Paul Baggaley will fill the long-empty slot of publisher for Picador in the UK, vacated when Andrew Kidd became an agent with Aitken Alexander in the spring. He has been publishing director at Harper UK Perennial. At Harper Children’s, Erica Sussman has been promoted to editor. She has been with the company since 2004. SharedBook has hired Ashley Gordon as vp, business development, focusing on creating relationships with publishing partners to deliver customized and personalized print-on-demand books. She was director of channel development at Lightning Source. Author Solutions has hired Kevin Gregory as coo. Most recently he served in various […]
Harvard Book Store's New Owners
Jeff Mayersohn and Linda Seamonson of Wellesley, MA bought the Harvard Book Store from Frank Kramer, owner for 46 years. Kramer says in the announcement, “Jeff is both a book lover and a businessman who has a tangible affection for Harvard Book Store. When I met him, I liked him immediately. And when I found out that he and his family plan their vacations around the locations of great independent bookstores, I liked him even more.” Carole Horne remains as general manager of the store. Jeff Mayersohn has been an executive at Sonus Networks, a an IP communications infrastructure company. […]
Borders: No Sale, Just Warrants
Borders does not have a deal to sell the company so, under their loan agreement from earlier this year, they have issued warrants to Pershing Square Capital Management to purchase 5.15 million shares of the company’s stock at seven dollars a share. The warrants can be exercised up until October 9, 2014.
The End for Olsson's
Olsson’s Books and Records closed all five of their remaining stores yesterday and petitioned the bankruptcy to turn their Chapter 11 filing back into a Chapter 7 liquidation. In a posting on their web site, the company cites “stagnant sales, low cash reserves, and an inability to renegotiate current leases, along with a continuing weak retail economy and plummeting music sales.” General manager Stephen Wallace-Haines says: “In the end, all the roads towards reorganization led to this dead end: we did not have the money required to pay for product in advance, to collect reserves to buy for Christmas, and […]
Fey Proposal
The NY Post says that a “sounding out” of interest in a book by Tina Fey by Richard Abate at Endeavor has elicited offers of over $5 million. There is no proposal, and Fey has not met with publishers.Post
Who Won't Win the Nobel? An American
Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl has tipped his hand when it comes to considering an American for the Nobel prize for literature. He told the AP in an interview, “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States.” Our writers are ”too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added, ”The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” […]