Longtime Tattered Cover owner Joyce Meskis, 80, died at home on December 22. Meskis purchased the small namesake bookstore in 1974 and grew it into a renowned group of stores, and sold the company in 2015. Longtime employee Cathy Langer said, “Her legacy is changing the way people think about bookstores and their role in society.” As the store notes, “Joyce was a literary lioness that evolved our industry in a way that few others had done before her.”
Pearson to Acquire PDRI
Pearson will acquire Personnel Decisions Research Institutes, which provides workforce assessment services, including to the US federal government. PDRI will join Pearson’s Assessment & Qualifications division. The companies have already partnered on assessments for federal jobseekers, and a release states, “This acquisition unlocks synergies between Pearson and PDRI, whilst bringing new capabilities for Pearson to explore as the company grows its long-standing enterprise learning presence.” PDRI is valued at $190 million, which Pearson will pay using existing cash and available liquidity. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2023, pending regulatory review.
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Scholastic Book Fairs Rise to 85% of Pre-Pandemic Levels, As Trade Slides 4 Percent
Scholastic reported earnings results for the second quarter ended November 30, with sales of $588 million, up 12 percent from $524 million last year, driven by “strong results” in Children’s Book Publishing and Distribution and gains in Book Fairs. Operating income was 20 percent ahead of last year, at $100.1 million, and adjusted EBITDA was $122.3 million, a 14 percent gain. The company credited these results to higher sales and profits in the Children’s Books segment, as well as “cost containment” related to inflation. Trade sales, which had reached all-time high levels, dipped 4 percent to $120 million due to […]
Forthcoming: Patterson to Co-Author Unfinished Crichton Novel
James Patterson will complete an unfinished manuscript by Michael Crichton, who died in 2008, the WSJ reports. The as-yet-untitled novel was sold to Little, Brown by Shane Salerno for production company CrichtonSun and Robert Barnett for Patterson, and is about “a mega-eruption of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano that can destroy not just the island but the entire world” due to a secret cache of chemical weapons. It’s scheduled to be published in 2024. Crichton’s widow (and chief executive of CrichtonSun) Sherri Crichton said the existing manuscript was over 100 pages. “Michael had been working on this book for years, it […]
Trial Takeaways: Marketing and Publicity
At the antitrust trial, marketing and publicity expenditures were discussed mostly as a way of determining the level of support for Anticipated Top Selling Books (those acquired for $250,000+). While there are exceptions and surprises—the social media influencer whose posts promote the book for free; the modest acquisition that becomes an in-house favorite or hotly anticipated by readers—most publishers agreed that there was some correlation between advance level and promotional spend. Marketing Vs. Publicity In broad terms, marketing is paid for (i.e. advertising) and publicity is not, and they are usually handled by two separate departments. For marketing, in addition […]