Kate Johnson has joined Wolf Literary Services, where she will focus on adult fiction, based in Scotland. Kate was previously an agent and vice president at Georges Borchardt. Adriann Ranta is now vp and senior agent, and Allison Devereux has been promoted to associate agent and foreign rights manager. Sara Sargent has joined Simon Pulse as editor. Previously she was an associate editor at Balzer + Bray. At Metropolitan Books, Guy Connor has been promoted to assistant editor. Nathan Filer’s Costa Award-winning debut novel, published in the UK as THE SHOCK AND THE FALL but in the US as WHERE […]
Open Road Acquires E-Reads
Open Road Integrated Media announced Monday that it has an agreement to acquire literary agent Richard Curtis’s E-Reads, one of the pioneering ebook publishers, with a catalog of over 1,200 titles. That list, focused on science fiction and fantasy (and including mystery, thriller, romance, and horror books) will significantly enlarge Open Road’s list of 4,200 titles. The deal is expected to close on April 1, at which point Open Road will decide which if any of E-Reads staff of 5 full- and part-time employees they want to retain. E-Reads founder Richard Curtis will continue to run his longstanding literary agency, […]
Packer Asks “Is Amazon Good for Books?”
And if you have to ask, the implied — but not particularly explicit — answer is no. George Packer looks at Amazon and the book business in this week’s New Yorker. Much of the piece will be familiar to our readers. He does find evidence of a forgotten Amazon imprint from late 1999 from former employee James Marcus, when “Amazon tried publishing books, leasing the rights to a defunct imprint called Weathervane and putting out a few titles,” mostly revived remainders. “Weathervane fell into an oblivion so complete that there’s no trace of it on the Internet. (Representatives at the […]
Folio Prize Names Eight Nominees
The UK’s new literary award The Folio Prize was set to announce their inaugural shortlist Monday afternoon, until the embargo was broken via Twitter. The nominees, culled from 80 titles; are: Red Doc, Anne Carson Schroder, Amity Gaige Last Friends, Jane Gardam Benediction, Kent Haruf The Flame Throwers, Rachel Kushner A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride A Naked Singularity, Sergio De La Pava Tenth of December, George Saunders McBride’s book, which already won the Goldsmith Prize, comes from Galley Beggar Press. It is not available in ebook form, but last summer Coffee House Press bought rights for the […]
Launching DreamWorks Press
Studio DreamWorks Animation is starting their own DreamWorks Press line of print and ebooks later this year, “likely to launch in time for the 2014 holiday season.” They will be issuing titles based on their forthcoming movies as well as their existing stable of characters where they have reclaimed those rights — from Shrek to properties acquired as part of Classic Media in 2012 including Rocky & Bullwinkle and Lassie. The imprint will be run by head of global publishing Emma Whittard, onetime director of global licensed books for Disney Publishing), and Perseus’s PGW will distribute the new company. Whittard is “supported by Dreamworks […]
Publishers Warn Trade Representative On Canada and Fair Use
We are accustomed to America’s intellectual property creators warning about inadequate protection for their work in countries such as China, Ukraine and Russia. But on Friday, organizations representing industries that rely on copyright (including the AAP) called out Canada for special attention and a place on the US Trade Representative’s “watch list” among others. The AAP explained in a release that Canada’s Copyright Modernization Act 2012 “expanded its fair dealing exceptions to include an undefined ‘education’ purpose. The education exception lacks any specific parameters, thus conflicting with established international norms regarding exceptions, and has also been subject to excessively broad interpretation, […]