At Harvard Business Review Press, Sarah McConville has been promoted to publisher, responsible for leading all commercial aspects of the press including strategic partnerships, marketing and publicity, foreign rights, and global and domestic sales. She will also spearhead product development efforts. In addition, Tim Sullivan moves up to editorial director. At Random House, Frank Steinert has been promoted to evp, chief human resources officer. He is head of HR for the US division and for the company worldwide. Alyson Sinclair has been named publicity director at McSweeney’s, effective November 21st. She was most recently marketing and publicity manager at City […]
Best of
The Lists Begin, As Hudson Booksellers Picks Books of the Year
Hudson Booksellers, which operates 70 bookstores and sells books through another 400 newsstands, has picked Jonathan Evison’s novel WEST OF HERE as their book of the year. Here are their full Top 10 lists: Nonfiction Townie, Andre Dubus III Bossypants, Tina Fey Granta 116: Ten Years Later, Granta, Ed. John Freeman Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens Arguably, Christopher Hitchens In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson Sex on the Moon, Ben Mezrich What It Is Like to Go to War, Karl Marlantes The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson Best Fiction Ready Player One, Ernest Cline The […]
Retail: Amazon’s Hits So Far, and Two Actual Bombs At A Colorado Borders
Amazon’s editors have announced their Best Books of the Year So Far lists. In addition to an overall Top 10 list, the etailer selects Top 10s for 12 categories of print books, and in a new twist, nine categories of Kindle books. Even on the Kindle lists, comprising 90 books in all, titles from traditional publishers dominate. The Kindle lists do include five Kindle singles (from Jon Krakauer, as well as titles by Cecelia Holland, Oliver Broudy, James Powell, and Mara Altman). The one sort-of self-published sort-of full-length title on the list is Seth Godin’s 96-page Poke the Box, from […]
The Year In Sales: Print Sales Decline Less Than eBooks Gained, As Retail Market Share Is Hit
Many in the trade were feeling relatively positive about business trends at the end of the year until the Borders news broke. For the 51 weeks of book sales, through Sunday, December 26, print book sales as tracked by Nielsen BookScan were down 4.4 percent overall. (The comparable reporting period from 2009 ran through December 27.) With ebook sales at the major reporting houses rising from roughly 3 percent a year ago to approximately 9 percent or more in dollars (and likely even more by units) by the end of this year it’s likely that the decline in print sales […]
The Final List: Naming the Best of the Best of 2010
You’ve seen the dozens of lists we have linked to over the past six weeks or so and now here is the complete and final tabulation of the very best of the “best of 2010” lists. We have compiled lists from 30 sources in all (itemized at the bottom) to determine the consensus favorites shown below. For each title we show the total number of “votes” received, and this year in a new twist we have endeavored to list the editors and agents behind the books as well. For those who prefer a neater Top 10 overall list, we have […]
A Look Back At 2010
I’m usually not big on grand end-of-year lists and proclamations, but 2010 certainly has been the busiest, most complicated and most fascinating year since I stumbled my way into Publishers Lunch just over 10 years ago. It has been a challenge and a pleasure to lead the way with coverage of some of these complex new developments, including the first comprehensive story on the invention of the agency model and similar breaking pieces on agency’s sales tax complications, the agency/wholesale hybrid model, the antitrust investigation in Texas, and more. Every year, our “person of the year” is really you, our […]