It’s time for our annual look at trends in dealmaking from the previous, based as usual on reports to Publishers Marketplace. Which comes with the usual qualifiers: PM deal reports represent only a portion of activity in the marketplace, and characterizations of deal size in particular are dependent upon disclosure from the parties involved. We infer relatively consistent habits over time from our community, and the PM dataset of deals is the only such resource robust enough to analyze over time. To us, the granular year-to-year changes are more indicative than anything else. Once again, total recorded deal volume increased, […]
Archives for January 2013
Print Sales Fall Over 9 Percent In US, 3.4 Percent In UK
US print book sales as tracked by Nielsen BookScan fell 9.3 percent in units for 2012. The biggest decline came from the smallest format segment, mass market books, where unit sales fell 20.5 percent. Trade paperbacks weakened more than hardcovers during the year. (Nielsen BookScan does not currently track US ebook sales.) In the UK, Nielsen BookScan’s data shows consumer expenditures on physical books fell 4.6 percent for the year, to £1.514, with unit sales declining 3.4 percent to 202 million books. With 10.6 million print copies sold during the year, EL James accounted for one out of every 20 […]
People
Charlie Conrad will join Gotham Books as executive editor, starting January 7. He had been vp and executive editor at Crown, and worked at Random House Inc. and Bantam Doubleday Dell for 22 years. F+W Media chief financial officer Jim Ogle has been promoted and adds the additional title of chief operations officer. He has responsibility for all financial functions of the company, as well as all legal matters, production, information technology, and logistics, and “will play a significant role in the development and execution of the company’s strategic plan.” In Germany, Blessing editorial director Tilo Eckardt will join Swiss-based Mohrbooks […]
Briefs: Safari Online Acquires Pub Factory; Foyles Holiday Sales Drop
Safari Books Online acquired PubFactory, which builds systems for delivering books, videos, reference, and other content on the web, from RDW Group’s iFactory division for an undisclosed sum. The deal closed on Decmeber 31, 2012. Under the agreement, Safari Books Online now owns the proprietary software developed by iFactory, which is used to develop scalable and semantically rich electronic libraries for publishers. “For some time now, we’ve admired the PubFactory team’s expertise in building powerful web-based systems for delivering mixed content like books, videos, journals, and reference databases. Their platform will be a robust complement to our growing stable of […]
Conklin Tops February Indie Next List
The ABA has released their Indie Next picks for February. In the meantime, Bookateria features the January picks–with books by George Saunders, Jojo Moyes, Sean Pidgeon, and Jeff Backhaus drawing critical praise (and landing on other booksellers’ January lists). You can also view all of the 2012 No. 1 picks. No. 1: The House Girl: A Novel, by Tara Conklin The Dinner: A Novel, by Herman Koch Ghostman: A Novel, by Roger Hobbs Schroder: A Novel, by Amity Gaige The Aviator’s Wife: A Novel, by Melanie Benjamin Indiscretion: A Novel, by Charles Dubow The Lost Art of Mixing: A Novel, by Erica […]
Transworld Won’t Publish UK Edition of Lawrence Wright’s Scientology Book After All
GOING CLEAR, the book-length investigation into Scientology by LOOMING TOWER author Lawrence Wright, will be published on January 17 by Knopf in the US, but the UK edition will not go forward as planned. The NYT reported as part of a profile on Wright that Transworld “recently canceled its plans to publish GOING CLEAR, though a spokeswoman insisted that the decision was not made in response to threats from the church.” Transworld spokesperson Patsy Irwin told the Bookseller “We’ve decided [GOING CLEAR] doesn’t fit in with our schedule.” The Wylie Agency is selling UK rights to the book, but had not […]