Amazon‘s annual holiday release featured a blizzard of whimsical non-statistics about all of the things they sold during the busiest shopping time of the year. Among the ebook-related bits, “the most popular Kindle book purchased on Christmas day was The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey.” The most gifted Kindle book during the holidays was the self-published Rath’s Deception by Piers Platt, and the most borrowed book all year in the Kindle Unlimited subscription program was No Ordinary Billionaire by J.S. Scott. The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, a subscription-based supplement of book reviews and more, will drop the print version in the […]
Most Reviewed
Newspaper Book Reviews, Reviewers, and Gender
The latest VIDA statistics assessing gender representation in book reviews continue to draw comment and response. But VIDA’s lens, expanded this year to include more publications, still primarily examines periodicals and journals and overlooks the substantial body of daily and weekly book reviews in large-circulation newspapers. That’s exactly the world we have tracked for years in our Publishers Marketplace Book Reviews database (also shown via our cool Top Reviewers tool), which offers a rich data set for analysis. In examining that data over the past 5 years, there are some interesting findings that may expand on the view that VIDA […]
Washington Post Eliminates Book Editor Job, Moves Most Staff to Style Section
A reorganization of the “structure and staffing” of various weekly feature sections at the Washington Post will eliminate the position of Book World Editor entirely. That job is currently held by Rachel Shea, who has run the group for the past two and a half years. She has the option of applying for the few other jobs open at the newspaper. Most Book World staff, including fiction editor Ron Charles and the current assistant editors, will report to the paper’s Style section. But nonfiction editor Steve Levingston will report to Outlook, where the non-fiction reviews are published. Executive editor Marcus Brauchli writes in […]
USA Bolsters Online Book Pages
USA Today has soft-launched a revised and expanded books section on the newspaper’s web site, complicated with a dedicated sub-domain, books.usatoday.com. Among the features, their bestseller list has a graphics-enriched consumer-friendly new presentation (and is featured on the books home page as well). Importantly for publishers and publicists, the Book Buzz column will now act as a daily blog, with contributions from across the USA Today books department staff. Book reviews have a consistent new page design featuring the jacket and click-to-buy links at Amazon, BN, IndieBound and iTunes, and those review pages pull in reader reviews from GoodReads and […]
People, Etc.
In Italy, former publisher of Mondadori Massimo Turchetta will take over as publisher of the trade book division at RCS Libri (comprising the imprints Rizzoli, BUR, Bompiani, Fabbri, and Etas) on March 1, reporting directly to ceo Alessandro Bompieri. Iris Blasi has joined Hilsinger-Mendelson East as coordinator of digital media. Previously she was an associate editor at Union Square Press. David Kass has been promoted to associate director of publicity. Caroline Sun will join Harper Children’s as publicity manager on February 28. She was a senior publicist at Penguin Children’s. The AAP Annual Meeting convenes March 9 in New York, […]
Publicize This: How to Get the WSJ to Break Your Book
The WSJ’s recently-launched weekend Review section proved it can put a book on the nation’s radar with their attention-getting (and controversially titled) except from Amy Chua’s book. (The book is called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother; the WSJ called their excerpt “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”) The splash made an ideal segue to a breakfast convened by the newspaper this morning with publishers and book publicists and marketers this morning. As Review section editor Gary Rosen said, “We want to be the place where the big buzzy books start.” Rosen spoke to the support the paper provided to promote […]