Following Indigo’s lead earlier this week, PW has announced their picks for the 10 best books of 2016: Barkskins, Annie Proulx (Scribner) What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus) Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Joy Williams (Tin House) The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) The Vegetarian, Han Kang, trans. fby Deborah Smith (Hogarth) Blood in the Water, Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon) Evicted, Matthew Desmond (Crown) Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, Frances Wilson (Farrar, Straus) A Kingdom of Their Own, Joshua Partlow (Knopf) Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich, trans. by Bela Shayevich (Random House)
Archives for October 2016
Amazon’s Stock Falls on Slimmer Than Expected Profits; Media Sales Now Even with Apple
Amazon and Google both reported third quarter sales after the close of the market on Thursday. Amazon was expected to exceed analysts’ expectations (yes, that’s as crazy as it sounds) but they only fulfilled that halfway: Indeed sales of $32.7 billion were about $130 million ahead of those estimates, rising 29 percent overall, but profits returned to disappointing, with net income of $252 million or 52 cents a share — down from a quarter ago, and down from analysts’ target of 85 cents a share. Those profits were additionally disappointing when you consider that the company’s profit engine — the AWS web services […]
Jolly Fish Press Claims Sale Is Pending to “Established Publisher”
Ten days ago Jolly Fish Press surprised authors and employees in announcing online that they would close at the end of October “unless another option will present itself” for lack of financing. (That announcement was followed by an apology to authors for announcing online before emailing them, along with an insistence that they “were not legally allowed to pre-release the news to anyone.”) Now in a post titled “Moving Forward,” they have announced “we have reached an agreement in principle to sell Jolly Fish Press to an established publisher. We will announce all the details once the deal is finalized […]
Potter Lifts Bloomsbury Sales Again, Though Profit Declines
Bloomsbury reported results for the first half of their fiscal year, ending August 31, with sales rising £10 million to £62.7 million, though adjusted profit fell to £1.5 million down £.5 million), blamed on the ending of their contract for publishing services with the Qatar Foundation. As in the previous fiscal year, Harry Potter continues to drive Bloomsbury’s results: Essentially all of the gain in sales came trade publishing, which comprised £37.3 million, and most of that from children’s books, particularly the Harry Potter Box Set and the Illustrated Edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (plus Sarah Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury). The non-consumer division […]
People
UK literary agent Carole Blake died Tuesday night, announced online by her agency Blake Friedmann: “It is with huge sadness that we must share the news that our beloved mentor, colleague and friend Carole Blake died last night. The loss of such an incredible woman so soon is not something any of us feel prepared for, but we are grateful that she lived so fully to the last, and that she died swiftly and painlessly, on being readmitted to hospital last night, with Julian by her side. We will keep friends posted regarding the family’s plans as soon as we […]
People
At Simon & Schuster Children’s, Janine Perez has been promoted to digital marketing coordinator. At Random House Children’s Books, Lauren Adams has been promoted to marketing manager, while Colleen Nuccio moves up to marketing coordinator. Stephanie Adams has been named marketing manager at Stanford University Press. In addition, Kate Templar has joined as sales & exhibits manager, while Ryan Furtkamp has joined as publicist. In the UK, agent Lucy Luck will join Conville & Walsh on November 1, moving over from Aitken Alexander. Following yesterday’s report of Maria Pallante‘s resignation, her letter to Carla Hayden was posted, in which Pallante writes: “I hope that you will […]