Vintage is reprinting a total of 100,000 copies across their backlist of 14 story collections by Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Random House Canada ceo Brad Martin told the Globe and Mail, “As far as we know, we have stock of all of Alice’s active titles,” though booksellers were light on copies and ran out quickly. Indigo placed “nice, substantial orders” for fresh inventory. You can read (or hear) Munro’s short phone call interview with the prize organizers here. She said in a written statement Thursday: “This is so surprising and wonderful. I am dazed by all the attention and affection that has […]
Book Fairs
Dohle Commits to Print, Scaled Innovation, and Alignment with Retail Partners
In introducing Penguin Random House ceo at a public forum at the Frankfurt Book Fair Wednesday, Frankfurt Academy head Holger Volland noted that they previously featured multiple heads of houses in a group. “Since Markus Dohle now equals five ceos,” Volland quipped, “we have replaced them with him.” Meanwhile, the always low-key and optimistic Dohle celebrated the completion of the merged company’s first 100 days together — which has been the opposite of a political leader’s first 100 days. “I wanted to make it the most boring merger in the history of corporations — because in essence what we do […]
Books Versus Other and the Rise of eBooks, Around the World
By next year (if not by now already) more than half of all books will be purchased online in the US rather than in physical stores, and Amazon executive Russ Grandinetti told the audience at Publishers Launch Frankfurt that the UK is only another year away — and he believes the same trend is “not more than three years” away for most of “the rest of Europe.” (At the same time, however, Bowker US survey data for the first half of 2013 actually shows online sales actually declining by a few percentage points, for the first time — though that […]
First and Last
For last-minute planners headed to the Frankfurt Book Fair, you can still enroll for what promises to be a very interesting Publishers Launch conference on Tuesday (from 8:30 to 2:00). And you can still use our code PL13PartnerMC20 to save 20 percent on registration. We have newsmakers Trip Adler of Scribd; Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins UK; Russ Grandinetti of Amazon; Jonathan Nowell of Nielsen Book; Alan Lau of Wattpad; and Otis Chandler of Goodreads — plus Ken Brooks, Rebecca Smart, Marcus Leaver, Micah Bowers, Octavio Kulesz and a panel on Germany’s emergence as the new market to go digital, with a closing […]
Talk About Timely: Newsmakers and Leaders, Up Close
Our big Publishers Launch Frankfurt conference is just a week away, on Tuesday, October 8 — presented in cooperation with The Frankfurt Academy — and will stand as the fair’s premier publishing and digital strategy event with a series of timely, newsmaking and accomplished speakers. Scribd’s new ebook subscription service is in the news today, and Scribd ceo Trip Adler is on our stage next week talking about it. Among other maturing new players, Wattpad made news for their publishing line with Sourcebooks and Goodreads has drawn headlines for trying to limit members and authors attacking each other on the site, and their […]
Ready for Discovery
We are all set for a great full-day conference tomorrow on Modern Book Marketing: Tools, Techniques and Services. As always happens with our New York shows, we’re getting a lot of late enrollments — so if you have been meaning to join us, make sure to claim your place now. More than just a collection of ideas and panels. Digital marketing strategist Peter McCarthy, along with Publishers Launch Conferences partner Mike Shatzkin and the team at Digital Book World, will present a structured curriculum of tested techniques, tools and best practices to guide successful digital book marketing and discovery. The full program also […]