At Portfolio and Sentinel, Bria Sandford has been promoted to senior editor.
Former longtime chairman of Canongate for 22 years (and stepfather of Jamie Byng) Christopher Bland, 78, died on Sunday of prostate cancer. He also had served as chair of the BBC board of governors and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and published two novels in the past few years.
The UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction is looking for a new sponsor after Bailey’s said it had “regretfully decided to make way for a new sponsor” after this year’s award. They took over sponsorship of what had been the Orange Prize in 2014. Chief marketing officer of Bailey’s owner Diageo Syl Saller will join the prize’s board, however.
Statistics
BookNet Canada released headline sales data for 2016 in advance of their annual research publication. Update: BNC made a mistake in their own press release and issued an update. What they meant was not all point of sales, but that data counted from a “subset of retailers [who] report consistently year over year.
Point of sales data from over 2,000 retail outlets [see note above] shows trade book print sales of 36.1 million units falling 6.4 percent (“slightly,” in their vernacular), with dollar sales of $740 million (CA) declining 3.6 percent. Nonfiction declined 10.4 percent on a unit basis, and 7.1 percent in dollars, as fiction fell 6.7 percent in units and 5.6 percent in dollars. Thanks to Harry Potter, juvenile sales fell less than one percent in units, and gained 6.7 percent in dollars.
Addition: The full reporting stream actually showed sales of 50.5 million print units in 2016 (down from 52.8 million units in 2015), registering sales of $984 million (compared to $1 billion in 2015).