Simon & Schuster ceo Carolyn Reidy wrote to employees on Friday afternoon with her holiday wishes following “another successful year in which we enjoyed outstanding publishing across the board, in every category and from all our publishing imprints and divisions.” Much of the letter is a highlights reel, with one standout: “To my mind, the most satisfying publishing event of the year belongs to Anthony Doerr’s #1 New York Times bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, a book that we published with exceptional passion and skill, which galvanized staff across the company and at our bookseller partners, and that […]
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Macmillan Resumes Agency, Will Test Subscriptions
Macmillan ceo John Sargent told authors, illustrators and agents in a letter that the company reached their own multiyear deal with Amazon “late last week” for both print books and ebooks, starting January 5, restoring a fuller agency model for ebooks. That agreement comes as Macmillan’s consent decree with the government governing discounts expires today. (The same legal restrictions on Penguin Random House expire today as well.) Sargent writes, “All our other retailers will also be on the agency model, leaving Apple as the only retailer who is allowed unlimited discounting. Irony prospers in the digital age.” Under the current injunction against […]
Dohle Looks to Year Ahead
Penguin Random House ceo Markus Dohle’s year-end “thank you” letter to employees focuses more on what’s coming than what happened — aggregating “some of the successes that we’ve been able to achieve together publishing” in a separate highlights video. Dohle congratulates employees on “making sure we have hit every one of our integration targets to date” and points to the big work still to come next year. “In our systems, IT infrastructure, and distribution environments, 2014 was a year of preparation; 2015, will be one of implementation: Most of the process changes we’ve laid the groundwork for will take effect next […]
Penguin Random and National Book Foundation Launch National Readathon
January 24, 2015 has been proclaimed National Readathon Day, a “marathon reading” session across the country to raise money in order to help fund the National Book Foundation’s efforts to promote literacy and reading. The “quixotic new event” was created by Penguin Random House, which brought to the idea to the NBF this summer, the Washington Post reports. NBF executive director Harold Augenbraum calls it “a terrific opportunity to broaden the awareness in communities across the country and to infuse funds into our community-based programs.” PRH is joined by Goodreads and Mashable as co-sponsors. Individuals and reading “teams” (which can […]
Government Still Pursuing SEAL Author Matt Bissonnette
Former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, whose 2012 book NO EASY DAY (published under the pseudonym Mark Owen) disclosed details of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden and who is set to publish a new book, NO HERO, under the same pen name on November 10, is under criminal investigation from the Department of Justice for allegedly revealing classified material, his lawyer and federal officials told the NYT. Bissonnette’s lawyer Robert Luskin believes the investigation stems from the book itself, even after “he thought he had reached an agreement in the spring with Justice Department and Pentagon officials to settle […]
McSweeney’s Becomes a Nonprofit
San Francisco-based publisher McSweeney’s announced it will go forward as a nonprofit organization, with the intent of obtaining 501(c)3 status next year. For now McSweeney’s, founded in 1998, will run as a fiscally sponsored project of SOMArts, which runs the South of Market Cultural Center in San Francisco. In a telephone interview with the SF Chronicle founder Dave Eggers explained the move: “We’ve always been a hand-to-mouth operation, and every year it gets just a little harder to be an independent publisher. An independent literary title that might have sold 10,000 copies 10 years ago might sell 6,000 now, for example.” […]