The 3 finalists for The Story Prize were announced Wednesday morning, with the winner to be named at an awards ceremony on March 21: Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda (Scribner) Steven Millhauser, We Others (Knopf) Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books) The Jewish Book Award winners were named, including Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography as book of the year, with Aharon Appelfeld’s Until the Dawn’s Light winning the fiction award. These seven novels (instead of the usual five candidates) made the Man Asian Literary Prize shortlist: Jamil Ahmad, The Wandering Falcon (Penguin India/Hamish Hamilton/Riverhead), Pakistan Jahnavi Barua, Rebirth (Penguin India/Penguin Books), India Rahul Bhattacharya, […]
Authors
Rachael Ray Moves to Atria; Gets Imprint (and QR Codes)
Following Reader’s Digest’s sale of the magazine Every Day With Rachael Ray to Meredith last October, the cooking personality is moving publishing houses as well, signing with Atria after nine books with Clarkson Potter. (Ray was originally published by Lake Isle Press.) Ray tells the WSJ she wants to make her new cookbooks “exciting for people using their Nooks or iPads” and says she was attracted by a Tom Watson golf book Atria published last year that used QR codes editorially to link to instructional videos. (Yes, this is the first known example of QR codes actually benefiting a publisher.) […]
Bestsellers: ELF ON THE SHELF’S Rising Popularity; Big Sales for Tim Tebow
The AP looks at the rising popularity of the holiday picture book ELF ON THE SHELF, which has sold 2.5 million copies since its 2005 publication by CCA & B Publishers, the Marietta, GA-based publishing houses founded by ELF creators Carol Aebersold and her daughters Chanda Bell and Christa Pitts after a round of publisher rejections. CCA&B recorded $10 million in revenue in 2010 and now employs 25 people. “We used to have to stop people in the aisles at retail shows and explain what this was,” Pitts explained but now, “people are coming in and they already know. It’s […]
Authors: WIMPY KID’s Kinney Sues For Trademark Infringement; BN Ships Green’s FAULT OF OUR STARS Early
Author of the DIARY OF A WIMPY KID series Jeff Kinney filed a lawsuit Tuesday in a Boston federal court alleging that DIARY OF A ZOMBIE KID, published by Antarctic Press, “blatantly infringed [Kinney’s] intellectual property and diluted its trademarks.” (Kinney and his company trademarked the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” title and the name and look of the books’ main character with the US Patent & Trademark Office under “publications, namely a series of children’s books” in Class 16 and, “Board games; card games; plush toys; toy action figures; puzzles” in Class 28, respectively.) In addition to the “confusingly […]
eNews: Chabon Criticizes Standard eBook Royalty As Open Road Publishes His Backlist; New Cookbook Apps;and More
Open Road Integrated Media will publish five backlist titles by Michael Chabon starting today, including novels THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH and THE WONDER BOYS. In an interview with the AP Chabon called the 50 percent royalty Open Road offered for the books “fair and generous” while took issue with industry standard (which the AP said was “around 25 percent” but which we take to mean 25 percent of net proceeds) for ebook royalties as offered by current publisher HarperCollins and past publisher Random House, which will publish the ebook edition of THE ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY next June. “I […]
Author News: Stockett, Ailes, Mina
Author of The Help Kathryn Stockett reports to CBS’s The Early Show on her new novel-in-progress. Originally due at the beginning of 2011, Stockett says “It’s not ready! But I’m working on it.” The new book “takes place during the Roaring ’20s in Oxford, Mississippi. … It’s about a group of women who have absolutely no marketable skills. We, as women of the 2000s, we go to college and prepare ourselves for the world. But these women did not, and the men fall away, so they have to find a different way to earn a living.” CBS Fox News head […]