Thursday night HarperCollins convened a small tribute to the late Michael Crichton, attended by many family members and friends (including former Harper ceo Jane Friedman). Crichton’s longtime agent Lynn Nesbit recalled with emotion how he said to her, “Let’s grow up in the business together, and we did.” She noted, “It’s a happy event because he did leave so much behind.” And she promised there was more Crichton to come, since “he laid out the whole concept of the next book.: Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham confirmed afterwards that Crichton left behind approximately 90 manuscript pages of a novel-in-progress, along with […]
Amazon to Integrate BookTour.com–Which Will Promote Physical Stores
While interviewing Softbanks’s Eric Hipeau for a BEA panel today, author, magazine editor and founder of BookTour.com Chris Anderson let slip that soon his company’s author tour information will be integrated into Amazon. The etailer took a minority stake in BookTour, reported in April (though at the time it wasn’t clear if there were other investors; Anderson was the only funder.) Amazon is due to start integrating BookTour’s information about author appearances across the country soon, starting with relevant data for Amazon’s “Author Pages” feature. Anderson and BookTour ceo Kevin Smokler made it clear that Amazon will not edit or […]
More Day One Highlights: Giving It Away, Musical Keynote
Late Thursday morning, Simba’s Michael Norris introduced “Giving it Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense And When They Don’t” by citing, as all ebook-related panels seem to these days, with some statistics. According to a survey Simba recently published about ebook buying and reading habits, 8% of the US adult population bought at least one book in 2008 – but 15% of them said they had read an ebook. Discrepancies between what people buy and read are common, but for the purposes of this panel, it was a natural segue to talk of whether giving books away for free online […]
People: Krieger to Retire
Associate publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Aladdin imprint Ellen Krieger will retire at the end of June after fifteen years at the company. While at S&S, she oversaw the merging of Pocket’s middle grade and teen imprints into the Children’s division’s Aladdin and Pulse imprints and launched Aladdin Mix. She comments: “It’s hard to imagine a more satisfying last chapter of my publishing career than my fifteen years at Simon & Schuster, shepherding Aladdin…through a number of exciting incarnations. I’m not sure what the next chapter will be; right now, I’m looking forward to not setting an alarm, and […]
Conroy Cancels BEA Appearances
The biggest surprise in the lead-up to Book Expo America was news yesterday that author Pat Conroy had to cancel his two planned appearances at the show. Via his agent Marly Rusoff, Conroy communicates that he is recovering from surgery, and “otherwise he would be at BEA, which he has always loved attending. He especially regrets being unable to sign with his daughter, Melissa Conroy, who has her first book out, in which he is a character.” (Her picture book POPPY’S PANTS publishes in September.) Doubleday will still have copies SOUTH OF BROAD, his first novel in 14 years, at […]
Shatzkin's New Big Ideas for Publishing's Future
This morning’s biggest Big Idea presentation came from consultant and publishing theorist Mike Shatzkin, who expanded his previously-presented master thesis that general trade publishing will fade and “the future means ‘vertical’ and ‘community'” to look more broadly at what publishing will look like in 20 years. Perhaps the biggest extrapolation was this: “Something we don’t pay enough attention to is that anybody with a web site is a publisher. Not all publishers are content creators, but they need content. That is the big unfolding opportunity for publishing and the people in it over the net 20 or 30 years.” Put […]