The Harper Collins Union, part of UAW Local 2110, has ratified a new contract, which mandates a starting salary of $52,500, for a 35-hour week—the highest in the industry. All covered employees will get annual pay increases, and time and a half for overtime. Notably employees “at the beginning of their careers” can work up to three hours of overtime per week without prior approval. With that overtime included, that effectively “brings the lowest annual compensation” for junior employees to $57,000 for a 38-hour week, the union notes. Starting pay will increase every year up to $55,200 in 2028. Employees […]
Archives for March 2026
People 3/19
Dial Books for Young Readers Closes
Penguin Random House is closing Dial Books for Young Readers. Launched in 1961, the imprint has published books by Rosemary Wells, Mercer Mayer, Mildred D. Taylor, and Richard Peck, as well as Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri’s Dragons Love Tacos, B.J. Novak’s The Book With No Pictures, and Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun. “As a result [of the closure], a few employees will be leaving, and some will be joining other [Penguin Young Readers] imprints,” a spokesperson stated. The publisher did not respond to inquiries about the rationale behind the decision, the plans for forthcoming books, or how […]
Brendan Curry on the Nonfiction Market and Current Publicity Challenges
Brendan Curry, director of the trade group at Norton, is on the Open Book podcast this week speaking to David Steinberger about changes in the nonfiction market since 2020 and current publicity and marketing challenges. Black Lives Matter triggered an unexpected hunger for nonfiction, he explains. “We started to see mass curiosity at a level of more mass culture, a real hunger for understanding about pretty deep and painful and complex issues in American life,” he says. This resulted in “really large sales results from books that you wouldn’t expect,” like The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which began […]
Chicken Soup for the Soul Sues Tech Companies in an Individual Suit
Chicken Soup for the Soul, the company that publishes the eponymous inspirational anthologies, is the latest to sue tech companies over using their books to train LLMs. The company filed suit in the Northern District of California against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, Apple, Perplexity, Nividia, and xAI, claiming that the tech companies pirated books from The Pile, LibGen, Z-Library, and Anna’s Archive when developing their AI models. Companies have previously stated that books are the best training material for LLMs. “The Chicken Soup for the Soul series is particularly valuable in this regard,” the complaint states. “Each volume contains dozens […]
Forthcoming: Liane Moriarty’s ‘Big Little Truths’
Crown will publish the sequel to Liane Moriarty‘s bestselling 2014 novel Big Little Lies on August 25. BIG LITTLE TRUTHS follows the characters from the first novel, whose children are now in high school. “When a strange man lurks around the school asking supposedly innocent questions and the principal receives a severed human finger in the mail, the community is in an uproar,” a release states. “This tightly connected group will finally have to face the full repercussions of the big little truths they have—and haven’t—shared with their kids, with each other, and with themselves. “I found it such a joy to […]