Media and entertainment industry executive Lauren Zalaznick has been appointed as the first independent board member of Penguin Random House. Zalaznick currently publishes The LZ Sunday Paper, a newsletter about women in business, media, and culture, and previously held a variety of leadership positions during a 12-year career at NBCUniversal, including president of Bravo Media; president of NBCUniversal Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks (including Oxygen and Telemundo); and evp, chairman of entertainment, digital networks and integrated media. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is creating HMH Labs, an incubation effort “designed to fuel innovation and growth in education through the ideation, experimentation and rapid […]
Archives for October 2014
Bookspan Plans Book-of-the-Month Club Relaunch, and Adds Affiliated Publishing Lines
Still the largest family of book clubs in the US, Bookspan has been quietly at work on ambitious new plans, PL has learned. A few months ago, with little fanfare, their “flagship” Book of the Month Club went dormant as a stand-alone club, integrating BOMC members in the companion club, The Literary Guild. (As best we can determine, the transition happened around August 1. The Wayback Machine last captured a BOMC home page in late July, and by August 7 the page was redirecting to the Literary Guild, which welcomed the old BOMC members. Also, the BOMC Facebook page went […]
People, Etc.
Tara Singh Carlson will formally move over to Putnam as senior editor. She will acquire hardcover titles for the Putnam list, while continuing to acquire trade paperback originals for Penguin, which will “predominantly” issue the paperbacks of her Putnam hardcovers as well. Joan Didion is the subject of a documentary film in progress, “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live,” co-directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne and Susanne Rostock. After shooting more than 60 hours of footage — largely with Didion — Dunne and Rostock’s company Rava Films has launched a Kickstarter campaign seeking a minimum of $80,000 in funding […]
An Early Start to the “Best of” Lists
It’s hard to believe, but the “best books of 2014” lists have already started. Perhaps looking to get the jump on PW — which always likes to go early at the beginning of November — Library Journal has posted their reviewers’ top 10, along with “more of the best” and various focused lists. (But they are saving the annotated printed version for their December issue.) And Canada’s dominant bookseller Indigo has also made their choices already. LJ’s top ten: An Untamed State, Roxane Gay No Place To Hide, Glenn Greenwald Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World […]
Bookstore News, Good and Bad
The forthcoming issue of Vanity Fair features Bruce Handy chronicling the life of the late owner of Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore, “the eccentric, irascible, and visionary George Whitman,” and looking at “Shakespeare’s greatest asset in the age of Amazon: Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia.” Downtown Greenville, SC will get a downtown bookstore, in a planned renovation of the Greenville County Family Court building. To be called M. Judson, already two years in the making with months more to go, the store is being created by local author Ashley Warlick, publisher of Edible Upcountry magazine Samantha Wallace, and owner of Booksmith in […]
Digital Startups Bought and/or Closed in 2014
With our story on the closing of Atavist Books, it’s helpful to examine the larger picture of the digital publishing start-up space. In response to a reader query, here is a look at 2014 activity, which breaks into two categories: Companies acquired and/or closed in distress or decline, and those acquired opportunistically, drawn from our comprehensive list of M&A activity throughout the year: Acquired and/or Closed In Distress in 2014 Atavist Books (closing) > IAC/Atavist Inc. Angry Robot > Etan Ilfeld Byliner.com > Vook Red Room (closed) > Wattpad Readmill (closed) > Dropbox Anobii > Mondadori Bilbary > liquidating CourseSmart > […]