We had a terrific session on with Wednesday, with seven authors worthy of your attention for their forthcoming books in conversations with their editors — along with some needed comic relief from authors Patty Marx and Roz Chast. If you missed any of it, you can watch the recording at http://publun.ch/BBEditorsPanel. Just paste in the passcode: cEzg!m7+ Thanks very much again to the ABA for joining us as co-presenter and helping to fill the virtual room with eager booksellers, along with everyone who helped spread the word, including NetGalley, Publishing Perspectives, Shelf Awareness, Bookselling this Week, and others — and […]
Forthcoming: Wright, Gladwell, Moriarty
Lawrence Wright‘s THE PLAGUE YEAR will be published by Knopf on June 8, with an announced first printing of 100,000 copies. A portion of the book ran in the The New Yorker a few weeks. Wright traces Covid-19 from its origins in China, to the critical first weeks and months of its arrival in the U.S., through its escalation around the world, to today. Malcolm Gladwell‘s THE BOMBER MAFIA: A Dream, A Temptation, and The Longest Night of the Second World War will be published on April 27 by Little, Brown, with Gladwell’s audio production company Pushkin Industries releasing the […]
Beyond Bookscan and AAP: The Good and Bad of 2020 Sales
2020 was a year of great challenges and for many great pain, yet at the same time by standard statistics it looks to have been a strong year for trade publishing in general. The two main measures of US trade book sales — Bookscan for weekly print sales, and AAP StatShot for monthly publisher dollar sales — both turned positive in June and stayed that way for the rest of the year. Those strong and steady results gave both relief and inspiration to many people throughout our business, demonstrating the enduring importance and value of books to readers and the […]
People: Yaged Promoted to President of Macmillan Trade
Following Don Weisberg’s elevation to ceo of Macmillan’s English-language trade publishers, Jon Yaged has been promoted to fill Weisberg’s previous position of president, Macmillan Publishers US (Trade). Yaged has been president of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group for the past 10 years. Jen Besser is promoted to president of Macmillan Children’s, reported to Yaged. Weisberg writes to staff: “In this year of extraordinary change, it has become even more imperative that the President of the US Trade Publishers have a clear vision not just for the company we are, but for the company that we want to be. A company that […]
November AAP Sales Rebounded On Big Hardcover Gains
Though we already know how the holiday sales season and year turned out from Bookscan, the AAP released their November StatShot report on Monday, showing a strong month of trade sales. The increases look big — trade sales of $870 million were well up from $649 million a year. But last November was a dismal outlier, so this year’s gain was more of a return to the norm, with sales running a little below the strong $883 million from November 2018. (Sales were $750 million in 2017, and $770 in 2016.) This year’s performance was helped considerably by the publication […]
Later This Week: Our Winter Editors Buzz Panel
Thanks to our co-presenter the American Booksellers Association plus kind enthusiasm from the community, we are expecting a packed virtual room for our winter Buzz Books Editors Panel this Wednesday at 7 PM EST. Make sure you register now if you have not done so already, and join moderator Jake Cumsky-Whitlock at Solid State Books in Washington, DC; co-hosts and authors Roz Chast and Patricia Marx; and seven great editors to hear about some of the season’s potential breakout titles