Archives for August 2022

Ayesha Pande at Ayesha Pande Literary is one of the few literary agents that the DOJ will be calling to testify directly at length in the A3 trial, but when her appearance concluded on Tuesday morning, it left some people wondering how her evidence supports the case against the merger. She did ratify the government’s argument that the big five are unto themselves in terms of their ability to consistently pay big advances and bring to bear best-in-breed marketing, publicity and sales clout. Pande noted that even for her authors who have published successfully with a smaller, independent house, “it […]

The most important takeaway from the second day of the A3 antitrust trial echoes a point we made the first day, which is that Judge Florence Pan is clearly very smart, learning quickly about publishing, and not allowing herself to be distracted by posturing from either side of the dispute. In the opening session on Tuesday morning, at the end of testimony and cross-examination from literary agent Ayesha Pande, Judge Pan had inferred, “Is it correct that if Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House were merged, it wouldn’t have affected any of the deals?” (The answer was, yes.) Then […]

A number of Lunch devotees may have had this same recurring dream in which you are in court (in your pajamas, naturally) and executives, editors and agents are lined up to discuss, under oath, the details of their auctions and acquisitions. Or maybe it’s just a pitch for a “Deals Court” reality show? But Tuesday afternoon in Judge Florence Pan’s Courtroom 12, that was part of what unfolded, as the DOJ’s Jeffrey Vernon walked through a number of competitive situations in which S&S and PRH were the final two bidders for projects of scale. (In the fantasy version of Deals […]