ICM announced to employees on Friday afternoon an agreement “on principle terms to establish an agent-owned partnership for ICM,” designed to buyout the controlling stake held by Suhail Rizvi and his private equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management. The financial firm bought into ICM in 2005 for $75 million and helped finance the acquisition the following year of Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann. The agreement comes after weeks of breathless speculation from Deadline.com and other Hollywood trades, though the WSJ‘s sources “said the agents had been negotiating with Rizvi toward Friday’s deal for a month, and described it as an amicable transaction.” […]
Archives for December 2011
eNews
The Politico collaboration with Random House has its first ebook bestseller in PLAYBOOK 2012: THE RIGHT FIGHTS BACK by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas, which hit the NYT eBook Nonfiction list at No. 8 and the Combined Nonfiction list at No. 32. By our tracking, this is just the second e-only title to make the NYT’s eBook Nonfiction list, after Sarah Burleton’s WHY ME?, a self-published memoir of an abusive childhood that has been holding steady on the bottom half of the list since mid-October. The short-form Politico work is priced at $2.99. Self-published digital titles, inexpensive short-form works and […]
We Didn’t Start the Fire…
After a premature wave of reports declaring the Kindle Fire a raging success before any consumers tried it, the press is now moving to the expected next phase of coverage: discovering the problems of a first-generation device. Today’s NYT has it both ways: Fire “is less than a blazing success with many of its early users” but “it would be foolish to underestimate Amazon.” Those poor early buyers “seem to have bought it on a mixture of faith and hype.” Gosh, where would that have come from? The news in the article is that, “in less than two weeks, [Amazon […]
More Votes for The Year’s Best Books
We already listed the Washington Post‘s Top 10 books of the year, but their Sunday special section also lists their 50 notable fiction and nonfiction picks, along with their favorite kids books, photobooks, and more. The New Yorker‘s critics share their favorites of the year, about 40 books in all. The Seattle Times asked reviewers to “nominate the best book published in 2011 they reviewed for us, and the best book published in the past year that they read but didn’t review.” That yields 21 works of fiction and 11 nonfiction titles. The top vote-getters were The Sense of an Ending by […]
Agency Lawsuits Will Be Handled In New York
Agency publishers got a measure of what passes for good news in today’s climate on Friday. A judicial panel on multidistrict litigation decided on Friday that the plethora of class action suits alleging conspiracy to fix ebook prices will be consolidated under the jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York. The panel said it “will serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses and promote the just and efficient conduct of this litigation.” The panel noted that “nearly all defendants, including all publishing defendants, are located in New York City, giving it a nexus to the allegations.” And “all […]
People, Etc.
Hilary Redmon will join Ecco as executive editor, focusing on non-fiction, starting on December 19. She has been a senior editor at Free Press. Literary agent Emmanuelle Morgen will join Stonesong on January 5, representing adult and children’s fiction, including women’s fiction and romance, historical fiction, and young adult fiction, and nonfiction in the areas of psychology, pop science, self-help, and memoir. Morgen has been at Judith Ehrlich Literary Management. In the rapidly-consolidating Dutch publishing world, NDC/VBK will put its imprints Contact, Mouria and Augustus together with the two Amstel imprints LJ Veen and Atlas to form a new publishing […]