Mark Henry Gates, 57, died last Friday of lung cancer. A longtime Midwest sales rep for Farrar, Straus and Holt, Gates was PW’s “rep of the year” in 2006. A CarePages notice says that “with tongue-in-cheek, he referred to himself as ‘the Willy Loman of the book trade’ and claimed more benefit and conviviality in taking a client to lunch than in filling out a sales report.” In the PW piece from 2006, FSG sales director Spenser Lee said: “Mark is an avid reader, champion of the smaller books, master storyteller and great advocate for his accounts and publishers. But […]
Archives for December 2009
Random House CEO Dohle's Letter to Agents on eRights and More
More on Pricing, and Kennedy Book
Following our story yesterday on high-profile pre-orders for which Amazon has dropped the ebook price to $7.99, we found a host of other popular current titles also offered below the $9.99 price point, including: Wolf Hall ($8.80); The Help ($7.60); The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson ($7.99); Pursuit of Honor ($8.00); What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures ($9.00); and Beautiful Creatures ($9.00). BN.com basically matches Amazon’s pricing. Meanwhile, though Twelve is releasing Ted Kennedy’s TRUE COMPASS as an ebook later this month, they have postponed a trade paperback edition until 2011. Cary Goldstein tells the AP […]
People
Literary and publishing blogger and literary event impresario Ron Hogan will join Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade & reference division as director of e-marketing strategy, succeeding Sanj Kharbanda, who has moved to the division’s digital strategy group. He reports to svp, director of marketing Bridget Marmion, starting January 4. Former longtime Lowe’s executive David Shelton, 62, has joined the board of directors at Borders.
The ABA Hotel Returns, Now in Manhattan
BEA has secured a room block at the Park Central Hotel just north of Times Square for bookseller members of the American Booksellers Association attending next year’s BEA, at rates starting at $179 a room.
This Time, Springer Sale Goes Through
Springer Science+Business has finally been unloaded, from one group of private equity firms (Candover and Cinven) to another: Sweden’s EQT Partners, with an 18 percent share being taken by the Singapore government’s investment company. The transaction is more a restructuring of Springer’s extensive 2.2 billion euros of debt than a conventional purchase. The purchase price was not released, though sources are guessing that the sale included 150 million euros in actual cash on top of the assumption of that mountain of debt.Bloomberg