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 […]
Gore Vidal Fractures Spine
The 83-year-old author was injured in a fall and cancelled an appearance at an Ohio library, but is recuperating at home. He tells the AP he’s working on a new novel about the U.S.-Mexican war in the 1840s. “I have every intention of completing it,” he said. “I am just sorry that I couldn’t come to Ohio during such a historic election. It was very hard to keep me away.”AP
One Stock Rising: Pearson (Plus More from CBS and Bloomsbury)
In a brief trading update, Pearson rode a stronger dollar to positive effect, since it gets sixty percent of its sales from the US. Penguin, while up, appears to have weakened in the past quarter: the more detailed report three months ago had sales at the unit for the first half of the year up 9 percent to 408 million pounds, but at the nine-month mark the company says sales are up 3 percent for the year to date on a constant-exchange-basis (and 6 percent on a “headline” basis). Pearson Education continues a strong year with sales up 10 percent. […]
Charkin Returns (Online)
Former blogger and current Bloomsbury executive Richard Charkin is blogging again briefly, writing about the Frankfurt Book Fair for FAZ’s online site. A delayed flight from London on Monday “meant missing out on the evening’s main event, the award of the German Book Prize. This would have involved listening to quite long and complicated speeches in German, which I’ve always found to be a hugely relaxing pastime at the end of a stressful day, given that I don’t understand more than about three words of German.” Then, “Tuesday morning kicked off with a highly confidential meeting of the International Advisory […]
The New Reality?
The Observer offers a look at the potential new reality of daily business in the wake of the economic crisis. “The stifling timidity many editors and agents are predicting appears not to have taken hold” yet but, “soon, though, people may find themselves compelled to be more wary. Only the most established agents will be able to convince publishers to take a chance on an unknown novelist or a historian whose chosen topic does not have the backing of a news peg. The swollen advances that have come to represent all that is reckless and sinful about the way the […]
International News: Sony Goes to Germany; Bloomsbury Goes to Qatar; Amazon Supports Translation; and More
Sony has confirmed that they will release their ebook Reader in Germany next Spring, working in partnership with bookseller Thalia for selling the devices and wholesaler Libri for selling and serving the ebook files. Libri is hoping to have “thousands” of titles available for the launch. Bloomsbury is partnering with the Qatar Foundation to create a new publisher house for English and Arabic books in the Middle East. Called Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing and based in Doha, it will publishing general fiction and non-fiction for both adults and for children, but also educational books for schools, academic books for universities […]