Julie Strauss-Gabel has been promoted to vp and publisher of Dutton Children’s Books. The unit will publish 10 to 15 titles a year as “a boutique middle grade and young adult imprint with a focus on titles of exceptional literary quality and strong commercial appeal.” Penguin Children’s president Don Weisberg says that Strauss-Gabel will be taking Dutton Children’s “gracefully into the future and I am excited to see her take on this new role at Penguin.” The move allows Lauri Hornik to return to a sole focus on Dial, where she remains publisher and president. Dial will expand from 50 titles […]
Archives for January 2011
Amazon Launches First “Singles” List, With Pete Hamill’s Previously Cancelled Immigration Work
Amazon posted their first list of just over 20 Kindle Singles, short nonfiction digital works “typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” With no page counts, consistent with Kindle ethos, consumers will have only price (currently ranging from 99 cents to $2.99) and kilobyte counts to estimate how long these works are prior to purchase. Among the titles is a version of Pete Hamill’s piece on immmigration, THEY ARE US, originally intended as a 40,000 to 50,000-word digital original from Little, Brown last fall. Hamill had not delivered as intended, and reportedly backed off the project due to his wife’s illness. […]
Positioning Aside, Sales Fall at WH Smith High Street Stores By A Good Amount
The UK’s WH Smith presented weak sales data that people are working hard to put a positive gloss on. Same-store sales at their High Street stores were down 7 percent for the eight weeks ending January 22 (so holiday sales, sort of) and down 6 percent for the most recent 21 weeks. The company says that “excluding entertainment” product, same-store sales were down 3 three percent. They say they are “rebalancing” their store mix to focus books, stationery and candy. The Bookseller says retail analysts were told once you isolate book sales, they fell 2 percent on a same-store basis […]
More Highlights From DBW’s First Day
We have lots more DBW coverage from Day 1 over at the PM website. Some of the highlights include: — An outside dose of reality on the future of brick-and-mortar bookselling from Goldman Sachs analyst Matt Fassler and Susquehanna Financial Group’s Marianne Wolk. Fassler was down on B&N’s prospects: “There are no safe investments, but publishers and booksellers are something to avoid” in his assessment, because they don’t control their own destiny. Wolk believes that Amazon makes little to no profit from ebooks as they try to maintain dominant market share, and doesn’t even think it’s a corporate goal to […]
Publishers Battle on Territorial Rights and Try Out New Skill Sets
The panel on territorial rights issues, Will Territorial Sales Become Obsolete?, moderated by Janklow & Nesbit rights director Cullen Stanley, showed some small shifts in thinking about English-language international sales. The always entertaining Andrew Franklin, president of Profile Books, got a laugh by pointing out that the structure of today’s contracts goes back to 1947: “The British had lost their empire, they kept everything that had been their empire and gave the US the rest. It has to go. The open market is absolutely a legacy of the physical book and it has to go.” Asked if he would prefer […]
Data Day at DBW
The second day of Digital Book World began with a block of three data presentations on consumer habits with respect to ebook purchases and ereading devices. (To be clear, we have cheated: since 92 percent of conference attendees and reporters find big presentations of data hard to take in, and take down, on the fly, the three presenters let us look over their slides in advance, which is the basis of this report.) Verso Digital conducted a new survey of book acquisition habits, this time looking at both purchasing and borrowing together–in print, digital and a mixture of the two–in […]