Catherine Onder will join Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s as svp and publisher on February 6, based in New York. Onder fills the position vacated when Betsy Groban left HMH last summer. Most recently she was editorial director at Bloomsbury Children’s. HMH trade president Ellen Archer says in the announcement, “She has a wealth of experience and a tremendous track record in middle reader and young adult publishing. Working with our gifted editors, she will direct and grow both our front and backlist business to new levels of excellence.” Onder comments, “I’m proud to join HMH with its rich tradition of children’s publishing of the […]
Self-publishing
People, Awards, Etc.
Katie Grinch has been promoted to associate director of publicity at Putnam. Morgan Amer will join Chronicle as trade sales coordinator on September 13. She was an assistant manager at Ryland Peters & Small. Author of the Llama Llama children’s books Anna Dewdney, 50, died on Saturday of brain cancer. Forthcoming Scribner will issue a collection of what they call “the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald” in April 2017, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, titled I’D DIE FOR YOU. The promo copy notes that “some of these stories were submitted to major magazines and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime but […]
Amazon’s Tale of Two Borrows Continues: KU Pool Rises, Page Rate Decreases
Amazon announced the retroactive rate at which they will compensate Kindle Unlimited participants for books read (and subscriptions paid for) in January. The per page fell to its lowest point yet, $.00412 per page (about 4/10ths of one cent) — or 10.6 percent lower than the $0.00461 per page a month ago — while the overall pool of money paid out increased to its highest level yet, at $15 million. At the beginning of the month, Amazon had also announced a revised methodology for their universal way of measuring ebook “pages” for calculating those per-page payments. That new method applies starting […]
Also From 2015: Subscription Did Work, Just Not For You
Last Friday, after a reporting glitch in the morning, Amazon issued December sales statements to KDP exclusive authors telling them how much the etailer decided to allocate for the Kindle Unlimited subscription pool — $13.5 million — and what that was worth per page, $.004609 in the US. Consistent with the larger pattern from recent months, the payment per page read declined (down 6.7 percent, from $.00492) as the overall pool allocated grew (up 6.3 percent, from $12.8 million). While many observers focused on curtailments in subscription reading programs during 2015 — as Oyster prepared to shutdown, and Scribd adjusted their title mix and […]
Kindle Unlimited Pool Grows But Per Book Fee Stays In Range
Amazon provided their monthly discretionary boost to the KDP fund that tells self-published authors — retroactively — how much they will be paid for ebooks borrowed through Kindle Unlimited. For April accounting, the pool totals $9.8 million, the highest monthly amount yet. But the fee per book borrowed through KU remains in the relatively low range, at $1.355 per read. (That translates into roughly 7.232 million borrows for the month.) For the 10 months since KU began, through April, Amazon has paid out approximately $67.3 million so far.
Malcolm X Estate to Self-Publish eBooks
The Malcolm X Estate will issue an ebook edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X on their own in May, rather than work with longtime print publishing partner Ballantine, the AP reports. L. Londell McMillan, an attorney for the estate, notes that “Malcolm X was a fervent advocate for self-help, self-reliance and self-respect.” He added, “Today’s technology allows for innovative means to share content and add to it for educational, cultural and commercial purposes. Malcolm X did not grant all rights to a publisher in perpetuity. The works and rights of Malcolm X belong to his children and the community, not a […]