Our Publishers Launch Conference BEA, on Wednesday, May 29 aims to bypass the usual cross-section of digital fragments and aim straight at the issues on people’s minds and of greatest strategic consequence right now. So we’ll evaluate the coming Penguin Random House merger from a number of angles, along with Amazon’s ever-growing footprint — all of which leads to our major theme of assessing scale in its many forms. Scale isn’t just about size, though. It’s about leverage and resources (not just financial ones) and how you deploy them to strategic advantage. And it’s about deciding which core functions and […]
Archives for May 2013
People
Clay Farr will join Basic Books as vp, associate publisher & marketing director later this month. He spent the past nine years at Perseus, most recently as vp, group marketing, and also served on Basic’s editorial board. At Crown, Rachel Meier has been named managing editor for the Crown trade, Broadway Books, and Hogarth imprints. Previously she was marketing manager for Crown Trade. Summer Smith has joined Bloomsbury as associate director of publicity. Previously she was publicity manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Emily van Beek has been promoted senior vice president at Folio Jr., the children’s division of Folio Literary […]
Preparing for Trial: New Documents and Details from the DOJ
The Department of Justice has organized and called attention to a raft of recently filed documents in connection with the pending June 3 trial in the ebook price fixing case, and the official court docket has still more documents — hundreds of pages worth — from Apple, Penguin, the States and more. As one preparatory document indicates, “the parties expect that the trial will last 3 to 4 weeks” (or 12 to 16 trial days). In the government’s new pretrial memorandum of law, their allegations and narrative has become more focused, and enriched with citations from the copious depositions of […]
BookStats Posits That Trade Grew Almost 7 Percent in 2012, Thanks to eBooks
BookStats has released selected industry data for 2012 Wednesday morning and supplemented that release in an initial presentation at the Making Information Pay conference held at NYU. The full data dashboard will be released to paying clients next week, and the entire formal report will be issued in June. Consistent with separate data already reported by the AAP, it was a positive year for trade publishing overall. BookStats puts overall trade publisher sales at $15.05 billion, up $969 million or 6.9 percent. Virtually all of that growth comes from ebooks rather than print books. They estimate the entire publishing business […]
Lagardere Publishing Rises On Strong Quarter In US and France
Lagardere Publishing rebounded in the first quarter of 2013, with sales of 419 million euros up 6.6 percent (or 25 million euros) on a topline basis, and up 7.9 percent according to the company’s like-for-like comparison. Hachette Book Group USA was a bright spot (following a soft holiday quarter to end 2012), up 14.9 percent, thanks to “a host of new works” and strong backlist film tie-ins including Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks, Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, and A Story Of God And All Of Us by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey. “As usual, sales of […]
People, Etc.
Joe Perez has joined the Random House Publishing Group as senior art director. Previously he was art director at Portfolio. At Atheneum, Emma Ledbetter has been promoted to assistant editor. Kerri Buckley has joined Carina Press as editor. Previously she was a product manager at Christopher Radko/Rauch Industries and before then, editor at Ballantine Bantam Dell. At Goodreads, Patrick Brown has been promoted to director of author marketing. In addition, Cynthia Shannon has been named author marketing coordinator. Previously she was communications manager at Berrett-Koehler. Fiona Brown has joined Little, Brown as senior publicist. Previously, she was at Riverhead. In the UK, […]