Publishers Lunch

Ottakar’s Confirms Bad Year, and Worse Start to New Year Bad news continues among UK chain booksellers, as Ottakar’s reported a loss of 4.6 million pounds, on slightly increased sales of 176.5 million pounds for fiscal 2005. The company blamed “unprecedented price competition,” “the slowdown in second half sales,” and “the distraction” of an attempted management buyout that in turn led to the stalled takeover by Waterstone’s. (“Exceptional costs” related to the bids drained 5.5 million pounds from the company.) It doesn’t help that same-store sales fell 2.8 percent. Though the results would indicate that the company’s model of a […]

Tokyopop Snatched by Harper, for Distribution and Co-PublishingA little over a month after being highlighted in the NY Times for renewing their distribution agreement with CDS, Tokyopop has switched gears. Now the company says they will move their North American distribution to HarperCollins — which had been looking for a client of scale ever since Perseus left their distribution services and acquired CDS. The new arrangement also features a co-publishing agreement to “create a progressive new line of co-branded manga titles” developed in conjunction with Harper authors and properties. Aiming for as many as 24 titles a year together, Tokyopop […]

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Loss Increases at Scholastic; Forecasts Are Cut The performance roller-coaster that characterizes Scholastic has rounded the Harry Potter crest and is pointed down again, as the company announced a sharply higher loss for the third quarter of $15.5 million (compared to $0.8 million a year ago), on sales of $481 million, up just 1 percent. Forecasts for the year have been cut following the poor quarter. In the children’s book publishing and distribution division, sales of $271 million were down slightly from $272 million a year ago, though trade revenue by itself rose 6 percent, and continuities were up as […]

Profits Up at Random, On Slightly Improved Sales Bertelsmann announced results for their fiscal year this morning in Germany, and Random House’s performance essentially matched CEO Peter Olson’s description in his end-of-year letter. Similar to last year’s performance, sales nudged up “slightly,” by just over two percent, to 1.83 billion euros, as profitability increased more dramatically, to 166 million euros. Olson cites this as “continuing our steady upward trend of the last few years,” though the unit is still below 2002’s sales of 1.995 billion euros. (Profits, reported then as Ebita rather than Ebit, were 168 million euros.)   Random […]

Personnel News and Announcements Publisher of the children’s book group at Houghton Mifflin Alan Smagler is moving to Scholastic to become vp, trade sales, reporting to Ellie Berger, starting April 10. Smagler takes over from Gray Peterson, who will be reassigned to a senior sales position, reporting to Smagler. At Penguin Press, Jane Fleming has been promoted to associate editor. In the publicity department at Vintage/Anchor, Sloane Crosley has been promoted to assistant director of publicity. At the publicity department of Penguin children’s, Rhalee Hughes has been promoted to director of publicity. She has been at the company for almost […]