Vanessa Campos has joined D4EO Literary Agency as an agent. She was previously sales and marketing director of Entrepreneur Press. Mariah Nichols has been promoted to literary agent. Imprints In the UK, Hodder & Stoughton has created the Hodder Studio imprint, which “brings together creative minds from a wide range of backgrounds and media industries.” and is “acquiring books with international aspirations, exploring original partnerships and developing new relationships with audiences.” The imprint will include audio, and the first books launch in October 2020 through to 2022. Jamie Hodder-Williams heads the imprint and Myfanwy Moore is publisher. (Moore was previously a TV […]
Archives for July 2020
Pearson Records Significant Operating Loss
Pearson released results for the six-months ending June 30 on Friday morning, with COVID-related impact weighing heavily on their sales. The company reported sales of £1.49 billion, down from £1.83 billion last year, a decline of 19 percent largely due to test center and school closures affecting its global assessment and international segments. North American courseware, including US higher ed, declined 14 percent, though they attributed it to the longer-term collapse in sales and conversion to lower-priced digital products (“due to the continuation of trends seen in 2019”), citing only “a modest impact from the closure of campus-based bookstores.” Adjusted […]
Scholastic’s Sales Fell 40% in Q4, Even as Trade Books Surged
Scholastic reported fourth quarter and full-year results for the period ending May 31 on Thursday afternoon. As expected, school closures due to coronavirus weighed heavily on their performance for the quarter, with overall sales of $284 million, down 40 percent compared to $471 million last year. Trade sales, however, surged to $80.4 million from $55.4 million last year — led by the big release of Suzanne Collins’ The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, plus continuing sales for Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man books, and Raina Telgemeier’s Guts, but also boosted in general by the early lockdown surge in educational books for […]
Briefs: Mary Trump’s Continuing Sales, and More
Mary Trump’s TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH sold over 1.35 million units across all formats during its first week on sale in the US, Simon & Schuster reported. Another hardcover reprint will give them 1.35 million copies in print when it delivers. That suggests continuing sales of about 400,000 units after pre-orders and the first day on sale, and an added 200,000 hardcovers in print since their first sales announcement a week ago. NPD Bookscan charted sales of over 337,000 hardcovers in the channels they measure, through July 18. Russell Ackerman and John Schoenfelder at Addictive Picture and producer Jay […]
Briefs
Controversies After UK thriller writer Mark Dawson admitted — or boasted? — about buying his way onto the Sunday Times bestseller list with a modest purchase of 400 hardcovers, Nielsen Bookscan has recalculated that Top 10 chart to remove Dawson’s book and the paper will issue a correction. Nielsen says they initially believed the purchase was related to a virtual book signing. Dawson, who still promotes his “top 10” listing on his Twitter page, said in a Twitter thread he was only cheating a little, not a lot: “If I was intent on ‘gaming the system’ I would have bought […]
WME Joins In Raising Assistants’ Compensation
William Morris Endeavor has responded to the #PayUpHollywood initiative by joining other large talent agencies in raising compensation for their assistants. The starting salary for assistants will go from $15 an hour — the legal minimum wage in New York City — to $18 an hour (or $37,440 annually). More importantly, given that almost no assistant can perform the expected duties in a standard work week, agency assistants are eligible for 10 hours of overtime (at time and a half, under the law), without pre-approval from supervisors. (That’s up to $270 a week, or as much as $13,500 across 50 […]