Interim director of English PEN since August 2017 Antonia Byatt has been made the organization’s standing director. Lena Moses-Schmitt was promoted to publicity manager for Catapult, Counterpoint and Soft Skull. Kate Hutchison has joined LSC Communications as director of business development and strategy, publisher services, focusing on creating digital solutions within the publishing industry. She was most recently at BookShout. On Twitter, Ginger Clark at Curtis Brown offers “an incomplete list of [30] literary agent nightmares.” Awards Ibrahim Nasrallah won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his second novel, The Second War of the Dog (Arab Scientific Publishers. The $50,000 […]
Opening Sales
Comey’s A Higher Loyalty Sells More Than 600,000 Units In First Week
Flatiron Books announced Tuesday morning that James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership sold more than 600,000 units in its first week on sale. They company says they have “over a million copies in print.” Bookscan will post data for print sales through the outlets they track on Wednesday morning. Earlier in the year, Michael Wolff’s surprise early success for FIRE AND FURY moved over 250,000 ebooks and 100,000 digital audiobooks in the first four days on sale, after Macmillan moved up the publication date to Friday, January 5. The first hardcover printing was 150,000 copies, but Bookscan only recorded […]
Holt Says Fire and Fury Set First Week Sales Record
Michael Wolff’s FIRE AND FURY “set a new record” for Henry Holt since it went on sale on January 5 “with a historic rate of sales velocity,” the publisher said late Thursday in an official update regarding books in print. The title is in its eleventh printing and they “will have shipped” 700,000 copies to date. Additional reprints still on order for another 700,000 copies will bring them to a total of 1.4 million hardcovers in print once those orders have been completed. Holt promises that “a significant number of books will be arriving in stores by the end of the […]
Is Dan Brown Still Dan Brown?
Dan Brown’s ORIGIN produced first-week sales numbers that would be strong for almost any author but Dan Brown. The book moved over 145,000 hardcovers through outlets tracked by Bookscan, and according to people at Penguin Random House internal data shows about 100,000 ebooks — mostly pre-orders — sold in the same period. The first-week US hardcover sales for Brown’s last book, INFERNO, published in May 2013, were approximately 369,000 through Bookscan outlets. (Inferno sold 6 million units in English in calendar 2013, according to Bertelsmann.) Knopf Doubleday spokesman Paul Bogaards told us, “ORIGIN had the biggest opening week of any novel published […]
People, Etc.
Lisa Erickson returns to the Crown Publishing Group as associate director of marketing for Crown, Hogarth, Broadway, and Tim Duggan Books (she has been at Little, Brown); Alaina Waagner recently joined the group as marketing manager (moving over from Random House). Ursula Cary has left Rodale Books, where she was a senior editor, to work as a freelance editor and writer, specializing in practical and narrative nonfiction. The Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation has enlisted Ann Patchett and James Patterson as their inaugural ambassadors, to help “increase awareness of its mission to directly support booksellers with confidential emergency financial assistance.” More Opening […]
People, Etc.
At Penguin Books, Victoria Savanh has been promoted to assistant editor. At BlueBottleBiz, Mike Conner has been promoted to chief evangelist, where he will spearhead the company’s member adoption while overseeing his pre-existing sales team. At Westwood Creative Artists, Stephanie Thompson has joined as office manager and literary assistant to Michael Levine. In addition, Jake Babad has left the agency to attend law school. Crystal McCoy has joined little bee books as senior publicist. She was senior account executive at B/HI. Opening sales Nielsen Bookscan announced that UK print sales for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in its first […]