More than two years after the original lawsuit was filed (with more recent lawsuits ongoing in other states) Judge Cote denied class certification to plaintiffs Mary Simmons and Jodi Foster, who are suing Author Solutions alleging fraud, unjust enrichment, and violation of various statutes and consumer protection acts. The original motion for class certification was filed last February. The 30-page decision, filed July 1, rejects certification for a variety of legal and technical reasons connected to the combination of charges in the suit. Judge Cote takes issue with Foster and Simmons seeking class claims in New York since they live in other […]
Archives for July 2015
People
Marjorie Braman, 60, died July 2 at her home in Taghkanic, NY of complications from breast cancer. She began her 26 years in publishing as an editorial assistant and worked her way up to svp, publishing director at HarperCollins and then vp, editor-in-chief at Henry Holt. She has worked as a consultant at Open Road Integrated Media. Authors she worked with include Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton and Sena Jeter Naslund. Most recently Braman worked as an independent editor and was a member of the independent editors’ group 5e. She is survived by her husband, Jamie M. Saul. A memorial service […]
The Pay-Per-Page Era Begins
As of yesterday, Amazon officially moved subscription payments for self-published ebooks in the Kindle Unlimited program to their new system of paying by the number of pages read by subscribers. In an email to participating authors, the company said that in June subscribers read over 1.9 billion pages (as measured by their new standardized page count). From there, authors concluded that the per page payout for July — when Amazon has promised the pool will comprise at least $11 million — will be close to .0058 cents for every page read. But, per Amazon’s procedure of determining the final pool […]
Back to the Basics At Barnes: What’s Been Lost In the eBook Era?
On or about September 1 Barnes & Noble Inc. will return to its roots as a chain of retail bookstores, following the spinoff of Barnes & Noble Education and the nearly-complete winding down of the Nook experiment. So we thought it would be interesting to turn back the reporting clock and see what’s happened to BN Retail — and other major book chains — since the beginning of the modern eBook Era, as a lens for how to view Barnes & Noble’s prospects going forward. Barnes & Noble first became a different company in 2009, when they bought the privately-held BN College. […]
People
The Walker Books Group has hired Lucy Pleydell-Pearce for the new global role of senior group and intercompany sales manager, starting July 6. She will “manage the intercompany sales flow for books originating in each territory that publish within the group, including monitoring release timings and enhancing group communication across all publishing lists,” as well as heading “sales outside the group, chiefly selling titles to third-party customers in the UK and US where rights are available.” Pleydell-Pearce was formerly foreign rights manager at Templar Books. Diane Aronson has joined Bloomsbury Children’s as senior production editor. She was previously a production editor at Cambridge University […]
McLain’s Circling the Sun Tops August Indie Next List
Circling the Sun by Paula McLain is the ABA’s No. 1 Indie Next pick for August. The rest of the list also includes Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal and The Marriage of Opposites, by Alice Hoffman, both featured in our Spring/Summer Buzz Books 2015 ebook, as well as: Fishbowl, by Bradley Somer Armada, by Ernest Cline The Girl Who Slept with God, by Val Brelinski You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), by Felicia Day Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother’s Story, by David Payne Dragonfish, by Vu Tran Orphan #8, by Kim van Alkemade Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase, […]