Shelley Husband has joined the Association of American Publishers as senior vice president, government affairs and special projects. Most recently she was staff director and general counsel for the House Committee on the Judiciary from 2013 to 2019. At Hachette Livre, Nathalie Houël has been promoted to group chief financial officer. Arnaud Robert becomes group secretary general, responsible for all legal matters, compliance, insurance and institutional relations. Juliane Chevallier moves up to internal audit and internal control director. All three will report to deputy ceo Fabrice Bakhouche. Kevin Lopez becomes group chief controller, reporting to Houël. Marian Brown has been promoted […]
Direct publishing
People, Etc.
Elle Keck has been promoted to editor for William Morrow/Avon. Ali Herring has been promoted to literary agent at Spencerhill Associates. Dick Duane, co-owner of Pinder Lane & Garon-Brooke Agency, died January 28 of colon cancer. Acquisitions Prospect Park Books sold their assets, including 100 backlist titles and 11 forthcoming ones, to Turner Publishing. (The former was distributed by Ingram’s Consortium; the latter uses Ingram Publisher Services.) Founder Colleen Dunn Bates said, “Those of you who know me know how much effort I put into linking us all, and I’ve so valued every minute of it. But I’ve also worked my […]
Briefs: Bloomsbury In Line with Expectations, Atavist Was Sold
Bloomsbury issued a brief trading update on the first four months of their fiscal year, through June 30, still “in line with its expectations” for the year. Sales were up 3.7 percent with the recently-acquired IB Tauris — and 2.1 percent without two months of Tauris’s sales. The company said they had “a particularly strong result in the adult division.” Catching up on some news from June, we note that Atavist was acquired by Automattic (the owner of WordPress.com owner). The deal included Atavist’s proprietary content management system, along with digital Atavist Magazine. Automattic had acquired digital publisher Longreads in 2014. […]
Barnes & Noble Press Replaces Nook Press
Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing platform has officially changed from Nook Press to Barnes & Noble Press (after changing in 2013 from PubIt! to Nook Press). Most notably, they have increased the royalty offered for higher-priced ebooks; titles listed at $10 or more, up to $199.99, now qualify for a 65 percent royalty, up from 40 percent previously. eBooks can now be offered for pre-order up to 12 months ahead of publication. On the print-on-demand side, they have added more trim sizes, along with glossy cover and color printing options.
Pottermore Reports Another Big Loss, Still Promising Turnaround
A year ago JK Rowling’s representatives were insisting the worst was behind them after reporting a significant annual loss for Pottermore, citing “recording breaking sales in December 2015” — and now the turnaround story is being pitched again. They are “on the path to profitability” for the fiscal year ending March 2017, but as for the just-reported year ending March 2016 (Companies House filings in the UK have a long time lag), they lost money again. Sales did indeed rise significantly, to £15.1 million pounds, but the site still incurred a pre-tax loss of £4.9 million. In the prior year, […]
Briefs: Amazon’s Inspire; Nook Press’s Print Platform
Attentive readers will remember that back in February we were the first to write about Amazon K-12 Education, a unit working on “improving the education of students with services for teachers, students and parents.” Those efforts were focused on “building a large discoverable library of open educational resources for K-12 teachers across the country, using Amazon’s scale and experience.” And the objectives included building distribution options for traditional content as well: “Imagine a school district that wants to put ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ e-book on thousands of tablets for their students to read – a single click of a […]