Our season preview from our Buzz Books 2020 Spring/Summer sampler continues with nonfiction. Because of the number of titles, we have divided the preview in half, today featuring spring and summer books about politics and current events, social issues, and science and technology. Books concerned with saving American democracy from an assortment of threats dominate this season’s nonfiction, alongside a number of books about members of Congress and other political leaders. Meanwhile, our sampler features work from Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk) and Patrik Svensson (The Book of Eels). For the trade editions — with publicity and marketing info, and click-throughs for […]
Archives for January 2020
People, Etc.
Denise Cronin has been promoted to executive director of subsidiary rights for the entire Random House division, now including the Crown imprints previously managed by Lance Fitzgerald. Rachel Hiles has been promoted to senior editor for food and lifestyle at Chronicle Books. Saraciea Fennell has been promoted to publicity manager at Tom Doherty Associates. Brianna Yamashita will join Scribner as senior marketing director on February 19. The ABA’s Winter Institute 16 will move to February next year, scheduled for February 7 – 10 in Cincinnati, OH. Distribution Norton will distribute Abbeville Press in North America starting July 1.
2019’s Book Club Books: How Did the Pickers Pick?
The burst in attention and impact for book clubs and monthly spotlight picks among booksellers, celebrities, and media outlets prompted our popular monthly “How Did They Pick?” feature, which tracks print sales of selected titles. Over time, that sales data has shown that not all picks are created equal; some are aggressively marketed commercial hits, while others are quiet releases and sell fewer than 1,000 copies in their selection month. The sales impact from club to club varies widely as well. Below we have charted each club’s most and least resonant picks of 2019, and we show you their average […]
Cummins Addresses AMERICAN DIRT Controversy at Winter Institute
A small, heavily overflowing room greeted AMERICAN DIRT author Jeanine Cummins at Winter Institute 15 in Baltimore on Wednesday for a charged, emotional and timely session originally envisioned as Creating Conversations Around American Dirt. Booksellers in the audience brought both palpable support but also raw and candid questions to the session, and Cummins responded in kind with thoughtful and emotional responses. As bookseller Javier Ramirez from Madison Street Books in Chicago noted in introducing Cummins, long before the Oprah pick and other attention — and controversy — AMERICAN DIRT had received “more Indie Next recommendations than any book in recent […]
Briefs: Waiting On Audible Captions Settlement Details, Book Culture Store Closed for Good, and More
For those watching the dates, the parties in the publishers’ lawsuit against Audible seeking to block their Captions feature had been expected to report back to the court on the execution of their settlement agreement as of Tuesday, January 21. But in the meantime, based on the previous report that an agreement had been reached, Judge Valeri Caproni went ahead and dismissed the case with prejudice. She left it up to the parties to decide if they “wish for the Court to retain jurisdiction to enforce their settlement agreement.” In that event the settlement agreement would still be submitted to […]
Buzz Books Spring/Summer Preview: Commercial Fiction
With Winter Institute underway today in Baltimore, we continue to present extracts from our big Buzz Books 2020 Spring/Summer overview, today highlighting commercial fiction. The full season preview includes work from Elin Hilderbrand, Jeff Abbott, Liv Constantine, and more. You can read titles from Sue Monk Kidd, Elizabeth Kay, and Veronica Roth’s first novel for adults in our sampler. Download the “trade edition” from NetGalley, or find the consumer editions on all the major ebookstore platforms (the “download” button here links to them all). Here is our full list of commercial fiction titles for the spring and summer season, alphabetically by author. Titles […]