On Wednesday morning, Hachette Book Group issued another statement in reply to Amazon’s Tuesday night post: “It is good to see Amazon acknowledge that its business decisions significantly affect authors’ lives,” they open. “For reasons of their own, Amazon has limited its customers’ ability to buy more than 5,000 Hachette titles.” As for Amazon’s public offer to share the acknowledged impact on authors, HBG says: “Once we have reached…an agreement, we will be happy to discuss with Amazon its ideas about compensating authors for the damage its demand for improved terms may have done them, and to pass along any […]
Archives for May 2014
Beyond BEA, Digital Book World 2015 Announces First Keynotes
Looking a few big events down the road, our conference partners at Digital Book World have officially opened for registration the sixth annual conference, to be held January 13 – 15, 2015 in New York. Today’s announcement includes some of conference’s broad themes, as well as the first group of timely keynote speakers. Already on the docket are top CEOs — Brian Murray of HarperCollins (which recently announced their planned acquisition of Harlequin) and Linda Zecher of recently-public Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (the first part of an expanded look at ed tech and other education-related issues) — and two top authors, […]
From the Archives: Macmillan’s “Kindle Outage Adjustment”
Amazon’s statement Tuesday night indicated that they “offered to Hachette to fund 50 percent of an author pool – to be allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50 percent” and it added that “we did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago.” We received a number of queries thereafter, from people who did not recall Macmillan’s Kindle Outage Adjustment. The publisher started making the additional payments to authors in 2010, and Macmillan ceo John Sargent wrote about it in a letter to agents and authors that […]
Fall/Winter BEA Book Buzz Preview: Fiction
As usual, our free Buzz Books samplers both open with Sarah Weinman’s broader surveys of over 100 notable books from the forthcoming season. We’ll be running portions of those overviews the next few days to help round out your BEA radar — and you can read the complete previews anytime in the new editions of Buzz Books. Download yours now from any major ebookstore — including Kindle, iBookstore, or Nook — or get the “trade edition” here as an EPUB or through NetGalley or Edelweiss. With thousands of downloads already, it’s the “big book” of BEA, letting you grab 30 […]
With Flat Sales and Bigger Loss, Indigo Sees Improvement on the Horizon
Canada’s dominant bookseller Indigo reported fiscal fourth quarter sales (for the period ending March 29, 2014). Sales nudged up marginally, at $184.3 million CA, but the net loss of $14.4 million was much higher than the loss of $8.2 million a year ago. Those “higher expenses were primarily driven by investments made in relation to the company’s ongoing transformational strategy.” Online sales increased by $2.8 million, or 13.1 percent in the quarter, and same-store sales were up 1.4 percent in their superstores, but fell 3.1 percent in the small-format stores. In a note opening the annual report, ceo Heather Reisman […]
People: Maya Angelou, 86, Dies
Award-winning author, renowned poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, 86, died at her home in Winston-Salem, NC early Wednesday morning. She had been in failing health for some time, cancelling an awards appearance several days earlier. “She’d been very frail and had heart problems, but she was going strong, finishing a new book,” Angelou’s agent Helen Brann told ABC News. “I spoke to her yesterday. She was fine, as she always was. Her spirit was indomitable.” Angelou was the author of more than 30 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most notably I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS […]