Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the latest pick for the Today Book Club. Hachette Book Group filed suit against Stephen Baldwin in New York Supreme Court, seeking to recover a $110,000 advance against a nonfiction originally due in 2009 that they say he never delivered. Harper UK is setting up a new fiction imprint, within their Harper Fiction division, called The Borough Press. Launching in 2014 — and publishing their already-announced Austen Project that has well-known authors retelling Jane Austen’s classics — it is led by Katie Espiner. As part of a reorganization that consolidates all […]
Archives for October 2013
Self-Publishing Grows Again, Of Course, But We Still Don’t Know How Big It Is
Bowker released their statistics for the output of new self-published titles in the US in 2012 — though as usual, they can only track books that carried ISBNs. That total — 391,000 titles — was up significantly over the 235,000 titles reported for 2011. As in the past, the top four producers accounted for over 80 percent of all the ISBN-carrying self-published titles. In order, the top producers are: CreateSpace (the biggest gainer) Smashwords (moving up into second) Lulu (moving up into third) Author Solutions But the Bowker counts do not include the vast pool — an unspecified hundreds of […]
Books Versus Other and the Rise of eBooks, Around the World
By next year (if not by now already) more than half of all books will be purchased online in the US rather than in physical stores, and Amazon executive Russ Grandinetti told the audience at Publishers Launch Frankfurt that the UK is only another year away — and he believes the same trend is “not more than three years” away for most of “the rest of Europe.” (At the same time, however, Bowker US survey data for the first half of 2013 actually shows online sales actually declining by a few percentage points, for the first time — though that […]
People, Etc.
Melina Gerosa Bellows has been promoted to publisher of National Geographic Books, adding responsibility for sales, marketing and distribution to her current role as National Geographic’s chief creative officer for Books, Kids and Family. Ken Rhodes has been promoted to managing director, NBN International. Will Lach is joining the American Museum of Natural History as director, licensing and publishing. Previously he was manager of product development, Department of Printed Product, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, Ross Harris has been promoted to literary agent. At Harper Children’s, Melissa Miller has been promoted to editor […]
Forthcoming: Nobel Literature Prize Announced Thursday; Morning Joe Hosts For National Book Awards; Russell Novella Leads Atavist Books List; and More
Just in time for Frankfurt, the Nobel Prize for Literature will announce its winner on Thursday, October 10, at 7 AM EDT. The National Book Awards will be hosted by “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, Crain’s reported in advance of this morning’s official announcement. The show will also announce the award shortlists on October 16, repeating the same gambit as last year. Perseus ceo and National Book Foundation chairman David Steinberger said of Morning Joe duo, “If you want to reach the broader culture, they are the perfect vehicle”, but he is also their publisher (via Perseus […]
S&S and Yilin Press Partner for Broader Availability of Mandarin-Language Titles
Simon & Schuster has entered into a new distribution and publishing agreement with Yilin Press in China that will expand the availability of electronic editions of works in Mandarin for readers worldwide, while also making works by notable Chinese authors available to English-language audiences. The digital distribution project will launch in November with 300 titles, including Mandarin translations of Yann Martel’s THE LIFE OF PI, THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen, UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo and THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing. In addition, the S&S trade imprint has acquired world English rights to a number of fiction and nonfiction titles […]