Complete

Sales and Profits Slide at S&S Sales fell four percent in the fourth quarter at Simon & Schuster to $252.5 million as operating income dropped 26 percent to $27 million. The company says “best-selling titles… did not match contributions from prior year titles.” while the profit drop is attributed to “the decline in revenues and higher employee-related and digital archive costs.” For the full year, though, sales were up 10 percent, at $886 million and profits were up 29 percent at $88 million, improved in part by “lower bad debt expense.” Release Follett Buys Varsity, Cheap Follett has agreed to […]

RH Buys Monacelli This morning Random House announced the acquisition earlier this month of visual arts book publisher The Monacelli Press. Founded in 1994, Monacelli has published over 250 books on architecture, the fine arts, interior design, landscape architecture, photography, and graphic design. Monacelli will be an independent imprint within Random House, separate from the company’s other divisions, run by publisher and founder Gianfranco Monacelli. The staff will relocate to Random’s Manhattan headquarters, and the company will take over sales and distribution from Penguin as of July 1. Monacelli will report to RH deputy chairman Edward Volini, who says in […]

Rodale Reports, Without Reporting Privately-held Rodale put out a press release celebrating all of the various percentage gains the company made in fiscal 2007 without actually sharing any of the numbers and comparisons that a publicly-held company would provide. The local paper in Allentown does put full-year revenues at $632 million, and the company says total sales were up 7.8 percent for the year. Books are among the categories that “exceeded our goals.” Release Amazon and Fox Move Ahead on Book-to-Film Project Amazon’s first film development project, based on Keith Donahue’s THE STOLEN CHILD, is moving forward at Fox with […]

Reed to Sell Business Information Unit Reed Elsevier announced their intention to sell off Reed Business Information, their trade magazine division that includes Variety and PW. CEO Crispin Davis says “its advertising revenue model and the inherent cyclicality fit less well with the subscription-based information and workflow solutions focus of Reed Elsevier’s strategy.” He also said “broadly, print publishing is flat while online is growing at around 11 percent a year.” Reed Exhibitions — currently a division of the RBI, which operates BEA and the London Book Fair — will be retained by the company. While the company timed their […]

E-Mail Tips The service that sends much of our mail has had technical problems — hence yesterday’s late meal yesterday. And today we are sending via the PublishersMarketplace server to get the mail through. We hope the problems will be resolved quickly, but in the meantime here are some tips that are always useful with mail issues: — Lunch Deluxe is posted to PublishersMarketplace.com as soon as it’s ready, and archived there as well. You can always read Lunch through the site, no matter what e-mail issues you might be having. (Some members are on the site every day; some […]

Over 1.1 Million Orman Free Downloads The Oprah Winfrey Show said in a statement over the weekend that they provided over 1.1 million free downloads of Suze Orman’s book in the short period that it was available. Orman says in the release: “I believe WOMEN & MONEY is the most important book I’ve ever written. So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer.” AP Editorial Cuts at HMH As part of the integration of Harcourt Trade and Houghton Mifflin, editors Jane Rosenman, Anton […]