Dutch bookstore chain Polare declared bankruptcy Monday afternoon. Less than a month ago, Polare temporarily closed its stores and suspended online sales as part of what they said was a “strategic organization” to stem ongoing financial woes. NLTimes reports the bankruptcy was “necessary to pay overdue wages” and that employees are guaranteed to receive their wages for a maximum of 6 weeks, paid by the Employment Insurance Agency (UWV.) Seven of Polare’s stores are also understood to have attracted interest from outside buyers, while five employees of the company’s store in Rotterdam have started a crowdfunding campaign to buy it from […]
eNews
CodeMantra Has New Owners
Service provider CodeMantra has been acquired by a group of Boston-based investors “with plans to support the company’s growth and expansion,” and the company will relocate its headquarters to Boston. The sale follows the death of one of the three co-founders, Suresh R. Chakravarthy (CR), at the end of 2012. Current cfo Vaidyanathan Segaripuram V will move up to ceo, and executive director – publishing services Walter Walker has been named president. Additionally, Ed Marino will join the company as executive chairman. Marino was an early ceo of Lightning Source (which he says is now a $400+ million business) and […]
People, Etc.
At William Morrow, Kate Nintzel has been promoted to executive editor. At Candlewick, Mary Lee Donovan has been promoted to editorial director. At becker&mayer!, Dana Youlin has been promoted to editorial manager, Delia Greve has been promoted to senior editor, and Nicole Burns Ascue is now associate editor. In the UK, Anna Valentine will re-join Orion in May as publishing director, non-fiction, reporting to Amanda Harris, newly promoted to deputy publisher. Valentine was most recently publishing director at HarperCollins UK. Mavis Gallant, 91, one of Canada’s most distinguished short story writers and literary figures, died Tuesday morning in Paris, where […]
The Truth About eBook Sales (Part 2): The Market Is Flat, and Self-Publishing Isn’t Big Enough to Change That
This is the follow-up post to Friday’s examination of The Discussion Over “Author Earnings.” Let’s use this opportunity to speak clearly about what we do know about the ebook sales landscape, since there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about the data that’s available. The worst meme around is the one in which the real and substantial data we have is dismissed for its incompleteness, in favor of people’s personal wishes and observances. The big touchpoints are the direction of the ebook market, and the rise of digital self-publishing. On the former, the US market data clearly indicates that […]
The Discussion Over “Author Earnings” (Part 1)
It’s time to start looking at what a lot of people have been talking about this week: bestselling self-published author Hugh Howey’s “Author Earnings” website and “report.” In case you have not read it (or read about it), Howey joined up with a programmer and they crawled some of Amazon’s genre bestseller lists for a brief period. Based on that and Howey’s own experiential deductions about correlations between Amazon “sales rank” and actual unit sales for his own books, they came up with elaborate (and unsupportable) — but provocative — declarations about yearly sales and authors earnings via Kindle sales. […]
Open Road Acquires E-Reads
Open Road Integrated Media announced Monday that it has an agreement to acquire literary agent Richard Curtis’s E-Reads, one of the pioneering ebook publishers, with a catalog of over 1,200 titles. That list, focused on science fiction and fantasy (and including mystery, thriller, romance, and horror books) will significantly enlarge Open Road’s list of 4,200 titles. The deal is expected to close on April 1, at which point Open Road will decide which if any of E-Reads staff of 5 full- and part-time employees they want to retain. E-Reads founder Richard Curtis will continue to run his longstanding literary agency, […]