Bloom Books, the Sourcebooks line that offers a “joint publishing model” and started with EL James as “keystone author,” has announced their next partnership: fantasy romance author Scarlett St. Clair. They will have full rights to her entire backlist starting this fall, featuring the Hades x Persephone series, and will publish her new original novel, KING OF BATTLE AND BLOOD on November 30. A TOUCH OF DARKNESS, the first in her self-published series, is a TikTok driven success, recording print sales of approximately 58,000 copies this year, through Lightning Source (with ebook sales figures not available). Sourcebooks says, “National chains, […]
Deals
Initiatives: S&S Submissions Guide
Simon & Schuster launched a Submission Selector, a database of S&S editors searchable by category and imprint. In an email to agents, ceo Jonathan Karp wrote, “The idea for this site came out of a conversation that our publishers were having related to remote work and how to make certain that agents ‘know’ all of our editors…. Our hope is that this database will simplify the submission process for you at Simon & Schuster as you quickly and easily find the perfect match for your projects.”
Second Quarter Deals Remain Very Strong
HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray told an investor conference in June that the publisher is, “Being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow, maybe 15 percent. And so our response, which is part opportunistic and part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now.” Our exclusive analysis of deal transactions in the second quarter of 2021 confirms that behavior, across the industry. In the first quarter, US deal volume was 19 percent higher than a year ago (and 21 percent higher than the recent four-year average). For the second quarter, deal volume again registered 18 […]
Forthcoming: Egan’s New Novel
The Candy House, Jennifer Egan‘s “hotly anticipated sibling novel” to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, will be published by Scribner on April 5, 2022 (and by Little Brown UK’s Corsair). It features “entwined characters and plot points that overlap with A Visit from the Goon Squad….” Egan says it, “Follows a number of its peripheral characters into their own futures and pasts to create an independent work with a new set of preoccupations and center of gravity, but equal affinity for technology, humor, and structural freedom.”
And the Next Thing
Thanks for the nice feedback on our updated Lunch design (and remember to expect Weekly and Daily Deals to switch over to the new format next week). Our development pipeline has been especially busy lately and today we are rolling out a new site refinement we hope you will find useful. Ever since we launched the Dealmakers interface, it has been our most-visited data collection in the aggregate. All along, the Dealmaker lists have surfaced the most active buyers and sellers across about 70 categories and sub-categories. As the industry has finally started to diversify more meaningfully, we wanted to […]
Deals: Harper Acquires King Archives
Harper Collins will become the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King’s archives, acquiring world rights to all formats and languages, including children’s books, graphic novels, and audiobooks. Their first titles will be published in January 2022 in the US, to coincide with Martin Luther King Day. The company announced that the Harper One Group “will appoint an archivist to facilitate access to the material, which will be available to all Harper Collins editors globally. The company’s many divisions will look to engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.” […]