Nan Vermylen Thornton will join Zachary Shuster Harmsworth as an agent. Previously, she was in-house counsel practicing copyright law at Pearson Education. The January Pennie’s Pick at Costco is BOSTON GIRL by Anita Diamant. More Best of 2014 lists keep coming in as the year draws to a close. Vanity Fair offers “11 Best Books of 2014 You Can Spend 2015 Reading” while the SF Chronicle‘s Top 10 list leads off with current “Best of the Best” fiction frontrunner ALL THE LIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr. On that theme, the NYT recently featured Anthony Doerr’s long journey to […]
Archives for December 2014
BN Buys Back Pearson Shares in Nook, Too
When Barnes & Noble bought back Microsoft’s 16.8 percent stake in Nook Media earlier this month for $125 million in cash and stock, they gave Pearson an option to sell back their Nook shares as well. In a filing with the SEC Tuesday morning, BN announced they purchased Pearson’s stake on December 22 for $13.75 million and 602,927 shares of its common stock. The buyback is at the same reduced valuation as the Microsoft repurchase, down from the $89.5 million Pearson paid in 2012 for their 5 percent stake in Nook Media. The deal is what ceo Michael Huseby earlier termed a “tag-along right” that […]
Osprey Is Sold to Bloomsbury
The unwinding of Osprey Publishing is complete with the announcement Monday that the company has been sold to Bloomsbury for £4.6 million in cash and stock. (Of that, £3.2 million is in cash, paid to private equity owners Alcuin Capital.) Bloomsbury says the business had sales of £7 million in 2013, over half of which comes from outside of the UK — mostly in the US — with almost no profit. Bloomsbury was considered a leading candidate to buy Osprey, mentioned along with Hachette UK in October. In June Osprey closed their Strange Chemistry Exhibit A imprints and the company was engaged […]
A Holiday Free Trial At PM
As work quiets down for the end of the year, we are offering one of our infrequent free trial periods at PublishersMarketplace.com. The daily newsletters will taper down to “as needed” for the next week or two, but any news and deal reports we have will still be added regularly at PM. Plus this is a great chance to explore all of our features and big, proprietary databases at your leisure: More than 20,000 individual Dealmakers pages; over 90,000 deal transactions; thousands of contacts (now integrated right into Dealmakers as well) and deep databases of bestseller lists (with special markings […]
Nearly Final: Doerr Still Leads Among the Best of the Best Books of 2014
We’ll be back one more time in early 2015 once all of the final “best books of the year” lists are published (the latest is James Wood’s favorites), but as we near the end, our aggregated ranking of the best of all the “best books of 2014” has — as usual — yielded two quite solid lists of top fiction and nonfiction. Anthony Doerr’s novel remains in the lead for “book of the year” and Roz Chast’s book retains a comfortable lead among nonfiction titles: Top 10 Fiction of 2014 1. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (20) 2. Station […]
People: Peter Wiley to Retire from Board Chair
John Wiley chairman Peter Booth Wiley announced that he intends to retire from that position as of September 2015, when his term expires, though he will maintain his board seat. Current director and former group president at Pitney Bowes Matthew Kissner has been nominated to take over as chair. Peter Wiley has held the position since 2002, when he took over from his brother Bradford Wiley II. While this breaks the Wiley family’s tenure at the top, he indicates that is temporary: “Although I am stepping down as Chairman after twelve years, the Wiley family remains committed to its leadership […]