As promised on Friday, we now have complete comparison statistics on the pre-London Book Fair dealmaking. Overall deal volume in the five weeks prior to the international fair (through the Friday before the event) has continued its growth for the second year in a row. Deals with US print publishers have increased to their highest level since 2010, now well above the low point in 2012, and deals with digital-focused publishers continue to add modestly to the totals, as show in this chart: Publisher investment continues to lag behind 2010, however, though it too has […]
Deals
London Book Fair Dealmaking Preview
As usual, our deal reports continue to swell in advance of next week’s London Book Fair as primary deals are lined up and announced to spur further rights sales. We’ve already posted 191 deals since Monday, with more to come throughout the day. We will run our comprehensive evaluation of dealmaking trends in next Monday’s Publishers Lunch (and will try to post to PM over the weekend). For now, we offer the first two glimpses. For the five weeks prior to LBF, counting through the Friday before the show (except for this year), dealmaking volume is fairly steady year over […]
Forthcoming: Books from Rice, Nicholls, and Maybe Lohan
Anne Rice said on a podcast co-hosted by her son Christopher that her new novel, PRINCE LESTAT: The Vampire Chronicles, will be published October 28. Reportedly, the title will be available for pre-order March 16. Author of ONE DAY David Nicholls will release a new novel, US, on “the bond of marriage and the demands of parenthood,” on September 30 in the UK, again from Hodder & Stoughton. It’s his first novel since the breakout ONE DAY (the success of which was spurred by the Random House Films movie version). In turn, producer of the ONE DAY movie Nina Jacobson […]
Forthcoming: A Real Banker, and A Funny One
Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke announced to the AP that he wants to write a book about the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed it: “I want people to understand what we knew, when we knew it, how we made decisions and how we dealt with the enormous economic uncertainty.” Bernanke “expects to begin meeting with publishers within the next several weeks.” As you prepare, you can review Princeton University Press’s collection of a lecture series by Bernanke on the same topic, published a year ago. Separately, a page-one 1,300-word investigation by the NYT reveals that […]
People, Etc.: Ali Gunn Dies
Literary agent Ali Gunn of Gunn Media died in Switzerland of a brain hemorrhage, the Bookseller reports. They say she was found dead Thursday morning. One of her former colleagues at Curtis Brown UK Jonny Geller tells the magazine, “My colleagues are devastated because she was such a life force. She always had a glass of wine and a smile. She was full of color and devoted to her authors. The idea that this has happened so suddenly is really shocking.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will expand their Best American Series with a science fiction and fantasy anthology, starting in October […]
A New Millennium Series Manuscript, and Other Maybe Books
While there are still no signs that the late Stieg Larsson’s unfinished manuscript for what was actually to be the fifth installment in his envisioned 10-book Millennium series will ever be published, the originating publisher in Sweden Norstedts has hired David Lagercrantz to write a fourth installment in the series. In turn, Norstedts has again sold world English rights to Quercus’s MacLehose Press, which says in a release it plans to publish in August 2015. Larsson’s editor at Norstedts Eve Gedin tells a Swedish newspaper, “We are proud and excited to now have signed an agreement with David Lagercrantz who, urged […]