Deputy CEO of DK John Duhigg will step up to global CEO of the publisher at the beginning of April, and will join the Penguin Group Board as well. Current ceo Peter Field is preparing to retire from Penguin at the end of the year after a 35-year career at the company. Between April and the year-end, Field “will retain his current responsibilities for Penguin in Australia and New Zealand and take on a range of international projects across the company.” F+W Media will launch Prologue Books, a new imprint devoted to reissuing out-of-print hardboiled and pulp novels originally published between […]
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Like Others, Harlequin Sees Sales Soften and Margins Hold Up
Canada’s Torstar reported fourth-quarter and fiscal year results Wednesday, and the performance of Harlequin fits the general pattern of other publicly-reported trade publishers: sales were down a little, and operating earnings rose. This is what the digital transition looks like. For the full year, digital comprised 15.5 of revenues of $459 million CA (down 2 percent from $468 million the previous year). In the fourth quarter alone, digital accounted for 17.7 percent of worldwide sales of $118 million, down $2 million. Digital sales added $7 million in the fourth quarter compared to a year ago, while retail print sales declined […]
People: Orion to Restructure
As part of a restructure, Orion will replace its trade and paperback divisions with Orion Fiction (housing more than half of its frontlist titles, and nearly all of its crime fiction) and Orion General (for Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Phoenix, Gollancz, and Orion Children’s.) Current trade managing director Lisa Milton will run the General division, while Susan Lamb, who oversees the paperback division, will now run Orion Fiction. Deputy ceo and group publisher Malcolm Edwards explained the restructure in a statement: “Orion’s structure has served us exceptionally well for our first two decades, but we need to look to the future. […]
Two Distributors Do Sign with Kindle–And Pay eBook Coop
While IPG remains in what could be a long-standing contractual disagreement with Amazon over wholesale terms for their clients–and their approximately 4,500 ebooks remain unavailable for sale on Kindle–two other independent distributors of scale did both come to terms with Amazon in the past week or so. Both the Perseus Books Group and National Book Network (NBN) reported to their respective clients on the new terms arrived for ebooks. Those new contracts were some time in the making; one of the two told clients they “entered into negotiations with Amazon in October of last year and have only just concluded […]
People, Etc.
A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes will join Graywolf Press as contributing editor as part of a new collaborative venture between the literary magazine and the publishing house. Graywolf plans to publish two A Public Space books per year, to be chosen and edited by Hughes, with “A Public Space Book” printed on the back cover and in the interior. The inaugural book will be selected in the coming months. “The collaboration is a natural extension of our work with writers in A Public Space—it will be wonderful to stay involved in a piece that starts in our pages as […]
People, Etc.
At Chronicle Books, Todd Presley has been promoted to executive director of human resources, McEvoy Group. Greg Mortimer joins Scribner Monday in the newly-created position of online marketing manager. He was formerly marketing manager of trade paperbacks for the Random House publishing group. Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz‘s new story collection THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER, “about the heartbreak and radiance that is love,” will be published by Riverhead on September 11, 2012. Diaz will appear at BEA as one of the author breakfast speakers on Tuesday, June 5, and he will do a national book tour in the fall. […]