Deal-watchers will take particular note of two reported buys for Amazon’s budding New York-based publishing unit. Liao Yiwu, who escaped from China this summer, is moving to Amazon from Harper One, for his account of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, FOR A SONG AND A HUNDRED SONGS: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison. Gregg Housh and Barrett Brown’s ANONYMOUS, covered while on submission by the Observer, has been bought by Julia Cheiffetz for Amazon. The book is pitched as “Barbarians at the Gate” for the digital era, the story of the ordinary people who became hacker-activists and successfully brought […]
Archives for September 2011
Audible Lines Up Film Stars for Audiobooks; Hay House Launches Film/TV Divisions
Audible is going Hollywood, enlisting a number of accomplished actors–including Annette Bening, Colin Firth, Dustin Hoffman and Kate Winslet–to narrate a new line of audiobooks, featuring many classic works selected by the performers. Scheduled for release beginning in early 2012, the offerings include these pairings: Kim Basinger (The Awakening by Kate Chopin) Annette Bening (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolfe) Jennifer Connelly (The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles) Colin Firth (The End of the Affair by Graham Greene) Anne Hathaway (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum) Dustin Hoffman (Being There by Jerzy Kosinski) Samuel L. Jackson (A Rage […]
People, Etc.
At Basic Books, editorial director since 2007 Lara Heimert has been promoted to editorial and publishing director. In her new role she will play a larger role in the presentation and publication of the imprint’s books while freeing Basic Book Group publisher John Sherer to concentrate on the new Perseus digital marketing initiatives and to focus on the efforts at Westview Press and Nation Books. At Little, Brown Children’s, both Connie Hsu and Kate Sullivan have been promoted to editor. Liz Gately begins scouting for De Boekerij and Meulenhoff in the Netherlands as of October 1. Books-A-Million has hired Tyler Novak as general counsel. […]
Julian Assange WikiLeaks Canongate
It will come as no great surprise that Julian Assange has released correspondence with Canongate and purported transcripts of apparently-taped phone calls with Canongate publisher Jamie Byng. Though Canongate published the unauthorized draft in part due to admitted “financial imperative,” according to an email from Assange’s agent Caroline Michel, by going ahead with publication, Canongate now is obligated to pay Assange, “in accordance with the agreement, the remaining amounts of £225,000 on delivery of the complete manuscript and £175,000 on first UK publication.” (That should provide enough to pay back Knopf and still leave some for Assange.) As we noted […]
Strong Start for O’Reilly’s Lincoln Book
Holt is celebrating strong first-day sales for Bill O’Reilly’s KILLING LINCOLN, a departure for the television host and his first book for the house, reuniting with his publisher from Random House, Steve Rubin. The publisher says the opening day sales alone were in excess of O’Reilly’s first-week sales on his last two hardcover releases, indicating combined print and ebook sales in excess of 30,000 units, and day two sales “are keeping apace.” Rubin says “contemporary times makes it something people really want to read. He feels like Lincoln was a great leader, and what we lack now is leadership.” O’Reilly […]
New Kindles for UK and Germany
We kept refreshing and updating our Amazon story yesterday, so a couple of details were missing from certain editions. A UK version of the least expensive regular Kindle–the non-touchscreen model–is available for pre-order, for release on October 12, at £89 (or roughly $140). A German version is priced at 99 euros. Both are ad-free models. Most press still missed out on the real prices of ad-free touchscreen Kindles: $139 for Touch and $189 for Touch Global 3G. The former is the same as the Nook Touch launched earlier this year. Kobo’s touchscreen device is $129, and their non-touchscreen reader is […]