Isabel White has left Brie Burkeman to set up her own London-based agency representing high-quality, entertaining fiction and nonfiction. Sandy Lu of the Vanguard Literary Agency is joining Lori Perkins at the L. Perkins Agency as an associate agent. Fredric Nachbaur has been named Director of Fordham University Press effective February 17. Most recently he was marketing and sales director at NYU Press. A memorial service for critic, editor and novelist John Leonard will be held on Monday, March 2 at 6:00 PM at Landmark on the Park, 160 Central Park West. Toni Morrison, Victor Navasky, Gloria Steinem, Eugenia Zukerman, […]
Washington Post to Drop Book World
As the NBCC first reported on their blog, the Washington Post will drop its standalone book review section: “The last issue of Book World in print will be the February 15, 2009 issue. Thereafter, content will be split between the Outlook section and Style & Arts on Sundays. Daily book reviews in Style will continue. The promise is that there will be four additional broadsheet pages in Outlook for book coverage and one additional page in Style & Arts. That’s an equivalent of 12 tabloid pages. (Book World is 16 pages.) Jonathan Yardley’s reviews will appear in Outlook. Michael Dirda’s […]
Sales Flat at Rodale
As a private company, Rodale’s annual press release about their performance traditionally celebrates all the things that went well and little else. Today the company says that sales for 2008 were essentially flat, down 0.5 percent from the year before (when sales were $632 million). In the books division, they celebrate sales of “more than 1.5 million copies of Eat This, Not That! and more than 1.3 million copies of Flat Belly Diet!” The company says “Rodale Books saw a 3.5 percent increase across both trade and direct channels” and they claim that “revenues from books sold online increased 47 […]
Having Asked for Consumer Fair, Canadian Publishers Start to Snub New Reed Effort
Reed Exhibitions created their proposal for a consumer book fair in Toronto in the fall in response to publisher requests (and complaints about the inefficacy of Book Expo Canada). But now Random House Canada has announced that they are disappointed in the plans for the new fair and will not participate. Spokesperson Tracy Turriff says in a statement, “We attended a presentation about the plans for the show, and a number of challenges were raised, including basic elements like the venue and timing for the show. We are concerned that it will be difficult for this show to achieve success […]
Clancy Finally Goes E
Penguin will start releasing books by Tom Clancy in a variety of ebook formats for the first time beginning February 3 with his 1984 debut The Hunt for Red October. Amazon will feature a Tom Clancy Kindle Store and Sony’s eBook Store is “planning major promotions,” including “bundles of selected titles as they become available.” The rest of Clancy’s backlist will be released in ebook versions over the following seven weeks. Prices will range for $4.99 to $18.
Kiyosaki Starts Free Wiki-Style Books
As first announced in December when Robert Kiyosaki took the cover advertisement in PW, his new work Conspiracy of the Rich: The 8 new Rules of Money will be written and publisher for free initially via a “wiki-style” presentation at www.conspiracyoftherich.com. So far just the introduction has been posted, and visitors need to register in order to read more than a small portion of the work.