Canada’s bankrupt D&M Publishers has sold the assets of the Greystone Books imprint, including all forthcoming books under contract, to Heritage House Publishing. The new owners are bringing back Greystone founder Rob Sanders to lead the imprint again, and Nancy Flight returns as associate publisher. Sanders will also be “a significant shareholder” in the new entity Greystone Books Ltd. Heritage House’s announcement says that their president Rodger Touchie “initiated” the purchase and was “assisted by longtime Greystone business partners, including the Perseus Books Group from New York.” PGW will continue to distribute Greystone in the US and will expand their […]
International News
Pearson Falls On Modest Profit Warning
In a trading update ahead of their full late-February earnings report, Pearson said to expect profits slightly short of what analysts had been expecting. Forecast operating profit of approximately £935 million and adjusted earnings of approximately 84 pence per share is only nine-tenths of a pence below expectations–but Pearson generally outperforms those expectations, and the stock has fallen in London on the news, down 4.5 percent over the past two days of trading. The release itself is disarmingly pleasant and polite. Penguin “benefited from a good fourth-quarter publishing performance and traded in line with our expectations,” and “will report revenues in […]
Sizing the UK eBook Market
The Bookseller obtained 2012 unit sale data on ebooks from six of the UK’s largest publishers, leading them to postulate that the total British ebook market comprised £235 million in publisher sales last year. (If their estimate is correct, it would mean that the top publishers have a much smaller share of ebook market in the UK than the US.) Reported to them by publishers (akin to AAP sales reports), Random House sold 11.2 million ebook units; Hachette 8.7 million; Harper UK 7.2 million, and Pan Macmillan 4.5 million. Some of those units were driven by the deep-discount 20-pence promotional […]
eNews: Penguin Joins Espresso; Kobo Eyes Russia, India, China and Beyond
Penguin Group is making their titles available through the Espresso Book Machine. EVP of business operations Doug Whiteman says in the announcement, “Penguin is always looking for new ways to bring our writers to readers and On Demand Books gives us another channel to further fulfill that mission. We are grateful to have this opportunity to extend the way we serve our booksellers, authors and readers.” Penguin’s self-publishing and workshop community Book Country announced new changes and features, including a free ebook creation tool and a online editor. Book Country has also raised the royalty rates offered to authors who […]
ABA Sales Softened In Second Half; UK eSales Still Lag US Considerably
As a group, ABA bookstores had a good year in 2012–but what’s implied in this BTW story is more significant than the stated statistics, ratifying our “story we can’t report” from yesterday. The ABA provides another indication that, despite happy anecdotal holiday sales reports,holiday book sales were soft, providing a soft ending to the year as early blockbusters (Hunger Games; Fifty Shades; etc.) gave way to a holiday season with few dominant, breakout books and a cooling off of the ebook market. (Barnes & Noble’s “core” non-Nook-related bookstores sales fell 3.1 percent during the holiday sales period.) What the ABA […]
eNews: Smashwords Hits $15 Million and Adds EPUB, GoodReads Eyes Bookselling?, and iBookstore to Open In Japan
Inside of some long and boosterish year-end blog posts, Smashwords made a couple of announcements. The privately-owned ebook distributor “will do around $15 million in ebook sales in 2012.” In June 2012, founder Mark Coker had told Forbes he expected to double his 2011 gross to $12 million for the year. Since romance and erotica comprised almost 40 percent of sales in June, we infer that growth in those categories helped lift overall results. It’s also increasingly clear that Smashwords’ growth is linked to the international expansion of the iBookstore. “For the month of November 2012, sales of Smashwords-distributed titles […]