The Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for excellence in children’s literature have gone to Terry Pratchett’s NATION for fiction and poetry; Candace Fleming’s THE LINCOLNS: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary for nonfiction; and Margaret Mahy and illustrator Polly Dunbar’s BUBBLE TROUBLE for picture book. Dan O’Connell, who has been providing publicity and marketing services to clients of The Strothman Agency since 2003, will now run a spinoff, Epilogue Media–offering those services for a fee to outside authors as well as Strothman clients. Consumers Union will distribute their book titles through Ingram Publisher Services.
Lunch Weekly for Tuesday, June 2
Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to put them all together. “nice deal” $1 – $49,000 “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000 “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000 “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000 “major deal” $500,000 and up FICTION Inspirational Nancy Mehl’s SIMPLE SECRETS, in which a graphic designer inherits a […]
Salinger Sues Over Unauthorized Catcher in the Rye Sequel
J.D. Salinger filed suit in a NY Federal Court against the anonymous author of the forthcoming sequel 60 YEARS LATER: Coming Through the Rye, also naming UK company Windupbird Publishing, Sweden-based Nicotext, and SCB Distributors (which sells Nicotext books in the US) in the action. The complaint declares, “the sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticize the original. It is a rip-off pure and simple.” This Courthouse News piece adds, “Salinger says the defendants are acting in bad faith to confuse the public, which is likely to think that he wrote the sequel. He […]
Stake in Spain's Santillana In Play; Pearson, Cengage and Oxford Among Likely Bidders
The FT names Infinitas Learning (what used to be the education division of Wolters Kluwer) as another prospect interested in Santillana, called the “market leader in school textbooks in Spanish-speaking Latin America.” Owner Prisa could “sell up to 30 per cent of the business in a deal that could fetch up to ¬360m ($512m)” as they restructure their debt. The paper adds that “owning a stake in Santillana would fit with Pearson’s expansion into educational publishing outside the US, where the group is twice the size of any of its competitors.”FT
HMH Creates Digital Team; RAND Drops eBook Prices; SuperKindle Release, and More
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade and reference division has created a Digital Strategy and Planning Group, led by svp Cheryl Cramer Toto (who had been the company’s vp of development and planning, a job that included leading the integration of Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin). Under Toto are vp of digital content development David Jost, vp of digital business development David Langevin, and Sanj Kharbanda, who has been promoted to vp of digital market strategy. He “will identify unique market opportunities for Houghton digital content and develop and implement innovative consumer-facing programs.” Yesterday the RAND Corporation announced they were lowering list price […]
Bezos: No Profits (?), No Color, No Stats
Missed during BEA madness was Jeff Bezos’s webcast speech to Amazon shareholders last Thursday. At least as interpreted by some, Bezos seemed to indicate that Kindle isn’t making money for the company yet (despite wild analysis by Wall Street analysts who don’t understand the business). Bezos said the company “is investing very heavily” in its digital business but “I don’t want people to think it’s a big cash-flow generator for us.” Speaking of the company’s businesses in China and cloud computing he said they were in “investment mode” and added, “we continue to plant these seeds and our experience — […]