At today’s Publishers Launch Conference on Book Publishing In the Cloud, Hachette Book Group chief operating officer Ken Michaels announced three software-as-a-service offerings that the publisher developed for their own use and will now make available for license by other publishers, “allowing the industry to take advantage of our innovations.” BookRadar, developed with and now marketed by CoEnterprise, lets publishers automatically monitor how their digital titles are displayed on key retailer sites. It highlights discrepancies (or compliance) in pricing as well on sale availability and release dates–compared to the publisher’s own ONIX data–and creates vendor performance scorecards. Separately, it also […]
Archives for July 2012
People, Etc.
At Italy’s Garzanti Libri, editorial director Oliviero Ponte di Pino has resigned after more than 20 years there. Paolo Zaninoni, who has been editorial director of Rizzoli and BUR since 2003, will take over at a time to be announced. As part of the reorganization director of Garzanti foreign fiction Elisabetta Migliavada will also serve as director of Italian fiction. Nellie Kurtzman will join Little, Brown Books for Young Readers as vp, marketing. She was most recently director of digital and trade marketing at Disney/Hyperion. At PS Literary Agency, Irene Merritt has been named literary assistant. World Book Night US confirmed that their campaign will return […]
McGraw-Hill Has Second Straight Quarter of “Record” Profits
McGraw-Hill reported second quarter earnings Thursday morning. Adjusted net income from continuing operations was $243 million, up 15 percent and ahead of estimates in what was another “record” quarter for the company. Sales dropped 1 percent to $1.55 billion for the quarter. The education division recorded sales of $474 million, down 12 percent, while net profit, at $57 million, was a 36 percent improvement compared to a year ago–helped, they say, by the restructuring at the end of the last year as well as “ongoing tight expense management.” The company adds, as they did in the previous quarter, that the […]
Random House Adds Television Development Unit, In Partnership with Bertelsmann’s FremantleMedia
Random House has announced formal details about their planned expansion into television development that was mentioned in February, following coverage of Random House Films branching out beyond their exclusive deal with Focus Features to produce and develop books into movies with multiple partners. The new Random House Television unit has a first-look deal with Bertelsmann’s FremantleMedia for TV programming based on Random House books. Jeffrey Levine has been hired as head of television for Random House Television, reporting to Peter Gethers–president of the rebranded film and tv division now officially rebranded as Random House Studio– and working out of FremantleMedia’s […]
Booker Longlist Announced
The Booker Prize announced its longlist of a dozen books. The list will be winnowed to six on September 11, with the winner announced on October 16. The full list, including US publishers where applicable, or known: The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre/Bloomsbury, March 2013) Philida by André Brink (Harvill Secker) The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books/Weinstein Books, Fall 2012) Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber/Metropolitan) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday/Random House) Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories) Bring […]
A Closer Look at What BookStats Says About the Trade (It’s Still Flat)
Now that BookStats has released some additional data to their paying subscribers, we’re allowed to provide deeper coverage of our own of their “extrapolations” of revenue shifts across trade publishing. (Our first story is here.) As a standing reminder, we subtract religious book sales of roughly $1.5 billion from the BookStats “trade” data. So all of the data you see below is our own modification and analysis of tables generously provided by BookStats. And this all derives from two relatively simple spreadsheets; the BookStats full annual report and electronic digital dashboard provide a wealth of additional, highly granular data across […]