Maggie Stiefvater fans got our new Buzz Books releases off to a roaring start last week when they learned that we featured the opening chapters of the fourth and final installment in The Raven Cycle (which starts with a big surprise) — and this new edition packs in a lot more for young adult fans. Here is the complete roster of the 20 featured books and authors. The underscored authors are also appearing at next week’s Winter Institute in Denver (where booksellers can grab a few rare printed copies of Buzz Books). As noted previously, you can get the full […]
Archives for January 2016
More Nielsen Stats: Coloring Saved Sales
Nielsen Bookscan released some additional 2015 statistics, confirming that “2015 was the year of adult coloring books.” As we reported earlier, total unit books for 2015 as measured by the point-of-sale service grew 17.6 million units, or 2.8 percent. Also as previously noted, nearly all of the growth came from adult nonfiction, primarily backlist trade paperbacks. Now Bookscan has confirmed the next logical inference with their own tabulation: They estimate that sales of coloring books grew by 23 million units in 2015 (up from just 2 million units in 2014). That accounts for all of the year’s growth in units, […]
Also From 2015: Subscription Did Work, Just Not For You
Last Friday, after a reporting glitch in the morning, Amazon issued December sales statements to KDP exclusive authors telling them how much the etailer decided to allocate for the Kindle Unlimited subscription pool — $13.5 million — and what that was worth per page, $.004609 in the US. Consistent with the larger pattern from recent months, the payment per page read declined (down 6.7 percent, from $.00492) as the overall pool allocated grew (up 6.3 percent, from $12.8 million). While many observers focused on curtailments in subscription reading programs during 2015 — as Oyster prepared to shutdown, and Scribd adjusted their title mix and […]
People, Etc.
Former PGW president Susan Reich has teamed up with financial advisor and consultant David Lamb to form Book Advisors, “to advise publishers on mergers and acquisitions in addition to providing consulting on strategic planning, digital publishing, distribution, and operational issues.” Reich is based in Oakland, CA and Lamb is in New York. Reich says in the announcement, “I’ve known David for twenty years and worked with him on the sales of PGW and Avalon Publishing. Combining my operational experience with David’s financial advisory background will give Book Advisors clients the best of both worlds.” Molly O’Neill has joined the Waxman […]
Awards: NBCC Nominees Named; Edgar Nominations
The National Book Critics Circle announced the nominees for their annual awards on Monday afternoon. The winners will be named March 17. As usual, the nominees overlap in many planes with our aggregated list of the Absolutely Best of the Best Books of 2015 — which means the biggest surprise is that Booker- and NBA-candidate Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is not up for the NBCC fiction award. The complete nominees are: Fiction The Sellout, by Paul Beatty (FSG) Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff (Riverhead) The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House) The Tsar of Love and […]
Scholastic Pulls Picture Book After Slavery Depiction Backlash
Scholastic announced that it has withdrawn publication of the picture book A Birthday Cake for George Washington by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, which was published on January 5. The book had been criticized sharply for its upbeat depiction of slaves, with School Library Journal calling it “highly problematic” while Kirkus Reviews deemed it “an incomplete, even dishonest treatment of slavery.” There are more than 100 one-star reviews of the book on Amazon so far. The publisher said in a statement Sunday night: “While we have great respect for the integrity and scholarship of the author, illustrator, and editor, we […]