At Writers House, Stephen Barr has been promoted to senior agent. Brian Jud will take over as executive director of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN) on January 1, following the resignation of Brad Flora. Jud is an author, book-marketing consultant, seminar leader, television host and a partner in Premium Book Company. Rachel Burkot has been named assistant editor for Harlequin Romantic Suspense. Danielle Plafsky will join Knopf as assistant marketing manager on January 2. Previously she was a marketing associate for Harper. Daniel L. Knotts has been named coo of R.R. Donnelley, replacing John R. Paloian, who is retiring after over 25 […]
Archives for December 2012
New Pew eReading Survey Shows eBook Reading Increases as Print Readership Declines
Pew Research’s latest e-reading survey, released Thursday, added still more context on various trends among those who read electronically in 2012. Of the over 2500 Americans aged 16 or older surveyed between October and November 2012, a little fewer than one-quarter (or 23 percent) reported that they have read an ebook in the past year, up from 16 percent in the previous year. According to the Pew survey, the likeliest ebook readers are those with college or graduate degrees (42 percent of those surveyed), those who live in households earning more than $75,000 (44 percent), and those whose ages fall […]
Pearson Invests $89.5 Million In Nook Media, After Disappointing Holiday
Nook Media–the entity formed in 2012 that owns Barnes & Noble’s Nook business and their college bookstores–has its second major strategic investor, joining Microsoft: As of December 21 Pearson agreed to invest $89.5 in cash for a 5 percent equity stake. The bookseller paired an announcement about that investment with a preview of holiday sales that indicates “results will be below expectations” and Nook in particular will not meet their previous projections for the fiscal year. Perhaps because of that performance, Pearson is buying in to Nook Media at essentially the same the valuation given to the company when Microsoft […]
Shanks to Stay On After Merger
Penguin USA ceo David Shanks has written to clarify the allegation from legal documents in September we referenced yesterday to a plan for him to step down in early 2014, now vowing to stay on as Penguin faces their merger with Random House. “I find the potential for this venture to be so exciting that I want to state for the record that, as of this time, I have no intention of leaving publishing any time soon,” Shanks writes. The previous report referred to “an internal succession plan that assumed that this scenario would occur if a certain set of circumstances […]
What to Expect (Or Not)
It’s time for our annual moment of confusion: we would like to stop working entirely until it’s 2013, like a good portion of the publishing world, but the news rarely takes a full vacation (as evidenced by the last few day’s dispatches). So you should expect occasional email service over the next week and a half, as the news–and our deal reports–dictate. Most likely we will only mail Publishers Lunch Deluxe to paid subscribers and corporate clients, while the shorter “free Lunch” rests. PublishersMarketplace.com works 24/7 and our news clips (with RSS and Twitter feeds) will keep track of what’s […]
HarperCollins Financials Revealed As Part of News Corp Spinoff Procedure
With News Corp.’s proposed spinoff of its publishing unit, aka New News Corp (the other division will be renamed Fox Group) moving forward, the company filed proxy documents with the SEC late Thursday outlining the scope of the proposed spinoff and revealing financial performance data for HarperCollins, after holding back on numbers ever since the close of fiscal 201o. For the most recent quarter, which ended September 30 (their fiscal first quarter), Harper reported sales of $352 million, up 17 percent from $301 million in 2011–largely because of the acqusition of Thomas Nelson in July, at the beginning of the […]