Here is our quick guide for your BEA preparations: – Our free ebook Buzz Books 2013: Fall/Winter is the biggest galley giveaway you’ll see, featuring substantial excerpts from 40 forthcoming book (running about 750 pages in all). It includes work from many featured BEA speakers, such as Amy Tan, Jonathan Lethem, Wally Lamb and Elizabeth Gilbert. – Our master BEA Schedule provides the comprehensive, day-by-day, hour-by-hour schedule that BEA’s site does not – Tickets are still available for very timely Publishers Launch BEA conference on Wednesday, May 29 (on scale, consolidation and more). Register at BEA’s site or use our […]
New Dan Brown Opens with A Million Units In the US
Doubleday reports to us that Dan Brown’s INFERNO sold 1 million units in the US and Canada in its first five days on sale, through Saturday, in print and ebook sales combined. The company did not break out the distribution between formats, but the Nielsen Bookscan count would indicate that ebooks slightly outsold print versions. The actual first printing was 2.3 million copies, so Doubleday should have ample print inventory for now. In 2009, Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL sold “more than 2 million units” in the first week on sale, but that was inclusive of the UK edition, which sold […]
Last to Settle Pays the Most: Penguin Agrees to Pay Over $90 Million to Settle eBook Pricing Suits
Penguin’s hard-to-fathom delay in settling the state and class-action lawsuits over ebook pricing (after settling with the Department of Justice in December 2012) was down to the wire, with the company forced to join in the trial starting June 3. But on Wednesday, it was announced that the publisher has agreed to settle those remaining suits — paying a whopping $75 million in restitution to affected consumers. They are paying another $7 million to the states themselves in litigation and investigation costs, and the class action attorneys are finally getting paid as well, collecting $8 million from Penguin, plus additional […]
With Kindle Worlds, Amazon Turns Fan Fiction Into A Business
A little more than a year ago, EL James spun what originally began life as Twilight fan fiction into one of the most successful book series ever. Now Amazon.com is tapping into the energetic world of fan fiction with the first broad, legally licensed, commercial model. Wednesday morning the company announced Kindle Worlds, a new digital publishing program that allows writers to upload and sell fan fiction based on well-known entertainment properties with characters that inspire fans. The initial properties all come from Alloy Entertainment — PRETTY LITTLE LIARS, GOSSIP GIRL, and THE VAMPIRE DIARIES — and Amazon “plans to […]
Jones Is the Latest to Leave in Granta Restructuring, and More
Granta Publications executive publisher Philip Gwyn Jones is the latest employee to be shown the door, leaving Granta this summer according to a company announcement. They now admit that a larger reorganization is underway after the resignations of Granta Magazine editor John Freeman and deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, to result in a leaner company. Proprietor and publisher Sigrid Rausing is taking “full operational and executive control of the company” and the new plan is to have a single editor-in-chief for the books imprints and the magazine. Rausing says in the statement: “The economic realities of small imprint publishing today has […]
The BEA Master Schedule
BEA keeps making incremental improvements to their web site and mobile app but they still don’t provide what a lot of attendees (and our readers) ask for: All the events in a single spreadsheet, arranged by time and date. So here, bigger than ever, is our annual pass at organizing hundreds of educational sessions, special events, “author stages” appearances and more into a single file. Just go to: publun.ch/BEA2013Sched. This year we have posted it as a shared Google spreadsheet. You can’t change the master document, but you can download it as an Excel file and sort or edit it […]