For the fiscal year ending in March 2008, Profile Books reported a turnover of £7.58m and net assets increased by 18%, down from 2007’s turnover of £9.09m and 23% net asset increase. Pre-tax profit came in at £1.03m euros and operating profits were £770,000, down more than half from 2007. The publisher cited a lack of a number one bestseller for the downturn from last year’s “exceptional” figures. Managing director Andrew Franklin said: “These are very pleasing figures. Some years we publish a runaway bestseller and it’s a fabulous bonus when we do, but even without one these results show […]
Change They Can Sell
CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise will be published on September 9 by Three Rivers Press as a paperback with an announced first printing of 300,000 copies and a list price of $13.95. (An e-book version will publish the day before.) Written by the staff of Obama for America, with a foreword by Barack Obama, Crown says the book “will describe and explain how Senator Obama will change Washington and what that change will mean to the American people.” The second part of the book will collect seven of the candidate’s speeches: including the […]
Spellberg Rationalizes Position
Since academics generally don’t stand for the repression of writing and inciting of violence, University of Texas at Austin professor Denise Spellberg writes to the WSJ to insist the paper’s op-ed last week “falsely asserts that I am the ‘instigator'” of the cancellation by Random House of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina. But her clarification makes her position pretty clear: “As an expert on Aisha’s life, I felt it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel’s fallacious representation of a very real woman’s life…. It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty […]
Suskind Documents CIA Lie
Ron Suskind, author of THE WAY OF THE WORLD, includes former CIA head of the Near East division and deputy director of clandestine operations Rob Richer as one of his on-the-record sources for the assertion that the agency was ordered to fake a document to help support the Administration’s case for war in Iraq. As wagons were circled when the book was released, Richer said in a statement “I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbush as outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book.” But Suskind has now posted […]
Publishing Terminology Primer
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor prepares a “guide to the arcane terminology of the book world” after realizing she uses a lot of industry jargon, from “dingbat” to “stet” to “pre-empt”, when teaching her students about the ins and outs of publishing. She doesn’t mince words about the meaning of out-of print: “The end.”Chronicle of Higher Ed
On Mahmoud Darwish, 67
The Palestinian poet, author and politician died Saturday night in Houston from complications following heart surgery. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning yesterday for the man he deemed “the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project.”NYTGuardian