Bloomsbury reported sales for the first half of their fiscal year ended August 31, with sales continuing their rise—due in particular to Sarah J. Maas—to £180 million, up 32 percent, or £43 million. Profits were up 50 percent to £26.6 million. Essentially all of the gains came from the consumer division, where sales were up 47 percent (or £42 million) to £131.3 million, with profit before taxation and highlighted items gaining 91 percent to £21.4 million. We can’t talk about the consumer division without talking about Maas. According to the publisher, her sales more than doubled again in the period, […]
Archives for October 2024
Obituary: Gary Indiana
Novelist, playwright, and critic Gary Indiana, 74, has died. He served as the art critic for the Village Voce from 1985-1988, and went on to publish novels including Horse Crazy, Resentment: A Comedy, and most recently, The Shanghai Gesture.
Ask an Expert: Pamela Dorman
Pamela Dorman is senior vice president and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books/Viking. In her more than thirty years at Viking Penguin, Dorman has published multimillion-copy, #1 New York Times bestsellers by Kim Edwards, Helen Fielding, Gail Honeyman, Sue Monk Kidd, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Jojo Moyes. She began her publishing career at St. Martin’s Press and is a summa cum laude graduate of Wesleyan University. Is there one problem you see in books that you wish writers knew before their manuscripts made it to your desk? There are many! A couple off the top of my head: Try reading some of your […]
Story Confirms That Spotify Is Paying Real Money to Publishers
Since Spotify started offering US premium subscribers 15 hours of audiobook listening a month at no extra cost nearly a year ago, we know the company has been putting real money into the hands of publishers and authors, marking one of the few initiatives in our world from a big tech player that actually seems to have grown the market. (When Spotify launched a regular, a la carte audiobook sales program the year before, the impact was minor at best.) Digital audio had been growing a lovely 12 to 15 percent a year by industry statistics and through the first […]
Authors Are Creating “Agents and Editors Guides” to Jump-Start Querying Process
In a recent trend online, querying writers are posting agents and editors guides to their unpublished manuscripts. The guides comprise four images or slides and include the title, comps, a brief plot description, and other information presented concisely and visually. The trend was originated by Shardai Smith, a fiction and horror author who also works in book marketing. Smith posted a guide to her novel From Our Blood back in March. She tells PL she was inspired by indie authors who have been making pitch guides for their readers for a while. “As a book marketer, I’ve followed a few […]