Some of the best experiments for innovations in brick-and-mortar bookselling are coming through the ambitious, ongoing program in which author James Patterson is giving $1 million in personal funds as direct grants to support independent bookstores in a variety of initiatives. In February Patterson announced the first grants, allocating $267,000 to 55 stores and at a Wednesday afternoon BEA panel, booksellers who received some of those grant shared success stories and appreciation. Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books, who moderated the panel and was among the first round of recipients, said the initiative is “one of the most genuine things I […]
At BEA, Booksellers Further Contemplate Bundling
The closest thing to an opening keynote program on a generally quiet conference day at BEA was an afternoon panel on The Future of Brick and Mortar Retailers — moderated by Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks and featuring John Ingram of Ingram Content Group; Joyce Meskis of The Tattered Cover; Michael Tamblyn of Kobo; Mike Hesselbach of Readerlink; and Oren Teicher of the ABA. The session’s applause line came at the end, when Teicher reminded everyone, “We want to make books of all publishers equally available, all the time.” And the session’s laugh line when Tamblyn followed up by noting Kobo […]
Carmen Balcells and Andrew Wylie Join Forces for International Agency
Literary agents Carmen Balcells, and Andrew Wylie, are joining forces for a new international agency, Balcells & Wylie, according to a short two-paragraph email sent to clients of the two agencies and seen by Spanish newspapers. They say the email begins: “Yesterday May 27, Carmen Balcells and Andrew Wylie signed a memorandum of understanding in order to create an international agency called Balcells & Wylie.” It notes that, “We have admired each other for years, and we are now able to work more closely. Our goal is to give greater strength, scope and duration to the representation of clients, and we are excited […]
Hachette Answers; Will Discuss “Compensating for the Damage” of Amazon’s “Demand” After Dispute Is Settled
On Wednesday morning, Hachette Book Group issued another statement in reply to Amazon’s Tuesday night post: “It is good to see Amazon acknowledge that its business decisions significantly affect authors’ lives,” they open. “For reasons of their own, Amazon has limited its customers’ ability to buy more than 5,000 Hachette titles.” As for Amazon’s public offer to share the acknowledged impact on authors, HBG says: “Once we have reached…an agreement, we will be happy to discuss with Amazon its ideas about compensating authors for the damage its demand for improved terms may have done them, and to pass along any […]
Beyond BEA, Digital Book World 2015 Announces First Keynotes
Looking a few big events down the road, our conference partners at Digital Book World have officially opened for registration the sixth annual conference, to be held January 13 – 15, 2015 in New York. Today’s announcement includes some of conference’s broad themes, as well as the first group of timely keynote speakers. Already on the docket are top CEOs — Brian Murray of HarperCollins (which recently announced their planned acquisition of Harlequin) and Linda Zecher of recently-public Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (the first part of an expanded look at ed tech and other education-related issues) — and two top authors, […]
From the Archives: Macmillan’s “Kindle Outage Adjustment”
Amazon’s statement Tuesday night indicated that they “offered to Hachette to fund 50 percent of an author pool – to be allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50 percent” and it added that “we did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago.” We received a number of queries thereafter, from people who did not recall Macmillan’s Kindle Outage Adjustment. The publisher started making the additional payments to authors in 2010, and Macmillan ceo John Sargent wrote about it in a letter to agents and authors that […]