World Book Night announced that special editions of Solomon Northup’s public domain book Twelve Years a Slave will be given free to schools for distribution as part of World Book Night on April 23. Executive director Carl Lennertz notes, “One third of our half million free books each year go into underfunded rural and urban high schools, and when Dover Publications offered to work with us on this, we jumped at the chance.”
In other announcements, Vintage announced that the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has sold 100 million units worldwide. Vintage itself has sold over 45 million units in the US. Arrow Books has sold over 27 million units in the UK/Commonwealth, and one million copies or more of their editions in Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, and The Netherlands. Even in the 2013, US sales topped 5 million units.
The Frankfurt Book Fair announced that Georgia will be the guest of honor nation in 2018. FBF director Juergen Boos says in the announcement, “It’s particularly appealing for us to be able to support the Georgian publishing scene in their preparations over the next four years, precisely because we have never worked with such a ‘young’ book market before.”
In personnel news, Casey McIntyre will join Razorbill on March 5 in the new position of associate publisher. She was most recently publicity manager at Harper Children’s Books.
After a little over a year as svp, consumer insight for HarperCollins, David Boyle is moving to the BBC Worldwide Brands team as evp of insight.
The University of New Orleans Press will now be distributed by Hopkins Fulfillment Services as of May 1. Previously UNO Press was distributed by the National Book Network.
In a typo, we mistakenly dropped one digit from the pub date for Timothy Geithner‘s STRESS TEST, which releases May 13,