Following the recent sale of the Financial Times to Nikkei, Pearson has now sold its 50 percent stake in The Economist Group as well, for £469 million (or $731 million). Three-fifths of their stake (or a 30 percent share in the Economist) goes to Exor, the holding company for minority shareholder Agnelli, while the remaining portion (a 20 percent share) has been bought back by the Economist Group itself, funded by the sale of their headquarters, the Economist Complex, which has been the editorial team’s home for more than five decades. Pearson noted the “proposed changes will be put to a shareholder vote next month […]
How Publishing Works
Hamilton Parts Ways With Minotaur Weeks Before Publication Date
Edgar Award-winning author Steve Hamilton is parting ways with Minotaur Books, his publisher for more than seventeen years, less than two months before the scheduled September 29 release date of his next thriller, THE SECOND LIFE OF NICK MASON. After issuing a terse announcement to various trade publications and accounts saying “publication had been cancelled”, Minotaur spokesperson Tracey Guest added in an updated statement: “After many years of publishing Steve Hamilton, unfortunately SMP has had a parting of the ways and will not be moving forward with the publication of THE SECOND LIFE OF NICK MASON. We wish Steve all […]
St. Martin’s Closes Palgrave Imprint
St. Martin’s Press is closing the Palgrave Macmillan trade imprint that they integrated in 2014 and will absorb the imprint’s staff, the result of “a structural realignment of Macmillan’s international educational resources” after the merger of Macmillan Science and Education and Springer Science + Business Media into Springer Nature. SMP “will begin phasing out the use of the name Palgrave immediately,” publishing those new titles under the St. Martin’s Press and Griffin imprints. Current Palgrave editorial staff will continue to manage previously acquired projects and begin to take on general St. Martin’s assignments: Karen Wolny will become executive editor; Elisabeth Dyssegaard continues as […]
McSweeney’s Becomes a Nonprofit
San Francisco-based publisher McSweeney’s announced it will go forward as a nonprofit organization, with the intent of obtaining 501(c)3 status next year. For now McSweeney’s, founded in 1998, will run as a fiscally sponsored project of SOMArts, which runs the South of Market Cultural Center in San Francisco. In a telephone interview with the SF Chronicle founder Dave Eggers explained the move: “We’ve always been a hand-to-mouth operation, and every year it gets just a little harder to be an independent publisher. An independent literary title that might have sold 10,000 copies 10 years ago might sell 6,000 now, for example.” […]
The Super Seuss Business
The Wall Street Journal writes in-depth on the Dr. Seuss franchise, so much a staple of Penguin Random House that it was cited a number of times in the company’s financial report earlier on Friday. The peg is the September 9 publication of a second collection of “lost” magazine work, Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories, following on an earlier 2011 collection that hit No. 1 on the NYT bestseller list. As a result Random House Children’s announced a first printing of 250,000 copies. The publisher said they have sold 600 million copies of Dr. Seuss books in 17 […]
New Penguin Random House Logo Has Neither A Penguin Nor A House
The quest for a new Penguin Random House logo and brand identity has led not to one mark, but to 250. Neither the penguin nor the house logo won this contest; in fact, both have been left aside in favor of a single “wordmark” proclaiming “Penguin Random House” in type only. (The distinctive Penguin orange does live on as stripes alongside the words, and in some backgrounds.) The “corporate wordmark” is designed to live in harmony alongside all of the company’s existing 250 imprint and divisional logos and trademarks in a “brand system” that works for PRH units around the […]