A good final holiday week of print book sales as measured by Nielsen Bookscan lifted the cumulative total for the five-week period into positive territory (though all of this year’s comparison numbers come with asterisks since 2015 was an unusual 53-week year in Nielsen’s tracking). For the five weeks starting with Thanksgiving, print unit sales totaled 119.6 million units, up 1.7 million units from a year ago, or a 1.5 percent gain. About half of those sales happen in the final two weeks of the holiday period, with print sales adding 2.2 million units in that window this time around, up 3.8 percent, at […]
Archives for December 2016
Briefs
The Costco Pennie’s Pick for January is Amy Stewart‘s Girl Waits With Gun (HMH) while the company’s book club pick for the month is The Tumbling Turner Sisters (Gallery) by Juliette Fay. Updating our very best of the best books of 2016 report, Jacqueline Woodson is represented now by Kathleen Nishimoto at William Morris Endeavor. Also, USA Today weighed in with their top 10 books of the year (now added to our vote count), also naming Colson Whitehead as their author of the year. Announcements The Ward & Balkin Agency is being acquired by Roam Agency as of July 1, 2017, when […]
Employee Sues Google Over Confidentiality Policies (Including Approval For Writing Novels)
Earlier this week an anonymous Google employee sued over internal confidentiality policies that run the gamut from spying on employees to writing novels without the company’s approval, saying they breach California labor laws. The suit, first reported on by The Information, “alleges Google runs an internal ‘spying program’ which relies on employees voluntarily reporting other employees who might have leaked information.” The John Doe plaintiff, employed as a product manager at Google, is suing under a California provision that allows employees to sue on behalf of other co-workers. Should the plaintiff win, the state would receive 75 percent of the […]
Still Going, Now with A Free Trial
Today is our last “scheduled” edition for this year (unless something else happens; “except when not” remains our watchword). We’ll be back as needed next week — at least once, at least for our Publishers Lunch Deluxe audience — with news briefs and more end of year thoughts and stats. And as always, PublishersMarketplace remains in operation 24/7 and will continue to present news, deals, bestsellers, jobs and more as they come in. In the meantime, we are restoring our traditional holiday free trial offer at PublishersMarketplace.com: Join now and check out everything the site has to offer for free through Monday. […]
Pantsuit Nation Founder Clarifies Book Deal and Nonprofit Status After Criticism
Earlier this week the founder of the private Facebook group Pantsuit Nation faced criticism and controversy following the announcement of coffee-table book comprising member posts set to be published in May by Flatiron Books. Founded by Libby Chamberlain in October for Hillary Clinton supporters to express enthusiasm for their candidate, and then a place for them to commiserate after Clinton’s election loss, at least some vocal members of the nearly four-million person group took issue with the book deal, as a “betrayal of safe space” and for seeming to sell the group out. In a public follow-up Facebook message, Chamberlain clarified how member […]
The Very Best of the Best Books of 2016
A couple more notable “best of 2016” lists may still trickle in (USA Today tends to run at the very end of the year) but with a wealth of lists already out — we have counted 65 in all — it’s time for our final, comprehensive aggregation of the very best books of the year. (We will update this post as necessary over the next week or so to reflect any additional lists.) As has been the case from the very start, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is the runaway consensus “book of the year.” With 43 votes it smashed all the records, […]