Jon Klassen‘s This is Not My Hat has won the UK’s Kate Greenaway medal, and Kevin Brooks’ The Bunker Diary was awarded the Carnegie medal. (The latter is not available in the US, which may present an opportunity — though it took a decade to publish this book about a kidnapped boy held hostage in a bunker, which the Telegraph calls an “unremittingly bleak account.”) Pat Strachan is no longer an editor at Little, Brown, where she worked since 2002, following the layoffs earlier this month. She can be reached at phstrachan@gmail.com. Kelly Rudolph has joined Harper as a publicity director, reporting to […]
Deals
Coming Soon: Jane Fonda’s Debut Novel
After two bestselling memoirs, most recently Prime Time in 2011, Jane Fonda has been writing her debut novel, AMANDA’S SECRETS. She mentioned the book inadvertently in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview at the Cannes Film Festival. Bob Levine at Levine, Plotknin & Menin tells us he plans to submit the project to publishers next month. “About 60 percent of the manuscript is done,” Levine says, along with an outline for the balance of the novel. Fonda told THR, “Writing a novel scares me,” adding, “I’ve never done it, so I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to do it.'” They are not describing the […]
Fiction Leads Rebound in Pre-LBF Dealmaking
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 […]
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 […]