One-time PW publisher (in the late 80s and 90s) and now board member at regional and custom-magazine publisher Wainscot Media George Slowik has purchased PW from Reed Elsevier. Slowik is retaining the entire staff and recently-appointed management of publisher Cevin Bryerman and co-editors Jim Milliot and Michael Coffey.
Free
Borders May Try to Raise New Equity, While Paying Steep Interest On New Loan
Borders filed details on their new credit agreements with the SEC along with filing their formal quarterly report. They disclose that the new $90 million term loan carries a minimum interest rate of 14.75 percent. Additionally, Borders needs to raise at least $25 million from the sale of new stock shares by May 15, or else there will be a $10 million reserve against the borrowing base of that term loan. (Even with yesterday’s sharp rise in the stock, Borders still has a current total market cap of about $150 million.) Good old Pershing Square is protected in the case […]
People
Sandy Hodgman will manage foreign rights on a part-time basis for LJK Literary Management and The Jud Laghi Agency starting May 1. She has sold foreign rights for HarperCollins and The Robbins Office. Both agencies will continue to work with co-agents in most territories, and to sell rights directly in the UK and Netherlands. On Demand Books has hired Steve Sutton as vp, director of university and library sales and Susie Stroud as vp, director of content acquisition. Most recently Sutton was vp, library services and director of new business development at YBP Library Services and Stroud was national accounts […]
Awards, People and More
The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has named its new class of fourteen fellows. The list includes fiction writers David Bezmozgis, Maile Chapman, Mary Gaitskill, and Wells Tower; poet Geoffrey Brock; New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar; graphic novelist and artist David Sandlin; and Pulitzer-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed. Jo Ann Miller, former editorial director of Basic Books, has formed J.A. Miller Associates to provide ghost writing, editorial collaboration, developmental editing, and author coaching. At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Maire Gorman has been promoted to the new position of vp of trade sales […]
Bookselling: Store Moves
Durham, NC-area “landmark” for the African-American community, the Know Book Store and Restaurant has closed. Owner Bruce Bridges still hopes to find another space in which to reopen.Durham News Cambridge, MA-children’s bookstore Barefoot Books is moving from Porter Square to a new location in Concord.
Meyer Novella Set for June 5 Release
A Stephenie Meyer novella, THE SHORT SECOND LIFE OF BREE TANNER, is set for release from Little, Brown Children’s on June 5 with an announced first printing of 1.5 million copies. The $13.99 hardcover, at 192 pages, is told from the point of view of Bree, a character originally featured in Eclipse. A dollar per book from the first printing will be donated to the American Red Cross International Response Fund. The book will also be available online at breetanner.com for free from June 7 to July 5 “as a special thank you to fans.” Meyer says, “I’d always considered […]