In a year of transitions for three of the world’s major book fairs, the London Book Fair opened Tuesday in a return to its historical home at the Olympia Exhibition Center. You can go home again, but usually by the time you do, someone has redecorated, and today LBF veterans went through multiple stages of soothing the cognitive dissonance of the return to Olympia. While there is a vague familiarity to the scene, everything is very different as well, and many fairgoers spent much of the opening morning getting situated. First there was the transportation, since the special above-ground train […]
Book Fairs
Fiction Deals Soft Heading Into London Book Fair
With the London Book Fair convening as of next Tuesday, it’s time for our regular analysis of dealmaking patterns in advance of the big international rights show. As usual, the last few days of results can have some effect on our final stats so we’ll be back on Monday with more definitive counts. (We’ve already posted 189 deals since Monday morning, with more to add to our site.) But the initial graphs surveying the five weeks leading up to LBF (starting March 7) show two clear trends. In domestic (US) deals, despite a significant surge in nonfiction reports, overall dealmaking […]
BEA’s Three Panels of Buzz Books
BEA has announced the fall books to be featured on the convention’s three Buzz Books panels in May. The adult panel is evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction. There’s one debut novel (from Stegner Fellow and Paris Review Plimpton Prize winner Ottessa Moshfegh); one adult debut (YA author Ruth Warburton, writing as Ruth Ware — for the debut title from Gallery’s Scout Press); and one novel that’s been buzzed since it was sold in fall 2013, from Garth Risk Hallberg, already promoted as a Winter Institute buzz book and now back for more: Adult City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (Knopf) […]
ABA News: 54 New Stores In 2014, and Winter Institute Buzz Authors
In the lead up to next week’s tenth annual Winter Institute, the ABA noted that they tabulated 54 new member stores selling new books in 2014: 45 new bookstores, and 9 new branches or satellites of existing members (plus another 5 stores primarily selling used books). Perhaps more significantly, they also charted sales of 28 ABA member businesses to new owners. (The story includes a complete list of new stores and new owners.) At their dedicated WI mini-site the ABA lists all of the many authors who will appear at next week’s event, and we have already run our seasonal […]
People: On George Nicholson, and More
Sterling Lord Literistic agent George Nicholson, 77, died on Tuesday. Before joining SLL in 1995, he founded Delacorte Press and Yearling Books, and was publisher of Books for Children at The Viking Press. At Hachette Book Group, recently-appointed svp group sales director Chris Murphy announced a reorganization of the sales group to “better align individuals to make the very most of their skills, and position us as a strong, well-rounded sales team.” Dave Epstein moves up to vp, retail sales, and will hire an executive director of children’s sales to fill his former position. Linda Jamison is promoted to executive director of mass merchant sales, reporting to […]
DBW: Price Promotions, Direct-to-Consumer, Global Publishing
The evolution of ebooks into a mature market in the US was evident on the second day of DBW last Thursday, as the focus turned to nuanced questions of how to boost sales of titles in a crowded marketplace, as well as publisher experiments in selling direct to consumers or in international markets. On a price promotions panel Thursday afternoon, Rachel Chou, chief marketing officer at Open Road, described how the market has changed, saying that price used to be the primary tool a publisher had to drive ebook sales, and running a discounted price promotion on a title two […]