Jenna Quatraro has been promoted to senior graphic design manager at Sourcebooks.
Stephen S. Power has joined ghostwriting and publishing services firm Kevin Anderson & Associates as an executive editor. Previously he was executive editor at Thomas Dunne.
Angus Cargill has been promoted to publishing director at Faber & Faber.
Katharine Nelson has joined Canbury Press in the new position of director of sales, marketing and publicity. She was previously director of trade marketing and publicity at Lonely Planet.
Obituaries
Josephine Cox, 82, author of 60 books including Her Father’s Sins and The Beachcomber, died on July 17.
Accomplished cover designer Adalis Martinez, 29, died July 14 of cancer.
Novelist Robert Hellenga, 79, author of books including The Sixteen Pleasures as well as, most recently, Love, Death & Rare Books, passed away July 18.
Bookselling
Barnes & Noble‘s new, relocated store in Rockville, MD is scheduled to open on August 5.
Picks
Barnes & Noble chose Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars as its August National Book Club pick.
The Bluestockings Collective announced that, “Due to so many unforeseen circumstances both pandemic-related and otherwise, we must leave our current location at 172 Allen St. in search of a new, more sustainable, accessible and safer home. This is not goodbye. This is ‘wait for our new location announcement,’ hopefully soon. The facts are: we have outgrown our space and we want features that better accommodate and center our disabled collective and community.” They note, “Though we wish we were making this decision on our own terms, our decision has been forced by the demands of our landlord for more money and by their inaction on necessary repairs to the structural damage our wild little slice of space has endured over these last 21 years.”
Forthcoming
Scholastic announced a November 10 publication for J.K. Rowling‘s THE ICKABOG in the US and Canada and released the jacket for the book.
Sales Statistics
NPD Bookscan reported on ebook sales for the first four months of 2020, based on publisher-reported sales through their PubTrack Digital service. Sales of 55 million units through April 2020 were 5 percent lower than the same period in 2019. But April was an important turning point.
For the first three months, ebook sales fell 8.1 million units, down 18 percent — then in April, during lockdown, ebook sales comprised 17.4 million units, gaining back almost 5 million units from sales of 12.6 million ebooks in April 2020. Though adult fiction sales suffered in print in the early weeks of lockdown as buyers focused on educational books and other books for children, ebook sales of general fiction rose 23 percent in April compared to March. Romance ebooks grew 22 percent in April compared to March, and adult nonfiction ebook sales grew 37 percent in April compared to March.
The separate AAP StatShot report for April — showing publisher-reported dollars — had trade ebook sales at $103.5 million, up $14.9 million from April 2019, a 17 percent gain. The subsequent AAP report for May showed ebook dollar sales gaining even more, at $107 million, up $30.5 million over the previous year (a 40 percent again).