Stacy Cantor Abrams moves to romance publisher Entangled as of January 3, oversee all acquisitions. She has been at Bloomsbury’s Walker Children’s Books unit. At Berrett-Koehler, Neal Maillet has been promoted to editorial director. He will continue to acquire titles in the areas of business, leadership, current affairs, and personal development. Tom Bouman has joined Orbit in the US as an editor, acquiring science fiction and fantasy. Previously, he was an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The Huffington Post noticed tweets from Harper Perennial indicating that Michael Chabon‘s TELEGRAPH AVENUE is being presented in-house for publication in fall 2012. A spokesperson […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
An Off-Catalog Pelecanos Book, Priced for Discovery
Reagan Arthur Books is trying an interesting strategy with an unexpected George Pelecanos novel, which they will publish next January 23. The 272-page page WHAT IT WAS is a stand-alone, which will be published as a 99-cent ebook and a $9.99 trade paperback. And for staunch fans, they are producing a limited-edition, signed and slip-cased hardcover for $35, with all three editions releasing at the same time. (The new title was quietly listed on bookselling sites in August, though we didn’t realize the interesting price promotion strategy until this week.) Arthur says they wanted Pelecanos’ next regularly-published hardcover to be […]
Wimpy Kid Boasts 25 Percent Better Opening Than A Year Ago
Abrams says that Jeff Kinney’s DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: Cabin Fever, the sixth book in the series, sold “more than one million copies its first week on sale.” Abrams says that is a 25 percent improvement on the first-week sale for the previous book this time a year ago. (A year ago, Abrams said the first-day sale was over 375,000 copies.) They also declare it “the number one bestselling hardcover book in the U.S. for all of the calendar year.” Though perhaps not if you count only trade outlets, since traditionally a significant portion of Kinney’s sales come through […]
Paolini Sales Nearly 500k; Isaacson Sells A Lot
Random House Children’s reports another very strong opening day for Christopher Paolini, with INHERITANCE selling 489,500 units yesterday (including print, ebook and audio editions), it’s first day on sale. The publisher says “hardcovers dominated the opening-day sell-through, with an 83/17 percent print to digital split.” Paolini’s BRISINGR sold approximately 550,000 units on opening day in the US in September 2008, back when Borders was still operating. In other sales news, Simon & Schuster continues to demur regarding any reporting of sales over the past two weeks for Walter Isaacson’s STEVE JOBS biography. But we’ve spoken to few executives familiar with […]
Little, Brown’s Mulholland Withdraws Markham’s Debut Novel for Lifted Passages
Little, Brown announced to booksellers Tuesday by e-mail that it was withdrawing from Q.R. Markham’s novel ASSASSIN OF SECRETS, and asking accounts to return the books for credit. The company says “it has come to our attention that many passages and lines have been taken from a variety of classic and contemporary spy novels. Upon investigation it was clear the passages in question were lifted and Little, Brown determined that the only course of action was to immediately recall books from retailers across the country.” The original trade paperback had a publication date of November 3. Markham’s plagiarism was originally […]
Paolini Claims His INHERITANCE
The fourth and final installment in Christopher Paolini’s bestselling fantasy series for children INHERITANCE releases today. Random House Children’s has announced a first printing of 2.5 million copies, a number you don’t hear very often any more for printed books. When BRISINGR was published in September 2008, the publisher reported opening day sales of 550,000 copies in the US, and 45,000 copies in the UK. Over the weekend, Waterstone’s told the Independent that the book recorded “the biggest pre-order of a children’s title since JK Rowling’s final Harry Potter book,” with “tens of thousands of copies” sold in advance.