Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has hired Bridgett Paradise as svp of human resources and chief people officer, reporting directly to CEO Linda Zecher. Her role “will encompass human resources strategy and policy, including talent management and acquisition, organizational design and employee benefits. Paradise has been at Microsoft, most recently in the position of general manager, human resources for the worldwide services division. Abigail Naqvi has joined Bloomsbury as the new head of academic marketing for the Americas. Previously she was marketing manager at Palgrave Macmillan. At HarperCollins, Susan Yeager has been promoted to director of sales, mass merch. At Knopf Children’s, Allison Wortche has been promoted to […]
Bestseller Radar
Batman Beats Back Kindle Unlimited
Yes, you read that correctly. For the first day since we starting monitoring the effect on Kindle Unlimited titles on Amazon Kindle’s So-Called Bestseller List, the number of KU titles on the top 100 declined modestly, now accounting for 38 titles. But Batman related books have stormed the list, taking over 10 slots, including the No. 1 position. (Wednesday was celebrated as the 75th anniversary of Batman’s creation.) KU books still claim half of the top 50 titles, though (25 today, versus 24 yesterday), and Amazon Publishing’s own titles still show the biggest boost. The traditional publisher titles included in KU […]
Daily Update: Influence of Kindle Unlimited on Amazon “Bestsellers” Grows
Since no one else is reporting on this at all, we’ll continue our tracking. Amazon’s hourly list of the top 100 “paid” Kindle bestsellers appears to be under the steadily growing influence of Kindle Unlimited “checkouts,” which are counted as part of paid sales. In this morning’s check, 45 of the top 100 titles are also available through Kindle Unlimited — and 24 of the top 50 titles. Amazon Publishing’s own titles still appear to be benefitting the most, and self-published authors who are not exclusive to Amazon (and therefore not part of KU) seem to have lost the most […]
Kindle Unlimited “Bestseller” List Encourages Exclusivity, Works Against Independence
A Monday night check of Amazon’s Kindle Bestseller list reinforces what we found in our Monday morning post: Kindle Unlimited looks to be having a significant effect on the etailer’s hourly bestseller list, since KU checkouts are being counted as “sales” for bestseller rank purposes. On Monday evening, 42 of the top 100 titles were KU offerings. 28 of those titles are exclusive to Amazon, either through the Amazon Publishing imprints (15 titles) or through KDP Select (13 titles). Another 14 of the new “bestsellers” are books from traditional and digital publishers, all but one of which (Business Adventures) were not on […]
Unlimited Consequences
It’s early days for Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription program — day four to be exact — but there is already plenty to note among some of the unusual consequences of the program. For Self-Published Authors, The Deal Just Changed, To…? First and foremost is at least some misgivings among self-published authors about what KU will do to their incomes. As Michael Sullivan commented on Kindle Boards, our Publishers Lunch post, and elsewhere: “I’m really surprised at the ‘Two-tier’ system that Amazon has implemented. Traditional published titles are paid as if they were bought — such that these titles get full […]
New Tracking: Self-Published Bestsellers
With self-published ebooks regularly claiming at least some positions on major bestseller lists, we wanted to move past random data points to some kind of regular monitoring. After weeks of private experimentation, we are ready to make our new process transparent. Tapping our existing stream of aggregated bestsellers lists at PublishersMarketplace (which cover multiple lists from 9 sources), we have added tagging to identify self-published titles. The new output is viewable in a couple of ways. The new PM Self-Published Bestsellers list shows all of the self-published titles to make at least one list we track — and applies a […]