As often happens, one of the bigger deal announcements comes not from the book fair but from the US. USA Today got the first look at the official press release (a glimpse had leaked through our foreign deal reports last month) that Dean Koontz will write a memoir, A BIT LITTLE LIFE: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog, publishing next summer from Hyperion. It’s the first in a two-book nonfiction deal for world English rights at Hyperion with editor Brenda Copeland. Koontz says: “I wanted to write not just another dog story like Marley & Me — and, by the […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
New Pynchon Novel
Following internet rumors, the LAT says that Penguin Press has confirmed that they will publish a new novel by Thomas Pynchon in August 2009.LAT
Keep Knitting
Putnam has announced that Kate Jacobs’ The Friday Night Knitting Club has over 1 million copies in print after 38 straight weeks on the NYT trade paperback fiction list, with a sequel volume KNIT TWO now setfor publication on November 25. It was just about a year ago that Jacobs’ former agent Barbara Zitwer announced that she would take over the series and write two sequels for Grand Central. At the time, Zitwer told us, “I wanted to create a series and to write the sequels and keep the series growing and Kate very much wanted to write something new […]
Will Buffett Book SNOWBALL?
A little like Warner’s launch of Jack Welch’s first book right after 9/11, Bantam faces uncertainty as their expensive authorized biography of legendary investor Warren Buffett releases next Monday in the midst of what Buffett himself calls an “economic Pearl Harbor.” Will current conditions make readers hungrier than ever for insights into one of the greatest investors ever, or leave them with no appetite for personal details about one of the world’s richest men? Time magazine appears to have had the first official look at the book, which they say “reveals that in his personal life, the Oracle of Omaha […]
Scholastic Announces Deathy Hallows Paperback
The final Potter novel, HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, will release on July 7, 2009 from Scholastic, just under two years after the hardcover publication, priced at $14.95. With an announced first printing of 2 million copies, Scholastic says the total of Potter books in print in the US will reach 143 million copies. Separately, Amazon announced that for Rowling’s next charity book, THE TALES OF BEETLE THE BARD, they will provide December 4 release-day delivery for the standard shipping price on pre-orders (and free for their “prime” members). They anticipate first-day orders for “hundreds of thousands” of copies.
A "Feast" of Lincoln Books
“At least 50 titles about Lincoln are due out between next month and early 2010, not counting those recently published,” the Boston Globe notes, with the bicentennial of his birth on Feburary 12, including “at least seven children’s books.” Simon & Schuster editorial director Alice Mayhew says, “People are hungry for details about Lincoln. He’s clearly the greatest hero, with a poignance and a sadness – what he had to endure as president and in his personal life.”Globe