Ralf Markmeier will join Harper Germany as managing director and publisher starting January 15. He succeeds Thomas Beckmann, who will retire in February, after 18 years with Harlequin and Harper. Markmeier was previously with Random House Germany, which he joined in 2003. Harper Collins cdo and evp of international publishing Chantal Restivo-Alessi said, “Ralf’s extensive trade publishing knowledge and management skills, gained at the biggest publishing conglomerate in Germany, will help us continue our growth trajectory.” Restivo-Alessi also commended Beckmann’s “outstanding service over the last two decades” and added: “During his career, Thomas consistently demonstrated his deep understanding of book […]
Archives for November 2017
Bookselling: Regulator Bookshop Sold; Kinokuniya To Open in Austin; and More
The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC will be sold to two store employees. Longtime owners Tom Campbell and John Valentine announced plans to retire on March 1 and sell the bookstore, which has operated for more than 40 years, to Wander Lorentz de Haas and Elliot Berger. Campbell, a co-founder of the shop, told the Herald-Sun: “We are not as young as we once were and we were thinking of moving on. We had two people who were interested in taking over that we thought would do a good job, and it all kind of came together.” The bookshop is […]
Earnings: Lagardere Declines, Quarto Warns on Loss and No Dividend
Lagardere reported third quarter sales, with publishing division revenues falling 4.3 percent to €646 million (down from €675 million a year ago). Underlying sales fell more, since that total includes €11 million from recent acquisitions. (Brainbow and Bookouture each contributed €5 million, and IsCool Entertainment added €1 million.) This year’s results were weighed down comparatively by last year’s release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by Hachette UK, and that division was down 13.5 percent as a result. US sales were down 2.8 percent, on “a lighter release schedule.” But the big French division rose 6 percent, mostly on improved educational sales. Foreign […]
Ingram Acquires OptiQly
The assets of start-up Optiqly, which launched in public beta recently, have been acquired by Ingram Content Group. Ingram’s ventures unit had been the primary seed investor in Optiqly, and Ingram’s CoreSource had signed on this summer to provide a version of the company’s tools as a subscription service to their large roster of distribution clients. Optiqly is designed to “help interpret dozens of signals and ranking factors that impact sales performance” of books at Amazon, and provides recommendations for optimizing discovery and conversion within the Amazon store. No formal announcement of the deal has been made, but clients were […]
IPO Launches For One of the World’s Most Valuable eBook Platforms
Benefiting from a red-hot market for IPOs in general in Hong Kong, the shares of Tencent spinoff China Literature nearly doubled in their first day of trading. The offering itself, which raised about $1.1 billion in proceeds for the company, was massively oversubscribed, reportedly with orders for more than 600 times the number of shares on offer. Priced at HK$55 a share, the stock is trading at HK$102.40, up 86 percent. The gives the ebook platform a market capitalization of roughly $11.9 billion — making it, by far, the highest-valued standalone publishing focused company in the world. (Pearson has a […]
Grann Tops Amazon’s Best Books of the Year
Amazon released their big annual Best Books of the Year package, naming David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon their No. 1 title. It’s the first time they have picked a nonfiction title as their favorite since choosing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot in 2010. (At the year’s midpoint, the editors preferred Arundhati Roy’s novel, but now it has dropped to No. 14 on their list. 12 of the titles, marked with a +, were on the mid-year list as well; asterisks denote books featured in one on of our Buzz Books samplers.) 1. Killers of the […]