Simon & Schuster ceo Carolyn Reidy wrote to employees on Friday afternoon with her holiday wishes following “another successful year in which we enjoyed outstanding publishing across the board, in every category and from all our publishing imprints and divisions.” Much of the letter is a highlights reel, with one standout: “To my mind, the most satisfying publishing event of the year belongs to Anthony Doerr’s #1 New York Times bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, a book that we published with exceptional passion and skill, which galvanized staff across the company and at our bookseller partners, and that […]
Archives for December 2014
More Year-End Items
The Guardian has their annual feature in which they survey top UK editors, asking about their “books that deserved to do better” and the books they wish they had published. Or rather, they survey 11 men and 2 women — so Virago associate publisher Ursula Doyle has mobilized a broader look from female editors under the #hitsandmisses hashtag on Twitter. Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape goes above and beyond in listing 3 books that deserved bigger audiences in “a grim year for literary publishing”: Adam Foulds’s In the Wolf’s Mouth, Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck, and “the one that really got away,” Other People’s Countries […]
Briefs
Following Macmillan ceo John Sargent’s indication that they will, with some reluctance, “test subscription in the coming weeks,” Oyster announced that their collection now includes over 1,000 titles published by Bloomsbury. Harper UK has disclosed their annual results for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014. Sales fell to £179 million, down £11 million from the prior year, while profits rebounded from terrible to just low, with pre-tax earnings of £7.2 million (still, much better than £2.8 million the year before). The company said profits were held down by £3.5 million related to their planned relocation to new offices in 2015. The Bookseller […]
Macmillan Resumes Agency, Will Test Subscriptions
Macmillan ceo John Sargent told authors, illustrators and agents in a letter that the company reached their own multiyear deal with Amazon “late last week” for both print books and ebooks, starting January 5, restoring a fuller agency model for ebooks. That agreement comes as Macmillan’s consent decree with the government governing discounts expires today. (The same legal restrictions on Penguin Random House expire today as well.) Sargent writes, “All our other retailers will also be on the agency model, leaving Apple as the only retailer who is allowed unlimited discounting. Irony prospers in the digital age.” Under the current injunction against […]
Filling Out the Main Stage
We continue to confirm a few final speakers for next months’ Digital Book World, including Penguin Random House Children’s president and publisher Barbara Marcus and Nielsen Book president Jonathan Nowell joining us at the opening day’s Publishers Launch Kids show. Notably, filling the last main stage keynote slot is Apple’s director of the iBooks Store Keith Moerer, in a conversation with Michael Cader on January 15. Along with our keynote conversation with Kindle executive Russ Grandinetti on January 14, for the first time attendees will hear from top executives at the two largest ebooksellers in the world. (Also appearing during […]
Dohle Looks to Year Ahead
Penguin Random House ceo Markus Dohle’s year-end “thank you” letter to employees focuses more on what’s coming than what happened — aggregating “some of the successes that we’ve been able to achieve together publishing” in a separate highlights video. Dohle congratulates employees on “making sure we have hit every one of our integration targets to date” and points to the big work still to come next year. “In our systems, IT infrastructure, and distribution environments, 2014 was a year of preparation; 2015, will be one of implementation: Most of the process changes we’ve laid the groundwork for will take effect next […]