As often happens, one of the bigger deal announcements comes not from the book fair but from the US. USA Today got the first look at the official press release (a glimpse had leaked through our foreign deal reports last month) that Dean Koontz will write a memoir, A BIT LITTLE LIFE: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog, publishing next summer from Hyperion. It’s the first in a two-book nonfiction deal for world English rights at Hyperion with editor Brenda Copeland. Koontz says: “I wanted to write not just another dog story like Marley & Me — and, by the […]
Penguin Gets Widgety
Penguin Group will use Ingram Digital for the hosting, management and distribution of ebook and downloadable audiobook titles in the US, UK and Canada. They say that Ingram will host and distribute “approximately 11,000 titles, with many more slated to be added in 2009,” including the fulfillment of titles for Penguin’s US and UK web sites. As of next year, “many titles will also be available to retailers through Ingram Digital’s Search and Discover services.”
Google Bits
Google Book Search’s head of partnerships for Europe Santiago de la Mora, as the company says they now have 20,000 publishing partners around the world: “But let’s be clear on the record that Google’s not going to launch an ereader or something like that.” He would not update the number of books scanned and available online: “The figure has not been changed. That’s [over a million books] the official number. It’s more than the figures. Let’s not get bogged down.” It sure is. As we noted earlier this week, the newly-formed Hathi Trust, seemingly not very much on the radar […]
Fair Book Made Good
One modest book lifted to international acclaim with help from exposure at the Frankfurt Book Fair is Sam Savage’s FIRMIN: Adventures of an American Lowlife, originally bought out of the slush pile by Coffee House Press. The book’s path to success in translation–with a reported 300,000 copies sold in Italy and 100,000 copies sold in Spain–was presented in a case study called The Ins and Outs of International Rights and Licenses at FBF. In this case the trigger was sub-agent Sandra Bruna bringing the book to Elena Ramirez RicoRico of Planeta’s Seix Barral. The publisher made a strong offer to […]
Obit for A Happy Bookstore
A weekly paper offers a long and admiring farewell: “This is the bittersweet story of the Happy Bookseller, Columbia’s longest-standing independent bookstore, finally closing its doors this month after a 34-year run.”Free Times
People, and More
Lynn Grady has been promoted to svp and deputy publisher for the William Morrow and Eos imprints. Shawn Nicholls will join the Collins group at the end of the month as director of online marketing, reporting Margot Schupf. He was at Crown, where he managed online marketing for all the group’s imprints. There’s informal word, via the Book Publicity Blog, that John McMurtrie has replaced the departing Regan McMahon as book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. Quayside Publishing Group is renaming their MBI Distribution Services to Quayside Distribution Services. They acquired MBI Publishing, along with its distribution arm, in […]