In advance of the sale of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade division, senior executive editor Rick Wolff recently accepted a voluntary buyout package, and he will leave HMH in mid-December. Wolff, “who has no plans to retire, was a minor league baseball player in the Detroit Tigers organization before entering book publishing.” At Harper Christian and Harper Focu, Jerri Helm was promoted to vp of digital marketing and analytics, continuing to lead the marketing operations team while also assuming responsibility for the corporate analytics team. Bookselling Politics and Prose is looking to change the paradigm around author events, from free promotion […]
News Corp CEO Says PRH Would Face Antitrust Fight Over Simon & Schuster
News Corp. ceo Robert Thomson said in answer to a question at the company’s annual meeting he has no doubt that Penguin Random House would face major regulatory issues in the US if they were to prevail in the bidding to acquire Simon & Schuster. “It will clearly be a serious antitrust issue if Bertelsmann acquires Simon & Schuster,” Thomson said. “However cute and clever the structure, if Bertelsmann is a beneficiary, it will be a book behemoth. And this will certainly be a profound antitrust issue for the entire book industry and no doubt for authors around the world.” […]
National Book Awards: Yu Wins Fiction, Along With Les Payne and Tamara Payne, and More
At the 71st National Book Awards on Wednesday evening, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (Pantheon) won the fiction prize. Roxane Gay presented the award, noting, “This has been an impossible year in almost every way. We are dealing with both a pandemic and a political climate that is terrifying and absurd.” Yu, who said he had not prepared a speech because he was so sure he would not win, spoke briefly, saying “I can’t feel anything in my body right now” and “I’m going to go melt into a puddle.” (Afterwards on Twitter, Yu remarked: “That feeling when you win a […]
Obama’s A Promised Land Sets PRH Opening Day Sales Record
Penguin Random House announced Wednesday that Barack Obama’s A PROMISED LAND sold over than 887,000 units (including pre-orders_ in all formats and editions in the US and Canada on the first day of publication. That comprises “the largest first-day sales total for any book ever published” by the company. Two years ago, Michelle Obama’s book BECOMING sold over 725,000 units in its first day on sale, moving 1.4 million units in the first week on sale. In July, Simon & Schuster said they had set their own “company record” for opening day sales in the US when Mary Trump’s Too […]
People, Etc.
Annysa Polanco has been promoted to director, diversity, equity & inclusion at Penguin Random House. In the coming year, the company will add “more fully-dedicated positions” in diversity, equity & inclusions roles across the divisions, including a new “board-level DE&I leadership position” that will report directly to PRH US ceo Madeline McIntosh. Polanco will report to that new executive once the role is filled. Michael DeFazio had been promoted to vice president & executive director, production planning, analytics, and paper purchasing, Penguin Random House. Film/TV Production outfit The Mazur Kaplan Company — run by bookseller Mitchell Kaplan and producer Paula […]
Bologna Book Fair Announces June Dates, Takes Aim at LBF and Book Expo with General Publishing Initiative
Following quickly on the London Book Fair’s hopes for an awkwardly-timed live book fair next year running June 29 to July 1, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair has also announced new dates, and expanded ambitions. Bologna now hopes to convene their fair from June 14 through June 17, moving from their original dates in mid-April. Both events may be ahead of sufficient vaccination to encourage live gatherings at scale, particularly while hoping to draw visitors from around the world. Note, for example, that Macmillan Publishers in the US recently declared that they will not open their trade publishing offices in […]