Nook Media–the entity formed in 2012 that owns Barnes & Noble’s Nook business and their college bookstores–has its second major strategic investor, joining Microsoft: As of December 21 Pearson agreed to invest $89.5 in cash for a 5 percent equity stake. The bookseller paired an announcement about that investment with a preview of holiday sales that indicates “results will be below expectations” and Nook in particular will not meet their previous projections for the fiscal year. Perhaps because of that performance, Pearson is buying in to Nook Media at essentially the same the valuation given to the company when Microsoft […]
Free
What to Expect (Or Not)
It’s time for our annual moment of confusion: we would like to stop working entirely until it’s 2013, like a good portion of the publishing world, but the news rarely takes a full vacation (as evidenced by the last few day’s dispatches). So you should expect occasional email service over the next week and a half, as the news–and our deal reports–dictate. Most likely we will only mail Publishers Lunch Deluxe to paid subscribers and corporate clients, while the shorter “free Lunch” rests. PublishersMarketplace.com works 24/7 and our news clips (with RSS and Twitter feeds) will keep track of what’s […]
People, Etc.
As part of an organizational readjustment at Perseus, all three distribution – Consortium, Perseus Distribution and PGW – and their respective leaders Julie Schaper, Sabrina McCarthy and Susan Reich, will now report directly to coo Joe Mangan. In addition, the sales department, headed by Matty Goldberg, will now report directly to cfo Charles Gallagher, as will the supply chain division led by Greg Anastas. Chelsea Green is celebrating their first year as an employee-owned enterprise with a $2,500 cash bonus to employees. President and publisher Margo Baldwin quips, “If Random House can give all their employees a $5000 bonus for 50 Shades […]
People
In the UK, Rosie de Courcy will join her former husband Anthony Cheetham at Head of Zeus as senior editor, acquiring fiction. Most recently, she helped establish Preface at Random UK’s Cornerstone. Constable & Robinson has purchased self-help publisher How to Books, which has a list of over 500 books.
And A Launch of Our Own: Publishers Lunch Bookateria
We are excited to open the virtual doors to our latest innovation: Publishers Lunch Bookateria. It’s a big online book discovery zone and store connected in all kinds of ways to Publishers Lunch and PublishersMarketplace.com. The fulfillment of a longtime goal of ours, it lets us connect the books and authors we talk about and cover all the time directly to informational pages about the books themselves (with easy links to purchase from a variety of major stores). In the same way that connecting deal reports to email addresses 12 years ago helped turn announcements in actionable pieces of business […]
People
At Balzer + Bray, Sara Sargent has been promoted to associate editor. In the UK, Joel Rickett has been promoted to publisher of Viking UK and Portfolio UK. Ruth Alltimes will move to Harper Children’s UK as publishing director, fiction in January, reporting to fiction and licensed properties director, Rachel Denwood. She has been publishing director of the fiction list at Macmillan Children’s UK. Patti Smith discusses with Billboard her plans for a few books she is working on “simultaneously,” including her next memoir. She says it “is in more of the ‘Just Kids’ vein and even in the similar time period, […]