At New Leaf Literary & Media, Jaida Temperly has been promoted to agent.
Morrissey‘s novel LIST OF THE LOST — unavailable in the US — won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award presented by the UK’s Literary Review.
The AP profiles independent booksellers Gayle Shanks (Changing Hands), Mitchell Kaplan (Books & Books), and Kris Kleindienst (Left Bank Books) as typical “baby boomers who founded [book]stores with little sense of how to run a business, but a profound sense of purpose” — who “are now pillars of a smaller but still vital independent-bookstore community, and models for the wave of younger owners.”
Coming Attractions
Barnes & Noble reports fiscal second quarter sales on Thursday — switching to reporting after the close of the market rather than first thing in the morning. Analysts are expecting a loss in this pre-holiday period (through October 15), and the company warned investors in September that this quarter’s result would include about $21 million in separation costs for the spinoff of BN Education earlier this year.
CEO Quotes
Hachette Book Group USA ceo Michael Pietsch writes in the WSJ about the future of publishing. “As this generation [raised on Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars] comes to the market over the next decades, their demand for great and exciting books will fuel a huge growth in writing and reading.” On the corporate level, “Ever-larger retailers and wholesalers bring significant margin pressure, which will lead to continued conglomeration.”
Meanwhile, persnickety editorial types are wondering why the Journal hotlinked the line “Especially the dead ones” — about the expectation of more factory-style books from bestselling authors, alive/dead/and with co-authors — to a story about Harper Lee and Go Set A Watchman.
Penguin Random House ceo Markus Dohle addressed the Guadalajara Book Fair recently, covered by Publishing Perspectives: “There is a healthy co-existence of global and local, and we want to maintain that diversity of voices, giving books the audience they deserve. Publishing is a service to society, and we see ourselves as a creative force — not as a corporation — a community of small and medium-sized firms.”
Dohle’s growth perspective included this: “Tech firms are a huge opportunity for publishers, they provide us with the opportunity to reach even more readers, and the book consumer base is growing my 25 million people a year, and so we need each other, and the relationship between tech firms and publishers should not be confrontational but collaborative.”