Archives for November 2007

Elizabeth Hay Wins Giller The former broadcaster won Canada’s top fiction prize for her third novel, LATE NIGHTS ON AIR, about “the loves and rivalries of a cast of eccentric characters at a small radio station in Yellowknife, near Canada’s Arctic.” (Counterpoint has a US edition scheduled for next March.) Globe and Mail Review section editor Andrew Gorham called it the other day: “It feels like this is Hay’s moment because she has been building in our literary landscape with each book that she publishes.” Reuters Flew Responds Following blogoversy over the NYT Magazine article we cited yesterday, Harper One […]

Amazon Prime UK Already a popular feature in the US and Japan, Amazon’s “prime” shipping plan has been added to their UK site, providing next-day delivery on a large selection items for an annual fee of 49 pounds. CEO Jeff Bezos notes, “We find lots of things happen when someone becomes a member of Prime — they start exploring other product categories and thinking about other ways they can use their membership.” Telegraph Another Make-Your-Own Cookbook Option Following TasteBook’s launch a couple of weeks ago (drawing on recipes from Epicurious), SharedBook has announced a similar program in conjunction with AllRecipes.com. […]

BookSurge Adds a Few Hundred Thousand Books to Amazon Catalog The title count of new books published this year just took an exponential jump: BookSurge has partnered with Ancestry.com to create almost 280,000 on-demand books, called the Our Name in History series, priced at $29.95 and running 98 pages. They chronicle the most common last names from Ancestry.com’s archive, “using historical records dating from the 1600s to provide a blend of interesting facts, statistics and commentary” to create “keepsakes about either their own last name or that of their favorite actor, president or media mogul.” This afternoon another large-scale print-on-demand […]

Deal News FICTION Debut Dave Boling’s GUERNICA, a sweeping epic of love, family, and war set in the tiny Basque town of Guernica before, during, and after its destruction by the German Luftwaffe on the eve of World War II, to Karen Rinaldi and Lindsay Sagnette at Bloomsbury, by Kim Witherspoon at Inkwell Management (NA). Declan Burke’s THE BIG O, in which a stick-up artist finds herself involved in a kidnapping scheme, from an author described as “Elmore Leonard with a harder Irish edge,” to Stacia Decker at Harcourt, by Marsha Swan at Hag’s Head Press. Writers Notes Magazine’s Notable […]

Sales Top Titles Lift S&S Simon & Schuster continues a strong streak of sales and earnings growth with reported third-quarter sales of $214 million, up 9 percent, “principally reflecting higher sales from top-selling titles” such as the The Secret and Joel Osteen’s BECOME A BETTER YOU. Operating income rose six percent, to $21.6 million, impaired in part by “higher royalty expenses, employee-related costs, volume-driven advertising and selling expenses and digital archive costs.” In this morning’s conference call, ceo Leslie Moonves said they had made “steady progress in the digital warehouse project” and noted “by year-end we expect to have 13,000 […]

Harlequin Slightly Up Down Sales at Harlequin were down 2.5 percent to $115.7 million (CA) due to the weakened dollar, though “underlying” sales were up $.7 million absent currency fluctuations. North American retail was up slightly while direct-to-consumer was down slightly, and overseas sales were up slightly. Even with the currency issues, profits rebounded 12.5 percent, to $16.3 million. Torstar Release Indigo Keeps Rolling Indigo continues its strong performance, with second quarter sales up 14.8 percent, to $209 million (CA). Same-store sales were up more than 10 percent throughout the chain, and their online store grew 50 percent, to $26 […]