Celia Lee rejoins Scholastic’s trade division as senior editor, Cartwheel and Orchard, moving over from Scholastic Book Clubs’ We Need Diverse Books partnership. Lori Wieczorek also moves over from clubs, as editor, licensing, media, and brands. Michael Petranek has been promoted to executive editor and manager, AFK and Graphix Media.
Sales News
NPD Bookscan issued sales for the week ending May 30, with total print sales down from the previous week, but still running well ahead of the same week a year ago. The service tracked sales of 12.55 million units, compared to 13.27 million units a week ago (when sales were lifted by the big release of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games prequel) and 11.6 million units for the same sales week in 2019.
With anti-racist books and other works by authors of color topping online bestseller lists this week, the Bookscan bestseller charts reflect early signs of those sales. Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism ranks No. 5 on the adult nonfiction list, selling over 17,000 trade papers for the week, followed by Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, selling just under 9,000 hardcovers. (Qualified PublishersMarketplace members can subscribe to unlimited Bookscan searching, or even monthly packages of 5 ISBNs of data.)
Awards
The Leon Levy Center for Biography announce five new resident fellowships (each including a $72,000 grant):
Nicholas Boggs (a literary biography of James Baldwin)
Susan Morrison (a biography of Lorne Michaels)
Lance Richardson (a biography of Peter Matthiessen)
Francesca Wade (a biography of Gertrude Stein)
Miriam Horn, the second Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow (a biography of naturalist George Schaller)
The International Booker Prize will now announce the winning author and translator on Wednesday, August 26.
Bookstores
Don Blyly, owner of Minneapolis’ Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgars, which burned down in May 30 protests, has authorized and taken over a crowdfunding campaign with a goal of $500,000 to rebuild the store.
Resources
The University of Minnesota Press is sharing an open access collection of antiracist books in the Reading for Racial Justice collection, available free to read online, through August 31. The books and their authors “challenge white supremacy, police violence, and unequal access to criminal justice, education, and resources in Minnesota, the United States, and throughout the world.”