Publishers Lunch

Schedule Note Tomorrow (Thursday) is a travel day; Lunch will be served, but there’s no telling which actual meal it will come closest to. From Friday (March 25) through next Thursday (March 31), there will be no regular meals while we restock the kitchen. Deals, jobs and everything else at PublishersMarketplace will move along as usual, as well as the daily and weekly deal mails, and news items and links will be posted to the PublishersMarketplace home page on occasion. Baron to Bookspan Former head of Dutton/Plume and Putnam Carole Baron will join Bookspan on April 4 in the newly […]

Appointments Libby Jordan is moving from the Morrow side of HarperCollins — where she had been associate publisher of Morrow/Avon and Morrow cookbooks — to the new Collins division, still as associate publisher. Jordan will oversee marketing and direct-to-consumer initiatives. At Bloomsbury, Peter De Giglio has been hired as chief financial officer. Most recently, he was vp of operations at Holtzbrinck Publishers. Excerpts from New Hitler Book Begin Reporting from Germany, the Guardian has details from the dossier on Hitler’s last days prepared for Joseph Stalin, which is being published in the UK and Germany now (in advance of US […]

NBCCs As you’ve probably read, the winners of the National Book Critics Circle awards: Fiction GILEAD, Marilynne Robinson Nonfiction THE REFORMATION: A History, Diarmaid MacCulloch Biography DE KOONING: An American Master, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan Criticism WHERE YOU’RE AT: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet, by Patrick Neate Poetry THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS: Poems 2000-2004, Adrienne Rich Miramax, on Fumes We wouldn’t dare try to paraphrase the language from this Page Six item: “Miramaxers- or what’s left of them – are fuming. ‘We have no idea what’s going on,’ said one staffer in the book department. […]

Profits Improve at Scholastic In their fiscal third quarter, Scholastic achieved operating profit of $5.8 million, up nicely from a $2.3 million loss a year ago (with a net loss of $.7 million, compared to a loss of $6 million last year), as sales rose 2 percent to $481 million. The stock rose over 4 percent in morning trading on the news. Trade publishing was a big contributor to improved profits, producing operating gains of $16.5 million on sales of $272 million. School book fairs yielded higher revenues, but continuity programs and school book clubs declined. Release Olson Down on […]

Revenues Flat at RH As Profits Rise Bertelsmann reported fiscal 2004 full-year results, and the brief divisional report for Random House shows revenues remaining basically flat in Euros, at 1.8 billion (which converts to $2.41 billion at today’s rates), in what the company calls “a sluggish book industry economy internationally.” The company’s reported profit measure now is operating EBIT, which rose to 140 million euros at the book unit, from 115 million last year. (Confusingly, this is a change from their previous method of reporting EBITA. Under that measure, last year saw profit of 147 million Euros, down from 168 […]

Up, Up and Away A quick post brought to you from Terminal 3 at Heathrow. Without meaning to be persistently negative, but simply reflecting what we hear, even my driver out to the airport has been hearing from people all day how reluctant they are about the move to ExCel. And he pegs the cab ride from Heathrow over to Anaheim-Upon-Thames as a good hour-and-a-half to two hours. London’s a great show, the move is a fact of life, and of course publishing people can excel to focusing on the negative. But it sure feels like the community needs a […]