Archives for March 2007

Endeavor Confirms NY Literary Expansion Weeks after the first report on Gawker, Endeavor has confirmed its hiring of agent Richard Abate from ICM to create a New York-based book division, operating out of their Carnegie Hall Towers office. Variety says the “plan [is] to grow a full-fledged business that will likely be staffed by at least five agents,” indicating that one motivation is “to put the growing agency on the ground floor of film-friendly literary material that can be serviced to movie and TV clients and be the catalyst for packages.” But that ground floor can get mighty dusty when […]

Bad News Barnes Barnes & Noble surprised Wall Street by announcing a sharply reduced earnings forecast for the coming year (approximately 30 percent or more below what analysts were expecting) along with same-store sales predictions of “flat to slightly positive for the year,” even with the new Harry Potter book. Margins are under pressure from multiple fronts: Their discounted Member prices are “negatively impacting both sales and gross margins as the unit sales growth has not yet offset the amount of additional discounts. In addition, gross margin will continue to be compressed by the highly competitive bookselling environment.” Nonetheless, CEO […]

FICTION Debut Jancee Dunn’s first novel, IN BETWEEN DAYS, the humorous and nostalgic story of a 30-something New Yorker who is forced to relive her 1980s past when she moves back into her childhood home after getting dumped by her husband and leaving her job, to Jill Schwartzman for Villard, in a two-book deal, by David McCormick at McCormick & Williams Literary Agency (world English). Former private school headmaster Selden Edwards’s debut FIN DE SIECLE, about a 1970s rock star dislocated in time back to turn-of-the-century Vienna, where he encounters some of notable people of the time and meets his […]

Because 20 Isn’t Quite Enough — Nor Was $100k Granta announced their second list of the 21 best American writers under age 35 (though 5 were born outside the US) last night. They picked: Daniel Alarcon; Judy Budnitz; Kevin Brockmeier; Christopher Coake; Anthony Doerr; Jonathan Safran Foer; Nell Freudenberger; Olga Grushin; Dara Horn; Gabe Hudson; Uzodinma Iweala; Nicole Krauss; Rattawut Lapcharoensap; Yiyun Li; Maile Meloy; ZZ Packer; Jess Row; Karen Russell; Akhil Sharma; Gary Shteyngart; and John Wray. And author James Patterson increased the awards from his Page Turner Awards five-fold in this, the second year. The top $100,000 grant […]

Harlequin’s Bad Year Ends, and They Say It’s Improving Every publisher based in another country with a big American division faces the problem of trying to explain in numbers why business was ok until you take into account the ever-weakening dollar but no one makes the process more elaborate than Harlequin parent Torstar. Perhaps because the company has suffered from a variety of challenges for a while now, you pretty much need an advanced degree in excuses to really understand their earnings releases. They allow for currency differences; they translate “underlying” revenue changes; they calculate what would have happened if […]