At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Trade & Reference group, Paul Shannon has been promoted to svp finance. Current svp digital strategy and planning Cheryl Toto expands her role to svp business planning and strategy, adding business operations and business applications to her responsibilities. With DEAD RECKONING, the twelfth Sookie Stackhouse book, set for publication in May, author Charlaine Harris says she is almost finished with the series. “Truthfully, the next two books will probably be the last two books in the series. I still love Sookie, but I’m beginning to want to write something else, and Sookie;s kind of taken over […]
Authors
Updates: More on Bolano Serialization and USAT Bestseller Lists
Yesterday’s Lunch dispatch misstated the nature of The Paris Review’s excerpting of Roberto Bolano’s novel THE THIRD REICH, which FSG will publish near the end of the year. The magazine is, in fact, serializing the book over four consecutive issues, with the final installment to be released in the first week of December. This is the first time in forty years that The Paris Review has serialized a novel. Editor Lorin Stein tells us the full novel will be published by FSG in mid-December, but the publisher’s fall catalog currently lists a November publication date, and director of publicity Jeff […]
Macmillan Acknowledges Kindle Outage Adjustment for Authors
A year after the showdown between Amazon and Macmillan over the publisher’s switch to agency terms that left most Macmillan titles unavailable for sale for about a week at the etailer, the companies’ joint move to make financial amends to authors has become public. In a letter from Macmillan ceo John Sargent to authors and agents, he explained their Amazon Kindle Outage Adjustment. (Most of the supplementary compensation was already paid in the prior royalty reporting period last year.) “We believe it was not fair that authors should suffer from the Amazon buy button takedown imposed on us for a […]
Briefs: Flynn is Fighting Cancer; Judy Moody Movie Gets Summer Release; and More
Author Vince Flynn said in a note on his website that he is battling prostate cancer, after being diagnosed in November: “At the end of my last tour, I was diagnosed with Stage III metastatic prostate cancer. Just a few years ago, this diagnosis would have been a death sentence. Today, specialists are making great strides in the areas of hormone therapy and immune response, and there are several very promising drug trials that are changing the landscape of how prostate cancer is treated. My treatments are working very well, and my near term prognosis is extremely good. In other […]
Knopf Clarifies Lawrence Wright’s Upcoming Scientology Book
Numerous media reports have created a wave of confusion over author Lawrence Wright’s work-in-progress on the Church of Scientology and director and high-profile Scientology defector Paul Haggis. In a telephone interview on Friday, Wright’s longtime editor at Knopf, Ann Close, clarified several key points. Knopf purchased North American rights to the book from agent Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency in early October, prior to Frankfurt. But that sale was too late to be included in the agency’s Frankfurt catalog–which was the source for a Gawker post earlier this month, which claimed the book proposal was still being shopped, and […]
A New Survey Shows A Widening Generational Gap of Mystery Readers
Sisters in Crime, in conjunction with Bowker PubTrack, released the results of a survey of 1,056 mystery readers conducted in September 2010 on their book-buying habits. And while many of the results will not be a surprise both to those in the industry and in the mystery community, what struck me in particular is the gap between readers over and under the age of 40, and how current acquisitions may appeal more to the younger group while it neglects, for good or for ill, older readers. Generally, the majority of mystery/crime fiction buyers tend to be women over the age […]