Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to put them all together. “nice deal” $1 – $49,000 “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000 “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000 “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000 “major deal” $500,000 and up FICTION Debut Kamala Nair’s THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN, the redemptive journey of […]
Archives for November 2009
More Financial News: Bigger than Expected Loss at Hastings; Santillana Deal May Fall Through
In other financial news, sales at Hastings fell 1.7 percent in the third quarter, at $112.3 million, with the company showing a net loss of $3.4 million–at -36 cents a share that was well below what the company’s single analyst was forecasting, and $0.7 million worse than Hasting’s own internal forecast. As a result, they formally reduced their guidance on full-year earnings by five cents a share. According to the company’s category breakouts, book sales comps were just above flat at 0.2 percent for the quarter (also up 1 percent for the year), but publishers probably don’t benefit from the […]
How the NBA Nominees Have Fared
With the National Book Award winners due to be announced on Wednesday evening, we took a look at what the marketplace has had to say so far about the fiction nominees. Unfortunately, the NBA nominations traditionally do not have a lot of impact on the marketplace. In both total sales to date as well as sales since the nominations were announced, Colum McCann’s LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN is the clear stand-out. With just under 2,400 copies sold in the last three full weeks as recorded by Nielsen BookScan, he has outsold the rest of the field combined (the other […]
New Deals for Smashwords and Scribd
Following their sales partnership with BN.com, Smashwords has struck a partnership to supply their self-published and small publisher ebooks to Shortcovers as well. Smashwords says their authors and publishers will earn 46.75 percent of the digital list price on those sales. Separately, Scribd.com announced a deal to offer over 14,000 dissertations and theses from ProQuestUMI through their site. Selling at $49, they will pay 80 percent of the proceeds to ProQuest. Overall, Proquest has over 2 million dissertations and theses in its database.
Burkle Doubles Barnes & Noble Stake; May Agitate for Change
There could be a battle of the billionaires brewing at Barnes & Noble, as companies controlled by investor Ron Burkle disclosed to the SEC that they have more than doubled their stake in the bookseller recently. Burkle’s companies now control 16.8 percent of the bookseller’s stock. That’s still only about half as much as the big block of stock controlled by chairman Len Riggio. Burkle’s recent purchases likely played a role in the recent upturn in BN’s stock, which lifted after reporting strong pre-orders for the nook. (Traders had been betting against BN, holding a lot of stock shorts that […]
New Google Settlement Drops Foreign-Language Works, and Gives Orphans a Fiduciary
Bowing to pressure from foreign governments and the Department of Justice, the revised Google Books Settlement agreement presented to the District Court shortly before midnight on Friday limits the scope of the scheme to works registered with the US Copyright Office and books published in the UK, Canada and Australia. As part of that change, the named plaintiffs have been expanded to include authors and publishers from those countries, and British, Australian and Canadian rightsholders will gain representation of the Book Rights Registry board. Expressing a less expansive view than he did a year ago when announcing the first settlement […]