Winter Institute wrapped up on Friday with the ABA Past Presidents in Conversation, featuring Becky Anderson, Betsy Burton, Mitchell Kaplan, Gayle Shanks, and Michael Tucker. Much of the session was given over to reminiscence of Winter Institutes past and anecdotes from their shops, but they also discussed changes in bookselling over the years and ongoing challenges. Notably, multiple panelists spoke to how the finances of the industry are, as Shanks put it, “severely broken.” She said, “When I have to take out a display of books and put in a case of tea towels or socks…I think things are not working.” […]
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Bookselling: Barnes & Noble Closes A Houston Store, Plans One for Sarasota
Barnes & Noble’s big 38,700-square-foot store on Westheimer Road in Houston, TX closed on January 12 after 23 years in that location. Separately, the chain will build a new 14,000-square-foot store in the Sarasota, FL-area’s University Town Center, which vp of real estate development Jim Lampassi says is due to open by spring 2020. Meanwhile Carl Hauch — former BN vp of stores and one of the three people sharing the bookseller’s “office of the chief executive” following the firing of Demos Parneros and unwillingness of the board to search for a replacement while they evaluate a potential sale of […]
People, Etc.
Caroline Osborn has joined Simon & Schuster Children’s as subsidiary rights manager. She was most recently in subsidiary rights at Little, Brown Children’s. Derek Reed has been promoted to senior editor, Currency, Convergent, and Crown Forum. Cami Miller has been promoted to director for mass market sales at Harper Christian. At William Morrow, Eliza Rosenberry has been promoted to senior publicity manager and Camille Collins to publicity manager. Anne Goldberg has joined Phaidon in New York, as project editor, food, reporting to executive commissioning editor Emily Takoudes. Previously she was associate editor at Ten Speed Press. Serene Hakim has been promoted to associate agent and subrights manager at Ayesha Pande […]
Parneros Formally Disputes BN’s Claim He Was a “Faithless Servant”
Former Barnes & Noble CEO Demos Parneros’ determination to dispute the bookseller’s claim he was a “faithless servant” has now resulted in a formal motion: On December 21, after some scheduling confusion regarding an intended postponement, his counsel filed the motion to dismiss BN’s second counterclaim against him. (As for the other two counterclaims, counsel heeded Judge John Koetl’s strongly-established concerns about a motion to dismiss.) Attorney Anne Clark’s 15-page filing leverages legal precedent to dispute BN’s claim that Parneros was a “faithless servant” who sabotaged negotiations with a potential buyer of the struggling company. While Parneros disputes the facts in BN’s […]
Atwood, Rooney, James, and More Top 2019 Preview Lists
With only a few days left in the year, a number of outlets have published 2019 previews, including extensive lists from Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, Esquire, Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Apple Books, and Bustle. Comparing last year’s aggregated preview list to our 2018 Best of the Best list, only three titles from the former, Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage, Lauren Groff’s Florida, and Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, carried through to the latter. This year’s Best of the Best winner, Tommy Orange’s There There, did not make any of the preview lists we collected, nor did number two Best of the Best […]
The Year In the World of #PitchShowcases
One of 2018’s early, and welcome, hits was Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, a mainstay New York Times young adult bestseller since late March, and the first in a trilogy, as well as one of our consensus best fiction titles of the year. It’s also the first big breakout for an author initially discovered in one of the increasingly popular online pitching outlets, Pitch Wars, represented by Alexandra Machinist and Hillary Jacobson of ICM. Looking back over the year and ahead to continuing trends, we wondered if Adeyemi’s success is seen as the outlier, in the way in which publishing […]