The ABA has hired publishing veteran Joy Dallanegra-Sanger for the new position of senior program officer. The organization’s ceo Oren Teicher says she will “help ABA focus on areas of particular and immediate importance to indie booksellers, especially in advancing our ongoing discussions regarding new business models and in helping to promote children’s bookselling.” Most recently, she was svp and director of marketing at Macmillan Children’s. BTW Camila Enrich Schroder in Barcelona has started scouting the Spanish-speaking territories for Cappelen Damm in Norway and Grupo Editorial Record in Brazil. Penguin has a new agreement with Quad/Graphics for short-run and print-on-demand […]
Archives for November 2011
Obituaries: Publishers Philipson and Grier
Director of the University of Chicago Press for more than 30 years and author Morris Philipson, 85, died at home yesterday of congestive heart failure. When Philipson retired in 2000, he had helped the press grow from $4 million in sales to $40 million. The Chicago Tribune says a public memorial service is being planned, likely for January. Tribune Barbara Grier, 78, a founder of Tallahassee-based Naiad Press, died of cancer yesterday. Author Katherine Forrest tells the AP, “It would be hard to imagine a more significant figure in the growth and development of lesbian publishing in the 20th century […]
S&S Shifts Sales & Marketing Focus To Digital, Cuts Sales Positions
Simon & Schuster is creating a dedicated digital sales team as well as a new retail sales force comprised of national accounts, field sales and telemarketing. The company is also pursuing what ceo Carolyn Reidy calls an “even greater focus on marketing, at both the imprint and the corporate level.” New marketing staff will be added to each of the company’s imprints, and the children’s marketing team will move back to the children’s division. Liz Perl will now report directly to Reidy, and the company’s digital group under Ellie Hirschhorn will add “responsibility for our corporate social media efforts, and […]
Paolini Sales Nearly 500k; Isaacson Sells A Lot
Random House Children’s reports another very strong opening day for Christopher Paolini, with INHERITANCE selling 489,500 units yesterday (including print, ebook and audio editions), it’s first day on sale. The publisher says “hardcovers dominated the opening-day sell-through, with an 83/17 percent print to digital split.” Paolini’s BRISINGR sold approximately 550,000 units on opening day in the US in September 2008, back when Borders was still operating. In other sales news, Simon & Schuster continues to demur regarding any reporting of sales over the past two weeks for Walter Isaacson’s STEVE JOBS biography. But we’ve spoken to few executives familiar with […]
The Books In the Kindle Lending Library
As we’ve been reporting and Amazon Prime customers have learned directly, browsing the Kindle Lending Library in full is difficult and understanding the entire contents of the 5,386-title collection has been unachievable–until now. Our data team has extracted and analyzed a nearly-complete compilation of all but 150 titles in that entire library. (For technical reasons we couldn’t scrape that last little bit; our analysis covers 5,237 titles.) So who is included and how many titles are represented? We have divided our results into three groups. The first is either known or presumed to directly licensed their titles to Amazon on […]
RLJ Equity Partners Acquires Parent Company of LJ, SLJ and Horn Book
Media Source Inc., the parent company of Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Horn Book and the Junior Library Guild, was sold to RLJ Equity Partners, one of the hedge funds created by Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson. 21st Century Group, LLC and New Canaan Funding Mezzanine, LLC also took part in the deal, for which terms were not disclosed. LJ and SLJ had been acquired by Media Source in early 2010; Media Source was in turn previously owned by Riverside Company, which bought them in 2007. Media Source had been on the block for a while, according […]