A lawsuit in the UK has revealed that Neil Blair at The Blair Partnership paid his former employer Christopher Little £10 million as a settlement fee in January 2012. The payment came after Blair set up his own agency in 2011 and took over representation of JK Rowling. The filing also indicates that Blair borrowed the money for the lump sum payment from Rowling. The only previous report of the settlement was a Daily Mail account in February 2012, with a statement from statement from reputation and crisis-management firm Project Associates indicating that Rowling and Little “have reached an amicable agreement […]
Archives for June 2021
Distribution
The SPCK Group, including Lion Hudson, IVP UK and SPCK, will be sold and distributed by Baker & Taylor Publisher Services in the US and Canada starting July 1.
Frankfurt Touts Plans, But…
Last week the traditional trade press ran credulous accounts of a persuasion campaign from the Frankfurt Book Fair, touting modest — fully cancelable — plans from primarily German and European exhibitors as a sign that, “Everyone is quite positive about the fair taking place in the autumn and we expect a lot of last-minute bookings.” Maybe not everyone? For many in our core audience, gathering together people from around the world to share the same indoor air face-to-face for three days — with no Covid test or vaccine requirement, and the added downside of the German public attending on Friday […]
House Judiciary Introduces Bills that Would Break Up Amazon’s Vertical Publishing Monopoly
Following on their 16-month investigation into the digital marketplace and the “unregulated power wielded by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google,” the House Judiciary committee introduced five bills that would break up and significant restrict and constrain those tech giants. Each bill is has a Republican co-sponsor and the committee refers to the package as “bipartisan bills drafted by lawmakers on the Antitrust Subcommittee,” but that still doesn’t tell us where the Senate stands. Two bills in particular would bring significant relief to Amazon’s broad dominance of book publishing. The most dramatic bill, which applies only to companies that worth $600 […]
Erdrich Wins Fiction Pulitzer
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced Friday afternoon, with Louise Erdrich winning the fiction prize for The Night Watchman. The rest of the winners and finalists: Fiction The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich (Harper) Finalists A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason (Little, Brown) Telephone, by Percival Everett (Graywolf) History Franchise, Marcia Chatelain (Liveright) Finalists The Deviant’s War, by Eric Cervini (FSG) The Three-Cornered War, by Megan Kate Nelson (Scribner) Biography The Dead Are Arising, by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright) Finalists Red Comet, by Heather Clark (Knopf) Stranger in the Shogun’s City, by Amy Stanley […]
People, Etc.
Bev Rivero has joined Beacon Press as senior publicist. She was most recently communications and marketing manager at The National Book Foundation. At Penguin Random House Canada, Talia Abramson has joined the design team as full-time junior designer. She was previously with the team on contract. Joy Bean has joined Arctis Books USA as lead editor. She was previously senior editor at Boyds Mills & Kane and Little Bee Books.