Berlin-based Inkitt announced a $16 million Series A funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins but including participation from HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. (The company previously raised $5 million.) The new capital will help fund their expansion, which includes plans to add 10 languages in addition to English. With more funding comes ever-greater hype: Founder and ceo […]
Financing/Start-Ups
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 […]
Fall Announcements: Illustrated Hosseini Book for September, Albom for October, Sanders for November, and More
It’s the day to announce forthcoming fall books. Khaled Hosseini’s SEA PRAYER, a short, illustrated book written “in response to the current refugee crisis and the haunting image of young Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on the beach in Turkey,” will be published September 18 by Riverhead (and August 30 […]
Ingram Acquires OptiQly
The assets of start-up Optiqly, which launched in public beta recently, have been acquired by Ingram Content Group. Ingram’s ventures unit had been the primary seed investor in Optiqly, and Ingram’s CoreSource had signed on this summer to provide a version of the company’s tools as a subscription service to their large roster of distribution […]
The Final Pivot: Pronoun to Close, Luebbe Writes Down oolipo
Macmillan announced online that their digital self-publishing service Pronoun is “winding down” and expected to close by mid-January. The “epilogue” post says, “While many challenges in indie publishing remain unsolved, Macmillan is unable to continue Pronoun’s operation in its current form. Every option was considered before making the very difficult decision to end the business.” […]
Quarto Falls on Profit Warning, and China Literature Heads for IPO
Ahead of reporting results for the first half of 2017, Quarto Group warned that its earnings guidance “for 2017 and beyond has been set too high.” That’s due to both “a lower-than expected trading performance in the year to date” during “the ongoing soft retail environment” as well as an accounting adjustment from the previous year. […]