For those heading to the London Book Fair shortly, note that there are planned tube closures this weekend that may effect travel to Earl’s Court and the conference center in Westminster. Most notably, the Circle line is scheduled to be closed entirely both Saturday and Sunday. The District line will be partially suspended both days, with no service from Earl’s Court to the east, including Westminster. Earl’s Court should still be serviced by Picadilly line and Westminster should still be serviced by the Jubilee line. You can check the official London transport site for more details. Meanwhile, per tradition we […]
Deals
Amazon Publishing’s Deals Make It the Peer of Two Big Six Adult Groups for Now
We’re wary of overcovering Amazon, but the etailer’s rapid publishing ramp-up is clearly of widespread community interest, and it feels as if we’ve been seen a large volume of deal reports for their various imprints lately. As always, we like to measure impressions against data. To that end, here is the breakdown of Publishers Marketplace deal reports for all Amazon publishing imprints over the last quarter: Amazon NY 18 Thomas & Mercer 14 Montlake Romance 12 Amazon Crossing 5 47North 3 Amazon Encore 2 Total: 54 deals But where does that deal volume put them? Compared to the […]
Children’s Deal Activity Looking Flat In Lead-Up to Bologna Fair
With the Bologna Book Fair launching next, we took a look at how this year’s deal activity compares to last year’s. And the results are…inconclusive. The problem with a straight comparison is that this year the fair is convening about two weeks earlier than last year. If we look at the US children’s deal reports beginning January 1 both this year and last, the results are almost exactly the same: Jan. 1 – March 15, 2012 1 Children’s (all) 231 2 Children’s: Young Adult 115 3 Children’s: Picture book 61 4 Children’s: Middle grade 51 Jan. 1 – March 25, […]
How Vintage Landed Erotic Romance Trilogy ’50 Shades of Grey’
As the NYT reported over the weekend Vintage bought world English print, digital, and audio rights to republish EL James’ erotic romance trilogy 50 SHADES OF GREY, which has sold more than 250,000 units (predominantly in ebook format) and has become an increasingly prominent topic of conversation over the past few weeks. The republished ebook edition is available now, priced at $9.99, with trade paperbacks to follow in early April, priced at $15.95. Foreign rights auctions have concluded or are underway in a number of territories as well. In a telephone interview, Vintage evp and publisher Anne Messitte told us […]
Random House Films Branches Out Beyond Focus Features
In further updates, the Hollywood Reporter ran a story last week on recent activity by Random House Films (as well as Macmillan’s movie development team) which left us confused about the direction of the RH unit. Since it was founded in 2005, Random House Films has focused on developing, co-financing and co-producing movies based on books in partnership with Focus Features. While the enterprise has yet to achieve the “substantial slate of feature films” envisioned at the outset, Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum says the venture “continues ever-forward under its founding leader and president, Peter Gethers.” So far the only […]
Rowling Will Publish This Year (and Settled With Christopher Little)
Further to yesterday morning’s announcement of JK Rowling’s new novel, which did include release timing, Rowling herself told the Twitter the book will be “out later this year.” Agent Neil Blair confirms to the WSJ “that he negotiated directly with Little, Brown in the UK for world English rights rather than offering the title for auction,” which is what we inferred, but apparently has surprised some people. Little-noticed was last month’s preamble to yesterday’s announcement: The Daily Mail “was informed” by London-based reputation and crisis-management firm Project Associates that Rowling settled with former agent Christopher Little. The statement indicated that […]