Chelsea Green Publishing has appointed Dave Rapaport as associate publisher and chief operating officer, effective July 1. He held senior positions with green household care products pioneer, Seventh Generation, and prior to that was a business and project development executive with Northern Power Systems and East Haven Windfarm. Random House India has hired Meru Gokhale as editorial director, Vintage India, charged with growing “a prestigious list of literary fiction and non-fiction.” Meru was senior commissioning editor at Penguin India. Also at the division, Milee Ashwarya is being promoted to editorial director, Ebury India, growing the list with a focus on […]
Archives for June 2011
Retail: Amazon’s Hits So Far, and Two Actual Bombs At A Colorado Borders
Amazon’s editors have announced their Best Books of the Year So Far lists. In addition to an overall Top 10 list, the etailer selects Top 10s for 12 categories of print books, and in a new twist, nine categories of Kindle books. Even on the Kindle lists, comprising 90 books in all, titles from traditional publishers dominate. The Kindle lists do include five Kindle singles (from Jon Krakauer, as well as titles by Cecelia Holland, Oliver Broudy, James Powell, and Mara Altman). The one sort-of self-published sort-of full-length title on the list is Seth Godin’s 96-page Poke the Box, from […]
Nebraska Book Co. Files for Bankruptcy with Debt Restructuring Agreements In Place
Nebraska Book Company, which has been headed towards bankruptcy at least since March in order to restructure a significant debt load, has filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware and at the same time announced agreements with their largest creditors. Though they are not calling it a prepackaged bankruptcy, the privately-owned Nebraska Book says they already have the necessary approvals from holders of over 95 percent of a debt tranche that is due in 2012 and more than 75 percent of notes that mature this December. The company says on their web site that the Chapter 11 filing is required to […]
Politico and RH Team Up for 2012 Election eBooks; Bundling; Pan Macmillan Digital Backlists; and More eNews
Politico and Random House are partnering to publish four “instant” digital books throughout the 2012 Presidential election beginning this fall. The as-yet-untitled series, with books to be in the 20,000-30,000 word range, will be reported and written by Politico chief white house correspondent and Playbook founder Mike Allen and former Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, with Jon Meacham to edit. Meacham pitches it as “a kind of Theodore White for the digital age” and tells the NYT that “an impetus here is to encourage people to think of book publishers in a more periodical way.” Politico editor-in-chief John Harris adds in […]
Lunch Weekly for Monday, June 27
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 Former editor at Houghton Mifflin and Da Capo, Wendy Francis’ THREE GOOD […]
People, Etc.
Martin H. Greenberg died June 25 after a long battle with cancer. He was 70 years old. Greenberg founded Green Bay, WI-based book packager Tekno Books, which produces about 150 titles per year and has over 2,300 published books translated into 33 languages, and was a longtime professor and the first Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1996. In nearly forty years of working in the publishing field, he also edited hundreds of anthologies, both by himself and with notable partners such as Isaac Asimov, Ed Gorman and Robert Silverberg in […]