BEA is just a few hours old — and the show floor won’t even open until Tuesday — but for now some of the biggest announcements are in the deals department. Random House Publishing Group has acquired Carly Simon‘s autobiography, which will cover “the discovery of her life-altering stammer, her meteoric rise and unparalleled career in music, and her loves, including her marriage to James Taylor, with Simon saying “after years of keeping journals and writing lyrics for my tunes, I have developed a strong interest in seeing how my life might just string together in a longer form.” In […]
Deals
People: Kendall to Lead Mulholland
Joshua Kendall will join Little, Brown on May 29 as the new editorial director of their Mulholland Books suspense fiction imprint, reporting to Judy Clain. Previously Kendall was senior editor at Viking/Penguin, and fills the slot vacated by John Schoenfelder, who left to work for film producer Scott Rudin. At Open Road, Allison Underwood has been promoted to senior marketing manager and Lara Selavka moves up to associate interactive producer. In addition, Iris Blasi joins as marketing manager, reporting to Underwood. She was most recently digital media manager with Hilsinger-Mendelson East. Ingram has relaunched their online search and order platform […]
London Travel Advisory, and Deal Trends
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 […]
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 […]