazine and marketing executive Brett Brubaker. (They will maintain a NY office as well.) They aim to “create books intimate in creation, but vast in sales potential.” Aside from the basics, they say “we provide publishers with marketing insight and plans to take each project beyond the initial sale, creating websites and wide-reaching appeal for every book we create.” Ford had been publisher of Little, Brown Children’s until 2005, after leading the US launch […]

FICTION Debut Brendan McNally’s GERMANIA,  a first novel about the last days of the Third Reich, when Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and friend, embarks on a foolhardy rebellion, aided by a former child star turned enemy assassin, ending up in Flensburg, where the surviving Nazis lose themselves in dreams of a bright and impossible future, to Colin Fox at Simon & Schuster, in a good deal, by Larry Weissman at Larry Weissman Literary (world). Susan White’s BOUND SOUTH, in which three women struggle to find their place in contemporary Atlanta, examining race, class, gender, and religion in a land where […]

NBCC Winners At the NBCC awards last night, “a solid majority of nominees showed up, including such high-profile writers as novelists Richard Ford and Dave Eggers and historian Taylor Branch” the AP reports, but most of the favorites didn’t win: Fiction: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss Nonfiction: Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution Biography: Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr. Autobiography: Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Poetry: Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory Criticism: Lawrence Weschler, Everything That Rises AP The Devil Needs a Haircut? Radar notices that an […]

Wiley: Sales Rise, Profits Fall Wiley announced third quarter sales of $297 million, up 7 percent from a year ago, with adjusted net income of $32 million, down from $34 million a year ago. In the US, the professional/trade division rose two percent, to $103 million. The company says backlist sales and “the strong performance of technology publishing, the sale of electronic rights and lower sales returns contributed positively to these results.” They took a bad debt provision of $5 million against the AMS bankruptcy. Release Personnel News Harper has hired Margot Schupf as group svp and associate publisher for […]

Marquez Resumes Memoir Gabriel Garcia Marquez celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday and “told friends that he has begun writing his second volume of memoirs” — a happy contrast to his statement last year that he had “run out of gas” for writing. The report comes not from Marquez himself, but friend and collaborator Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. LAT More on AAP/Microsoft/Google Microsoft’s Tom Rubin made one small modification to the published text of his speech at yesterday’s meeting of the publishers’ association, underscoring in the preamble that he didn’t mean to “attack” anyone — before attacking Google as planned. Among the […]