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A Flat Quarter for Scholastic Scholastic announced flat sales for their fourth quarter ($334 million in the children’s book publishing and distribution, even with a year ago, and $601 million overall, up $9 million from last year) and lower profits, with net income of $38 million, versus $43 million a year ago. Sales for fiscal 2007 are projected to drop from this year’s $2.28 billion (which included last year’s new Harry Potter) to between $2.1 and $2.2 billion. Total Potter revenue for 2006 was $195 million, up from $20 million the year before. Press Release Uh Oh: Jones’ Idea of […]

Germany’s Continuing Hit The Guardian highlights German bestseller MEASURING THE WORLD, which has sold 600,000 copies in hardcover since last September, “nothing less than a literary sensation.… It hasn’t just delighted the readers. It has also enthralled Germany’s famously grudging critics, who have swooningly praised the novel and hailed its author – 31-year-old Daniel Kehlmann – as a literary wunderkind.” Quercus will publish in the UK next year. Guardian Fox Goes Graphic It’s Comic-Con time, and so the related press releases shall flow. Fox Filmed Entertainment’s Fox Atomic will create a line of graphic novels, to be published by corporate […]

Action at Retailers and Wholesaler Distribution giant Source Interlink — the largest ID magazine and book distributor, and the primary distributor of CDs and DVDs to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders — is featured in the WSJ’s Heard on the Street column as potentially closing in on a sale to private-equity groups or management following a long period of being shopped. “People familiar with the matter say no deadline has been set for bids, but a deal could come in the next two months.” For now, though, investors are betting the other way. They have massively shorted the company’s […]

FICTION Debut Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s DR. OLAF VAN SCHULER’S BRAIN, a collection of linked short stories tracing a family of doctors in New York City from 1664 through the present day, to Antonia Fusco at Algonquin, in a nice deal, by Eve Bridburg at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency (World). ebridburg@zshliterary.com Abiola Abrams’s DARE, the story of a talented Ph.D. student who is mistakenly identified and bursts onto the rap scene as Gang Gurl X; based on the first urban hip hop adult movie to be produced by Femme Productions in early 2007, to Selena James at Pocket, by Alexis Hurley […]

Schedule Notes I’m off to the Stanford Publishing Course briefly tomorrow morning, and then come back to drop off our book reviewer at camp, so there will be no regular Lunch served until Tuesday. As ever, deals, jobs and everything else at PublishersMarketplace.com (including news links from the home page) will continue apace. Options Questions Hit BN A Barnes & Noble shareholder filed suit against the company alleging that they improperly backdated stock option grants to their executives on multiple occasions. The company said in a statement it “believes there is no merit to the complaint and that its practices […]

Short Items Rappers have apparently adopted the 1998 book THE 48 LAWS OF POWER as “the bible for behavior in the hip-hop world,” the LAT reports, “largely as a result of rap artists’ growing sense of themselves as an entrepreneurial warrior class.” “Geeky white guy” author Robert Greene is now “fashioning himself into an unlikely consigliere to hip-hop’s elite,” including collaborating on a business book with 50 Cent. LAT The Library of Congress has announced authors participating in the sixth annual National Book Festival, scheduled for the end of September. Release In an NYT op-ed piece, Katha Pollitt reflects on […]