Oprah’s Back to the Present As you’ve surely heard, a summer of Faulkner was enough to drive Oprah back to contemporary books and live authors she can bring on her show. James Frey’s “gut-wrenching” memoir A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is her new selection, with Anchor reaping the benefits of the 600,000-copy printing of the tie-in […]
Lunch for Thursday, September 22
Random Goes Direct Random House has quietly and recently launched a program that makes the company’s complete in print/in stock catalog of books — comprising over 20,000 titles — available for sale directly to readers through their web site. Spokesman Stuart Applebaum tells Lunch, “Our direct-to-consumer sales initiative through the Random House, Inc. website is […]
Lunch for Wednesday, September 21
Google Gets Sued The Authors Guild has joined with individual authors Herbert Mitgang, Betty Miles and Daniel Hoffman (poet laureate of the US in 1973-74) to file suit against Google in a Manhattan Federal court yesterday over their Google Print for Libraries program. The parties seek class action status and allege in their complaint that […]
Lunch for Tuesday, September 20
BAM Will File Late Books-A-Million announced after the close of the market yesterday that they will miss the required Federal filing date for their quarterly 10-Q report for the period ending July 30. They say it is “a result of management’s ongoing evaluation of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting for the second quarter. […]
Lunch for Monday, September 19
King Tops First Round of Auction The online auction for the right to name a character in Stephen King’s forthcoming book CELL yielded a winning bid of $25,100, with proceeds going to the First Amendment Project. The next highest winning bids in the first round of the auction included: Lemony Snicket ($6,350) Michael Chabon ($6,000) […]
Lunch for Friday, September 16
Personnel News Daniel Slager is leaving Harcourt to become editor in chief of Milkweed Editions, starting in mid-October, joining managing director Hilary Reeves as co-leader of the nonprofit literary publisher. Slager was selected from a field of 100 candidates. Before joining Harcourt in 2000, he was an editor at the Grand Street quarterly. Advanced Marketing […]