In line with our early assessment of dealmaking heading into this year’s London Book Fair, now officially underway, even with a busy few days of final reports this year’s activity stands at moderate. The biggest (or “major”) deals came in just ahead of last year and still well below the most recent high-water mark in 2014, with fiction having its second-strongest showing in the last 8 years (and in turn nonfiction at its weakest point in that period — except for the Obamas’ record-setting deal). Overall six-figure deals were more balanced across the breakouts: Looking just at the closely-watched fiction […]
Book Fairs
Moderate Dealmaking Ahead of the London Book Fair
It’s an unusual dealmaking climate leading into this year’s London Book Fair, which officially begins next Tuesday, for a variety of reasons. Shifting the gathering back a month to mid-March for the first time in years has various effects. The submissions process appears to have made a late adjustment to the early show and, as we have already noted, with big publishers just coming out of sales conference, new announcements for big fall titles (in the last week alone including Mandela, Allende, Gordon Brown, Dan Rather, the Bush sisters, Jennifer Egan, Tina Brown, and John Le Carre) are getting as much […]
Sargent: Even As eBooks Shrink, Data Will Drive Better Publishing, with Big Change for Education
Macmillan ceo John Sargent told you all you need to know about the state of digital publishing and the evolution of the Digital Book World conference when he opened the show in New York on Tuesday by answering pre-submitted audience questions. “Why isn’t he speaking about digital?” Sargent said at the top. “Because you didn’t want me to,” with submitted questions addressing broader and cultural issues. In fact “we’ll see that business [digital] shrink this year,” Sargent noted, even as the market for reading continues to grow. Self publishing and Kindle Unlimited are “very big and growing” and general trade […]
Book Expo Will Limit Attendees, Revert to Two Days of Exhibits
In a promotional piece from PW, Book Expo now confirms what they would not make official for us a week ago (though it was between the lines if you read carefully): With convention attendance dwindling steadily over the past five years and then dropping precipitously for the 2016 Chicago event, the new strategy will officially “limit” non-exhibitor attendees to 6,000 people. As we reported recently, Chicago attendees numbered 6,314 people, or right around the new limit, down from 9,634 in 2015, and 11,374 in 2012. Media are counted separately. As noted on the show website, the exhibit floor will once again open for two […]
BEA Chicago Attendance Was Down By Over A Third
Back in May we all knew that the Book Expo show in Chicago was smaller and quieter than recent conventions in New York, though at the time conference did not release attendance estimates. Rather, representatives said their expectation — and then their post-show rough estimate — was about the same level of attendance as in New York in 2015, or 17,000 to 18,000 people. (Historically, the estimates provided right after the show tend to be higher than the final verified numbers.) In response to a recent PL recent query, Book Expo has told us that total audited Chicago attendance was 11,311 people — […]
To BE Is Not to BEA: Show Changes Name to Book Expo
Budweiser changed their name to America for part of this year, but the big US trade book show is going the other way, telling booksellers that “Book Expo America” has officially changed its name to Book Expo (or, rather, BookExpo). A refreshed web site shows off the new Book Expo logo and branding, though for web purposes, the show remains bookexpoamerica.com since bookexpo.com has been owned by someone else for years. More practically, the show and the ABA have agreed to a long overdue move: The annual ABA Celebration of Bookselling luncheon that draws lots of booksellers and executives off […]