Alex Merrill has joined Skyhorse in the newly created role of chief operating officer, reporting to Tony Lyons. Merrill was most recently group publisher at Morris Media Network. “Alex Merrill is the right person at the right time for Skyhorse Publishing,” said Lyons in the announcement. “I am confident that his strong management background combined with his entrepreneurial skills will help Skyhorse soar to the next level.” Stephanie Abou has joined Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, where she will continue working with literary and upmarket novelists as well as select authors of narrative nonfiction and pop culture works. She had been at Foundry. […]
Archives for April 2015
Indies Choice Nominees
Last week the American Booksellers Association announced finalists for the 2015 Indies Choice Book Awards, with voting on the winners to close at midnight on April 14 and the winners announced two days later. Adult Fiction All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (Scribner) The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (Random House) The Magician’s Land, by Lev Grossman (Viking) The Museum of Extraordinary Things, by Alice Hoffman (Scribner) Natchez Burning, by Greg Iles (William Morrow) Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf) Adult Nonfiction Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan […]
People, Etc.
Leila Campoli has joined Stonesong as an agent representing nonfiction in the areas of business, economics, finance, science, pop culture, current affairs, and politics. She was most recently an editor at Palgrave Macmillan. Courtney Carbone is being promoted to associate editor at the Random House Children’s/Golden Books imprint. Alli Brydon is joining The Bright Group on April 6 as managing agent in their expanding US office. She has been a senior editor at Sterling Children’s, where she worked for over 9 years. She will oversee US agents James Burns and Anne Moore-Armstrong and help build their roster of US children’s book authors and illustrators. Faith […]
No Joke — An Apparent Amazon Source Uses Business Insider to Pressure Harper Negotiations
Many online stories today need to be taken with a grain of a salt, but the Business Insider story about Amazon and HarperCollins posted Tuesday is apparently meant seriously. An unidentified source whose perspective makes them connected to Amazon tells BI (in which Jeff Bezos is an investor), “The contract between ‘Big Five’ book publisher HarperCollins and Amazon is about to expire, and HarperCollins is refusing to sign an agreement with the new terms that Amazon is asking.” The source also threatens on the bookseller’s behalf: “If HarperCollins and Amazon don’t come to an agreement, no print or digital HarperCollins […]
More On The Recent Spate of Author Solutions Lawsuits
We were curious as to why the law firm of Giskin Soloratoff Anderson & Stewart filed two separate lawsuits in Indiana against Author Solutions last November and earlier this month when they had a similar class action suit pending in New York. In a telephone interview Tuesday, Oren Giskan told us the Indiana cases were filed “because we came to understand that all of the claims we wished to have resolved could only be done in the State of Indiana” while the NY suit, presided over by Judge Denise Cote, likely would not. Specifically, Giskan pointed to contracts from Author […]
Penguin Random House By the Numbers
We wound up discovering and deriving more information about Penguin Random House’s results from further review of their annual reports yesterday (which disclose breakdowns not offered up in their standard earnings releases). Most importantly, looking back at Bertelsmann’s 2013 annual report, we established a comparison baseline for 2013 results for Penguin Random House. That report said that if Penguin’s results had been incorporated for the full year (instead of just the last six months), 2013 book publishing sales for Bertelsmann would have been €3.248 billion overall — with PRH contributing €2.986 billion and the rest coming from PRH Germany. So we can […]