Press conferences, author guests, and planned events notwithstanding, the core of the Frankfurt Book Fair for trade visitors remains rights sales and renewing international relationships. For many people, Frankfurt is also very much about habit and tradition, essentially the same show every year, but with new titles: The same party schedule, the same dinner dates and venues, the same roster of key appointments, the same layout of stands (and unfortunately, the same wealth of smokers when you try to get some air). But there’s one interesting thing that’s different this year, though it may not be obvious: This is the […]
Archives for October 2017
Chris Jackson: “‘Diversity In Publishing’ Doesn’t Exist–But Here’s How It Can”
Publisher of One World Chris Jackson gave a speech to the Association of American University Presses in 2016 that was adapted into an essay which is included in former Bloomsbury Press publisher Peter Ginna’s just-released anthology, What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing. LitHub posted the thoughtful essay, via the University of Chicago Press: “Rather than just cranking up the engine on a typical publishing imprint, my dream is to treat it in a prefigurative way—to create, in a small corner of the Random House building, the model for what I think all of publishing should look […]
November Library Reads
Andy Weir’s Artemis is the top pick for November’s Library Reads List. The list also includes Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, which is featured in our Buzz Books 2017 Fall/Winter sampler, available for download now. The other picks are: The City of Brass, by S. A. Chakraborty The Story of Arthur Truluv, by Elizabeth Berg The Library at the Edge of the World, by Felicity Hayes-McCoy Someone to Wed, by Mary Balogh The Midnight Line, by Lee Child Heather, the Totality, by Matthew Weiner Prairie Fires, by Caroline Fraser The Shadow District, by Arnaldur Indridason
Hachette Book Group Terminates Weinstein Imprint
Following the extensive and continuing accounts of alleged sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, on Thursday Hachette Book Group announced that they are finished with Weinstein Books, both as a publishing partner and a moniker. (The line was acquired as part of their purchase of the Perseus Books Group.) The company said in a statement and email to staff: “Hachette Book Group has terminated the Weinstein Books imprint, effective immediately (Perseus Books has had a co-publishing agreement with The Weinstein Company, under which we published around ten new books a year). Going forward, titles currently under the Weinstein Books imprint will […]
WH Smith May Trim Inventory, Stores
UK retailer WH Smith reported annual results through August 31. In line with the long-term trend for Smith, their growing travel store business added more sales than their slowly declining high street bookstore business lost. For the first time, travel is the larger segment, with sales of £624 million, versus high street sales of £610 million (down from £639 million a year ago, or 5 percent). High street “trading profits” (before unallocated costs, finance costs and taxation) were flat, at £62 million, though that was with another £12 million of cost savings. The company make clear that “over the next […]
CreateSpace Keeps Gaining Share In Self-Published Market
Bowker updated their annual statistics tracking the output of new, self-published titles that carry ISBNs in 2016. As has been well documented, a meaningful quantity of self-published titles do not carry ISBNs at all. But the Bowker data set helps track many of the vendors. As in past years, Amazon’s CreateSpace continued to grow, up over 18 percent, with 501,000 print ISBNs (compared to 424,000 in 2015). That has CreateSpace claiming 78.5 percent of that market, and they have only three meaningful competitors, all of whom declined: Lulu was down 11 percent at 42,000 ISBNs; Blurb was off 33 percent at […]