NYT culture editor Danielle Mattoon wrote to staff in a memo Thursday that the paper has hired Jennifer Senior as a book critic “focusing on nonfiction,” starting October 19. Matton writes, “As a reviewer, Jennifer brings a connoisseur’s eye for detail and a reporter’s sense of context, allowing her to get at the heart of both the books she’s reviewing and the larger stories they are trying to tell.” She has been a contributing editor at New York Magazine, and is the author All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. The paper has been looking for a new critic since […]
Authors
Funke Breaks with US and UK Publishers Over Editing; Will Launch Own Publisher
International bestselling author Cornelia Funke is parting ways with both Little, Brown Children’s in the US and Chicken House in the UK after disagreeing with editorial requests from each house. Instead, she will publish the third volume in her Mirrorworld series, The Golden Yarn, through her company, Breathing Books, in November. In both cases, the publishers have reverted rights to the first two books in the series to Funke, and Breathing Books will re-release the first two titles in November as well. Funke will use the UK titles for all three books. (In the US, the first two books were […]
Amazon KU Payment Drops 11 Percent For August
Amazon decided — as usual, in their sole judgment, based on undisclosed data — that they will pay KDP Select authors a total of $11.8 million for Kindle Unlimited subscription reading in August. That’s up from the $11.3 million pool divided up for July. But with the money being shared across 2.3 billion pages read, Amazon’s per-page payment dropped considerably. Going down to roughly $0.00514 per page (about half of one cent) from $0.005779 per page in July may look modest visually, but as authors were quick to note on online forums, that equates to an 11 percent decrease in the […]
Pedroza Likely to Win $10.7 Million Or More In FIFTY SHADES Royalties, But Can She Collect?
Former co-founder of The Writers Coffee Shop Jennifer Pedroza is moving closer to receiving her one-quarter share of The Writers Coffee Shop’s profits from the Fifty Shades trilogy, though the process has been underway for many months and still is not finalized. In a Texas court hearing on Wednesday, Judge Susan McCoy heard from accountants hired by both Pedroza and defendant Amanda Hayward that 25 percent of TWCS’s profits would equal approximately $10.7 million. A jury ruled in Pedroza’s favor in February, and starting in April, Judge McCoy has been trying to get Hayward to deposit $10 million in an escrow […]
Author Solutions Lawsuit Settled in New York; Indiana Suits Consolidated
Once Judge Denise Cote denied class certification in July to the group of plaintiffs who filed suit against Author Solutions more than two years ago alleging fraud, violation of consumer protection acts, and unjust enrichment, it was only a matter of time before that version of the case reached a natural end. On August 12, Judge Cote issued a one-page order of discontinuance indicating the suit had been settled by the two standalone plaintiffs the prior day, with the case “discontinued without any costs to any party and without prejudice to restoring action to this Court’s calendar if the application…is made within […]
Briefs
Liz Esman has joined Crown as senior publicist, Crown, Hogarth, Broadway Books and Tim Duggan Books. Previously she was a publicist at HarperCollins. In addition, Morgan Carattini has been promoted to publishing manager for Crown, Archetype, Hogarth, Broadway Books, Tim Duggan Books, and Three Rivers Press. The Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin has acquired Kazuo Ishiguro‘s archive for a reported $1.1 million. Among the unpublished works included in the archive are an early pulp western, as well as a short novel called To Remember a Summer By. Entertainment Weekly has an excerpt of THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S […]