New Releases/Forthcoming

It’s been almost a full year since Oprah made her most recent book club pick of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, and according to the Newtonville Books Community Blog, #63 will be a Little, Brown trade paperback title priced at $14.99, with an announced first printing of 500,000 and ISBN # 978-0-316-08637-0. Amazon reports differing metadata, listing the Oprah #63 pick as a $23.99 hardcover with an ISBN of 978-0-316-08636-3. Neither listing includes an approximate page count. On Twitter, Oprah implored viewers to tune in on Friday, September 18, saying she’d “never made a selection like ‘this.'” […]

Egmont acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for a new four-book series by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler), whose 13-book “Series of Unfortunate Events” have sold over 60 million copies worldwide and been translated into 39 languages. The first book in the new, untitled series will be published in 2012. No US publisher has been announced, and when reached for comment, HarperCollins Children’s Executive Director of Publicity Sandee Roston said “I am not aware of a deal at this time.” Snicket’s agent, Charlotte Sheedy, is away on vacation and couldn’t be reached for comment.Guardian

“Cautious optimism” is the buzzword of the AP’s fall preview, as a fall season crowded with titles (especially literary fiction, not to mention one by someone named Dan Brown) has publishers in a better mood. “It’s not that we’re back to the extremely strong sales of more than a year ago, but we’re trending upward,” S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy said. “After taking our expectations down for so long, we’re finally taking them up.” Or as Left Bank Books co-owner Barry Leibman phrased it, “”We were down 20 percent this summer, which I used to think of as horrible. But we […]

With little more than speculation to go on about the contents and the reception to Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL, USA Today’s writearound about “pent-up demand” teases out one amusing tidbit from Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer for B&N. She said 50 stores asked for advance copies: “I had to explain there aren’t any.”USAT But don’t look for an e-book edition in Germany, as Lübbe has no plans to release one of the German translation.Buchreport.de (via Publishing Perspectives)

A year after scrapping a 500-page followup, Elizabeth Gilbert went back to the drawing board and in January Viking will publish Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, a memoir of the “tumultuous year” that came after the mega-success of Eat, Pray, Love (with 4 million copies sold as per Bookscan’s report) and “meditation on wedlock” to her Brazilian-Australian husband. Viking has announced a first printing of 1 million copies, but the NYT helpfully points out that while “such numbers are known to be widely exaggerated, they indicate the publisher’s ambitions.”NYT