Sarah Grimm has joined Crown as publicist, working on the Crown, Hogarth, Broadway, and Tim Duggan Books imprints. Previously she was an associate publicist at Putnam. Printz Award winner and two-time National Book Award finalist Gene Luen Yang has been named the new as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He says in the announcement, “I’m thrilled and humbled…. Reading breaks down the walls that divide us. By reading, we get to know people outside of our own communities. We gain knowledge others don’t expect us to have. We discover new and surprising passions. Reading is critical to our growth, both […]
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A Final 2015 PM Free Trial
Today’s full catch-up Publishers Lunch Deluxe is packed with additional stories, the kind of extra coverage and analysis we provide every day. For those who were too busy during our first holiday free trial at PublishersMarketplace.com, we are offering a second chance before the year ends: Join now and check out everything the site has to offer for free through the weekend. (Please follow the posted instructions; trial memberships must be cancelled before midnight January 3 if you don’t want to remain as a member.) And for the discount-minded, if you’re putting our big three-day Digital Book World Conference on your calendar for […]
People, Etc.
Former BEA director of education Mark Dressler died December 23 from cancer. Dressler also programmed sessions for the Frankfurt Book Fair, and was co-owner of a wine shop in his home of Traverse City, MI. USA Today named Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins as their “author of the year.” They write: “Before 2015, no one had heard of Hawkins, 43, who previously wrote chick lit under the pseudonym Amy Silver. Then Train hurtled into bookstores on Jan. 13 and immediately clicked with readers desperate for the next Gone Girl.” Riverhead has sold over 4 million units in the US. But it […]
People, Etc.
Amistad Press founder Charles F. Harris, 81, died December 16. Harris began his career at Doubleday in the 1950s and also worked at Random House and Howard University Press before founding Amistad in 1986, which he sold to HarperCollins in 1999 (and stayed with until 2003.) The NYT covers the growth in personalized children’s books, from UK-based Lost My Name to Sourcebooks‘ Put Me In the Story program and others. But the paper may be a little off-base in dismissing the impact. While 2 percent growth in print units is hailed as a renaissance, adding a percent or two to children’s […]
More to Come — And A Free Trial to Check It Out
We’ll be back tomorrow with our last “scheduled” edition for this week, including a look back at the year in M&A, though PublishersMarketplace remains in operation 24/7 and will continue to present news, deals, bestsellers, jobs and more as they come in (including 7 new job listings just from yesterday). And we will return next week, at least occasionally, with more unique insights and stats and whatever news there is to share, at least for our PM member/Publishers Lunch Deluxe audience. In the meantime, we are bringing the traditional holiday free trial offer at PublishersMarketplace.com: Join now and check out everything […]
People, Etc.
Christopher Richards will join Penguin Press on January 11 as associate editor. Previously he was an associate editor at FSG. At Penguin Random House, Andrew Rein is promoted to sales director, mass merchandise national accounts. Bloomsbury has agreed to acquire some family law publishing properties from Nexis Lexis and Jordan Publishing that are being spun off as a condition for regulatory approval of RELX (Reed Elsevier)’s purchase of Jordan. Bloomsbury is paying £1.4m minus deferred income. At the same time, Bloomsbury says trading conditions have been “good…in broad terms” but sales for the year remain dependent on final holiday results. We will […]