For the first time we can recall all of the major monthly bookseller picks were launched bright and early on the actual first day of the month. Barnes & Noble now seems to have joined their competitors and built a proper, standing best-of-the-month feature page as well. The one consensus pick across Amazon, BN and iBooks is Tom Perrotta’s novel. Mrs. Fletcher. Winning two votes are Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo* and The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne — Adebayo is Amazon’s featured debut and Boyne is Amazon’s spotlight pick for August, and both titles makes iBooks’ fiction list as well — […]
Archives for August 2017
Revised AAP Stats Show Trade Just Above Flat In First Quarter
After a quiet delay, the AAP released their StatShot sales data for the first quarter of 2017. (The main press release presents rolled up Q1 data only. But the organization still tabulates their data on a monthly basis, and provided monthly breakouts for each individual month to members in the same format as previously.) You may recall that we came to the reasoned conclusion a year ago that month-to-month variations in AAP trade stats were providing more noise than signal in understanding market performance. The new shows a market that was pretty darn flat in the first quarter of the […]
Publishers Win KinderGuides Infringement Case
It will come as no great surprise that publishers Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, along with the estates of Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ernest Hemingway, prevailed in their copyright infringement case brought against Fredrik Colting and Melissa Medina for their KinderGuides books, asserted as “early learning guides” to classic works of literature. On Friday, NY Southern District Federal Judge Jed Rakoff granted summary judgment on all nine counts of copyright infringement, and rejected the defendants’ claim of fair use “as a matter of law.” Somewhat unusually, Judge Rakoff issued a two-page ruling, with “a memorandum […]
Our September Buzz Books Monthly
With the success of our recently-launched Buzz Books 2017: Romance as well as our two Buzz Books 2017 Fall/Winter collections, we continue our monthly sampler program with the release of September Buzz Books Monthly, available now on Amazon, iBooks, and NetGalley. Buzz Books Monthlies are your first and best place to turn for an insider’s taste of what to read next, and what the book world will be talking about next month. As usual September’s edition offers just the right amount of excerpts for consumers, and includes a comprehensive preview that highlights hundreds of notable forthcoming titles for the month (listed by subject category and then again […]