As we’ve suggested previously, it’s pretty clear already that Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad is the consensus “book of the year,” and the Washington Post’s just-published 10 best only adds to the case. Their full list: Fiction Commonwealth, Ann Patchett News of the World, Paulette Jiles Swing Time, Zadie Smith The Trespasser, Tana French The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead Nonfiction Evicted, Matthew Desmond The Gene, Siddartha Mukherjee The Return, Hisham Matar Rogue Heroes, Ben Macintyre Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich As usual, the paper’s full “best books” package includes extensive lists of notable fiction and nonfiction. Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine has […]
Archives for November 2016
Bookselling: BN “Commits” to Staying in the Bronx; Three Lives Stays Put in Greenwich Village; and More
With Barnes & Noble set to close its only location in the Bronx at the end of the year — leaving the entire borough without a bookstore — there are plans to reverse course and for the chain to return to the Bronx “within 24 to 36 months,” according to the Bronx Times. BN vp, development David Deason said in a statement: “We remain committed to working diligently with local officials to reopen a store in the Bronx in the future as we finalize our new store openings.” Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. says, “My office will continue to work with […]
People: Besser and Borland Promoted
At Putnam Children’s, publisher Jen Besser has been promoted to president as well, reporting to Penguin Children’s president Jen Loja — who writes that Besser “has continually wowed us with her keen publishing sensibility, and her ability to find the best books for every kind of reader.” Loja adds, “Her perfect balance of believing in what she does deeply but also being able to see the fun and the humor in what we all do, not only makes her a valuable leader, but also a delight to have in the senior management of the group.” At Atria Books and Washington Square Press, […]
Kindle Unlimited Pool and Page Rate Rise, As Pages Read Declines
In their latest retroactive allocation of funds, Amazon has decided to give Kindle Unlimited participants a slightly larger pool of funds to share for October — $16.2 million (up from $15.9 million in September), with the per page payment rate jumping to $.005189 (up from $0.00497397). But at least some authors continue to have concerns about whether the software that tracks page reads is functioning correctly, as previously reported in October. Total pages read declined for the second month, to approximately 3.122 billion, down 2.3 percent from the 3.197 billion pages counted in September.indle
Triumph at The National Book Awards: Whitehead, Lewis, Kendi and Borzutzky
With anticipation of life in Trump’s America weighing heavily throughout the evening, the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening was a bastion of diversity, resistance and hope, celebrating joy and the enduring power of words and reading to change and reframe the world. Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad was expected to win the fiction award, and is by far the most commercially successful of the year’s NBA contenders, but the emotion of the evening and its celebration of stories, publishers and sentiments outside of the mainstream was less expected. As chair of the nonfiction judges Masha Gessen noted in discussing […]
The Good and Bad of Half-Year Sales
We have known the basic contours of trade publishing results for the first half of 2016 since the end of August, following public reporting by publishing companies — trade sales were down modestly in total dollars, with still-rising print unit sales unable to fully make up for still-declining ebook sales. Now the AAP has finally released their statistics for the first half of the year, compiled from approximately 1,200 publishers, giving some additional color to the sales trends behind the numbers. Total net trade sales of $2.803 billion for the first half of the year were down $55.8 million (or -2 […]