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 […]
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 […]