Karen Kosztolnyik will return to Grand Central on May 30 (where she once was executive editor) as vp and editor-in-chief, under new publisher Ben Sevier. Reporting to Kosztolnyik will be editors Millicent Bennett, Maddie Caldwell, Wes Miller, Suzanne O’Neill, Lindsey Rose, and Gretchen Young, along with their teams. Kosztolnyik will acquire and edit “in her areas of interest, most prominently in commercial and literary fiction.” Most recently she was executive editor at Gallery and Scout Press, which she joined in 2011. Sevier says in the announcement Kosztolnyik “is well known in the book business for her taste, for her devotion […]
Bookstores
Amazon “Dedicated to Removing Bad Actors”
Further to our first story on Tuesday about efforts to ensure that third-party booksellers winning the buy box under Amazon’s new initiative are offering truly new, legitimate inventory, an Amazon spokesperson told us that the company “remain[s] dedicated as always to removing bad actors.” Reinforcing that “Amazon’s policy is that only new books are eligible to win the Buy Box,” the spokesperson said, “we move quickly to address any violations” and maintained that they “continuously verify and monitor all seller accounts.” Separately, Penguin Random House spokesperson Claire von Schilling confirmed the authenticity of the company’s email to Amazon third-party booksellers we cited […]
Can Publishing Do Anything About Book Buy Boxes?
Following the surfacing of Brooke Warner’s HuffPo piece explaining Amazon’s recent initiative to let third parties win the buy box on books to those who were unaware, both the IPBA and the Authors Guild have posted on why this is bad. But the bigger and more important question for the industry is whether anything can be done about the situation. To review, the change is part of revised third-party seller rules Amazon first announced last November, for implementation as of March 1, 2017. They did say at that time, “Sellers will be able to compete for the Buy Box for Books […]
Briefs: Prizes for Johnson and Shepard, Tor Labs, Opening Magic, and More
The inaugural winner of the $50,000 Simpson Family Literary Prize — honoring “a writer who has earned a distinguished reputation and the approbation and gratitude of readers” — is T. Geronimo Johnson, “at the relatively middle stage of a burgeoning career.” Author most recently of The World to Come: Stories Jim Shepard won the 2016 Rea Award for the Short Story, cited for his “prodigious research” into history and science and “X-ray vision of the soul.” The National Book Foundation gave their Innovations In Reading prize to Barbershop Books, a community-based literacy program that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barbershops, founded in 2013 by Alvin […]
May Bookseller Picks
Amazon‘s spotlight pick for May is Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy and their featured debut is Benjamin Ludwig’s Ginny Moon, also excerpted in our Buzz Books 2017: Spring/Summer. The other picks feature: Apollo 8, by Jeffrey Kluger One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul Time’s a Thief, by B.G. Firmani Sycamore, by Bryn Chancellor American Kingpin, by Nick Bilton Trajectory, by Richard Russo The Jersey Brothers, by Sally Mott Freeman Broken River, J. Robert Lennon Barnes & Noble‘s top fiction for May recommends Russo’s book of stories as well, along with: Men without Women, by Haruki Murakami Against […]
Barnes & Noble Promotes Parneros to CEO
Barnes & Noble is promoting chief operating officer Demos Parneros to ceo, with Len Riggio remaining as chairman of the board. In their awkward way the company said as much in March, when Riggio didn’t have any good answers to the state of the ceo search — if there really was a search at all — but praised their “spectacular new chief operating officer” calling Parneros “certainly a top candidate for the ceo position.” Parneros was hired in November, shortly before the previous coo Jamie Carey left the company. In the press release, Riggio says, “It has become abundantly clear over the last five […]