Drew Reed will move to Sony Pictures as evp of literary affairs, starting May 1. He has served in a similar role at Fox for 17 years. Jake Bauman continues as vp of literary development, and will report to Reed.
Patricia “Patty” M. Wong, city librarian at Santa Monica Public Library, was elected as president-elect of the American Library Association. She will serve as president-elect for one year before taking over as president at the 2021 ALA Annual Conference.
At Scribe UK, Sarah Braybrooke has been promoted to publisher and managing director and Molly Slight to editorial director. Both will take on their new roles next month when publisher-at-large Philip Gwyn Jones steps down to become publisher of Picador.
The Guggenheim Fellows were named for 2020, including fiction writers Oscar Cásares; Garth Greenwell; Yiyun Li; Valeria Luiselli; Celeste Ng; Sigrid Nunez; Helen Phillips; and Susan Steinberg. The grants include 8 writers of general nonfiction, 9 poets, and 3 writers of literary criticism.
Relief
The #SaveIndieBookstores campaign raised over $64,5oo in funds in the past week, in addition to James Patterson’s founding gift.
Artist Relief is a $10 million emergency initiative organized by multiple national arts grantmakers and seeded with $5 million from the Andrew Mellon Foundation that will distribute $5,000 grants to “artists facing dire financial emergencies due to COVID-19.” Writers are included in the multiple disciplines eligible for the grants.
Sales
In the latest figures from NPD Bookscan, print sales for the week ending April 4 were 10.9 million units, up 6.9 percent from a week ago, though below the totals in the prior two weeks.
Adult books recovered slightly from their lowpoint a week ago, up almost 300,000 units at 5.32 million units, as juvenile books continued to gain, now with an extra boost from pre-Easter titles. They registered 5.19 million units, rising more than 400,000 units. The top 10 adult titles are still weak compared to normal times, moving 177,000 units.
To see how dramatically the market has shifted, compare this week to the similar period in 2019, ending a week before Easter (on April 13): Total unit sales were 11.985 million units, so the market is down 8.9 percent overall. Adult titles moved 7.2 million units that week, and are down 26 percent in comparison; juvenile books moved 4.6 million units, and are up 12.8 percent.