Nearly a year after announcing the store was for sale, Politics & Prose will be under the new ownership of former Washington Post reporters Bradley Graham and his wife Lissa Muscatine. Barbara Meade and David Cohen, the widower of Meade’s fellow owner Carla Cohen, chose the couple to buy the store after entertaining five or six bids and determining Graham and Muscatine were “uniquely qualified to extend the store’s reputation as a gathering place for ideas and civic discourse.” At a meeting with store staff, Graham said Politics & Prose has “a very special culture here, a culture we want […]
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Catherine Cookson Estate To Sell Digital Books Direct, and Other eNews
Add the estate of Catherine Cookson to the growing number of authors selling digital backlist titles directly (and, in this instance, exclusively through Amazon in the US and UK.) The author’s literary representatives at Sheil Land formed a separate company, Peach Tree Publishing, which will sell 91 Cookson titles as ebooks priced between $1.50 and $5.99. Cookson’s agent Sonia Land engages in some mutual controversy-starting with the Daily Mail by saying she never informed Cookson’s print publishers Transworld or Simon & Schuster of the ebook plan: I haven’t told either firm about the deal and I am sure they are going […]
Borders Asks Court to Authorize $8.3 Million in Executive Bonus Payments
In papers filed last week, Borders asked a federal bankruptcy court to authorize as much as $8.3 million in bonus payments to company executives – including up to $1.7 million to CEO Michael Edwards. Seventeen executives are covered by the largest bonus program, which could add between $4.7m and $7.1m, while a second $1.2 million bonus program covers 25 “director-level” managers that court papers say are “critical to the debtors’ reorganization and to ongoing business.” The company said that 70% of its top executives have been with Borders for 18 months or less, and that bonuses were not paid at […]
Briefs: Dorchester Woes Continue; The Brand of Mary Higgins Clark; Penguin Piracy Suit; And More
Dorchester Publishing continues to do its best zombie impression, as a number of authors have learned the ailing company continues to sell digital copies of their work even after they no longer hold the rights, and despite repeated assurances they would stop this practice. Horror writer Brian Keene detailed the situation on his blog, saying that he found unauthorized e-copies of his books under the Dorchester banner selling through various digital outlets. “In the most recent case (iBooks), Dorchester blamed their vendor, Libre Digital, but provided no documentation verifying this. An employee at Apple cast doubt on this explanation. In the […]
St. Martin’s Pays a Reported $2M For Four Books By Amanda Hocking, Self-Publishing’s Reluctant Heroine
This year every week in publishing could be considered eventful, but this week in particular had a special kind of symmetry, as the very publishing house Barry Eisler walked away from to publish on his own brought Amanda Hocking into the fold. Despite sources indicating otherwise a few days ago, St. Martin’s emerged the victor of the auction for Hocking’s new Watersong YA paranormal series, reportedly paying more than $2 million for World English rights (which, of course, includes digital rights, too.) “I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,” Hocking told the NYT Thursday. “People have […]
Borders Pulls a Distribution Switcheroo: TN Center Stays Open And PA Facility Will Close
Borders announced it would shutter its distribution facility in La Vergne, TN months ago, but yesterday they did an about-face and will keep the center open, which also spares the 300 employees who were set to lose their jobs. But the news was grimmer for workers at Borders’ Northeastern facility in Carlisle, PA. The company has said for months that they can no longer afford to support three distribution centers, and so the nearly five-year-old 600,000-square foot facility will now be shuttered in July or August, with 333 workers set to be laid off. Borders other distribution center in California […]