Agent Brendan Deneen has joined FinePrint Literary Management. He had been at Objective Entertainment. Robert Riger will join Simon & Schuster Audio as director of the Pimsleur Language Program, taking over from Whit Waterbury. Most recently Riger had been vp, publisher of SparkNotes before leaving last year. In France, Vianney de la Boulaye has joined Hachette Livre as vp, legal affairs, replacing Christine Auffray, who has left the company. Fred Kaplan, author of Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer was named as biographer of the year by online publication The Biographer’s Craft. The BISG is conducting an online survey of […]
Archives for March 2009
Currency Drives Strong Year for Penguin and Pearson
As expected, Penguin rode the big swing in dollar/pound exchange rates to sales for the year of 903 pounds, a 6.7 percent increase, as adjusted operating profit rose 26 percent, to 93 million pounds, exceeding the company’s long-discussed target margin of 10 percent a year. (On a “constant exchange rate basis,” though, the company says sales were flat, and profits rose 4 percent; on an underlying basis, after accounting for the sale of a small wholesaling business in 2007, sales grew 3 percent.) Those profit gains came in spite of a charge in the “the small units of millions of […]
Random House Buys Ten Speed Press
Random House announced their acquisition of previously independent Ten Speed Press. Ten Speed’s four imprints–Ten Speed Press, Celestial Arts, Crossing Press, and Tricycle Press–will operate as parts of the Crown Publishing Group. The unit will maintain its editorial, marketing, publicity, design, and production staff in Berkeley, CA. Founder Phil Wood, who started the company in 1971, will serve as publisher emeritus, but “a new reporting structure for Ten Speed Press will be announced in the coming weeks.” Ten Speed has an active backlist of over 1,000 titles, which they have self-distributed. Random House will officially take over distribution on May […]
Partial DFW Novel Emerges
Agent Bonnie Nadell and David Foster Wallace’s widow Karen Green found a partial manuscript of THE PALE KING two months after the writer suicided. This week’s New Yorker carries a brief excerpt, and Little, Brown has what publisher Michael Piestch calls a tentative agreement to publish the work in 2010. “The characters are Internal Revenue Service agents working at an IRS facility in the Midwest. The intense tediousness of their jobs and their attempts to transcend boredom reflect Wallace’s preoccupation with the concept of ‘mindfulness’ — the idea, as he put it in a 2005 commencement speech, that you should […]