Senior editor Ira Silverberg is leaving Simon & Schuster at the end of the year, after a little more than 3 years with the company. Publisher Jonathan Karp calls the forthcoming HARK by Sam Lipsyte, acquired by Silverberg, something “we expect to be one of our fiction highlights in 2019.” He notes, “Ira has been an ardent champion of his authors, a keen observer of international literary talent, and valued colleague.” Forthcoming Diana Gabaldon previewed her ninth book in the Outlander series, GO TELL THE BEES THAT I AM GONE, a couple of months ago but said she was still […]
Archives for December 2018
Holiday Sales Figures Are Becoming Better
Because the just-released NPD Bookscan sales data covers the week ending December 22, it’s too early to make any definitive statements about the important holiday sales period — but the indication is that once again, holiday book sales experienced a strong final surge, even if it’s not the same big holiday lift that retailers in general experienced. (Mastercard data showed retail sales excluding autos up 5.1 percent through December 24 for the full holiday stretch.) Bookscan shows print sales in the most recent week of approximately 33.7 million units, up from about 27 million units the week before — and […]
One Last Offer
As we did around Thanksgiving, we are opening up PublishersMarketplace.com for a brief free trial, lasting through January 1 — which will be the last opportunity like this for quite some time, so feel free to share if you wish. And, as we noted before the holidays, PM members can load the simple PM News App on your mobile devices if you want to keep an eye on Lunch News, Deals, Automat stories, Jobs and more over the holidays. (The URL is m.publishersmarketplace.com.)
Atwood, Rooney, James, and More Top 2019 Preview Lists
With only a few days left in the year, a number of outlets have published 2019 previews, including extensive lists from Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, Esquire, Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Apple Books, and Bustle. Comparing last year’s aggregated preview list to our 2018 Best of the Best list, only three titles from the former, Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage, Lauren Groff’s Florida, and Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, carried through to the latter. This year’s Best of the Best winner, Tommy Orange’s There There, did not make any of the preview lists we collected, nor did number two Best of the Best […]
Thousands of Books Set to Enter the Public Domain on January 1
Santa has one more delivery on the way: On January 1, 2019, all works published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. The list of books, movies, and songs numbers more than 1000, based on research conducted by Duke Law School’s Center for the Public Domain — and includes work by authors such as Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, and Edith Wharton. This is the first mass-release of works into the public’s hands in 21 years, thanks to a provision of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that froze the release of works created prior to […]
The Year In the World of #PitchShowcases
One of 2018’s early, and welcome, hits was Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, a mainstay New York Times young adult bestseller since late March, and the first in a trilogy, as well as one of our consensus best fiction titles of the year. It’s also the first big breakout for an author initially discovered in one of the increasingly popular online pitching outlets, Pitch Wars, represented by Alexandra Machinist and Hillary Jacobson of ICM. Looking back over the year and ahead to continuing trends, we wondered if Adeyemi’s success is seen as the outlier, in the way in which publishing […]