We’re feeling pleasantly pre-adolescent this week as we officially celebrate the twelfth anniversary of PublishersMarketplace.com. As always, it’s hard to believe what a longer-than-expected journey this has become. It remains a privilege to serve and be part of a professional community we love, and your support and participation are the driving reasons for our existence. The founding mission of our site remains the same — to help people in publishing find each other and do business together through the internet (later refined to “solving information problems and creating information opportunities for book publishing professionals”). As does our founding promise, to […]
Archives for November 2013
People, Etc.
Laura Ferguson will join Open Road Media later this month as vp, special markets. Previously, she was director of premium, corporate and customer driven publishing at Simon & Schuster. Emily Keyes has joined Foreword Literary as an agent. Previously she was an agent at the L. Perkins Agency. French spy novelist Gerard de Villiers, 83, died Thursday in Paris of pancreatic cancer. De Villiers was the author of 200 novels featuring CIA contractor Malko Linge, the first appearing in 1964 and the last published in France last month. Five of his novels will be published by Vintage beginning in 2014, […]
Zola Announces More Funders; Harper Enhances with An App
Start-up Zola Books has raised another $3.9 million in financing, “to grow [their] engineering and strategic partnership initiatives.” (The $5.1 million figure you might have seen includes previous funding.) New named investors include Cablevision founder Charles Dolan, Bob Kohn, Jeff Pulver, David Placek, director Paul Saltzman (Prom Night in Mississippi); Peter Sundman, and early-stage investor fund Radcliff Group. More authors connected to Zola founder Joe Regal’s literary agency have also participated, with Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram) and Martin Clark joining previous participants including Audrey Niffenegger and Josh Bazell. Zola has acquired exclusive ebook rights for five backlist works by Joan […]
A New Name for Random House Mondadori
Now that Penguin Random House owns all of the Spanish-language company founded and still operating as Random House Mondadori, they are taking the logical step of renaming the unit. It will be called Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. Additionally, the group’s Literatura Mondadori imprint will change its name to Literatura Random House. Aside from the new names, there are no other changes at the division, which remains under the leadership of ceo Núria Cabutí. She says in the announcement, “Today we begin our life as Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, bringing with us the fantastic legacy of our history in Spanish-language […]
Houghton IPO to Start Trading November 14; Chegg Offering Coming, Too
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt formally announced their planned IPO on Friday, offering 18.25 million shares (with another 2.7 million shares on option to the underwriters for overallotments) at an expected price of $14 to $16 a share. The stock, listing on the NASDAQ under the symbol HMHC, is expected to start trading on November 14. The official investor roadshow begins next Monday. The underwriters are putting the approximate deal size at $275 million, at the midpoint of the expected pricing. As indicated previously, the company itself will receive no proceeds from the offering, which is designed to let their long-suffering investors […]
Today’s Kindle Offer (and New Amazon Imprint, Lake Union)
It was only a week ago that Larry Kirshbaum’s coming departure from Amazon Publishing was widely misreported as a “scaling back” of the company’s sprawling publishing initiatives. Now, capping off a week of announcement, Amazon is inviting Prime members to buy one of their own books (from Amazon Publishing) “in advance of the official release date” for just $1.99. It’s all artifice, since Amazon is setting that official release date as the publisher, and setting all the prices and discounts (the inaugural titles have listed pre-order prices of $4.99), but it’s another way of pulling some levers on their own […]