Building on their success this year with YA novels and the growth of the children’s imprint Jabberwocky launched three years ago, Sourcebooks is creating a YA imprint called Fire, to launch in spring 2010 with seven titles. Editor Dan Ehrenhaft, who came over to Sourcebooks from Alloy Entertainment this spring, will lead the new line. CEO Dominique Raccah says “we want voices that will ignite, inspire, and surprise teens, regardless of genre.” The company says Fire will acquire fiction “in a variety of media, bringing worlds to life via the web, audio, digital–whatever teens are looking for, wherever they’re looking […]
First Look at Vook, from Atria
Look, up on the interweb: it’s a video book, it’s a v-book, it’s a digi-novel. No, it’s a Vook, or rather four of them, in the first co-publishing partnership between entrepreneur and Turn Here founder Brad Inman’s new start-up Vook and Atria Books. Releasing Thursday and priced at $6.99, the two fiction and two nonfiction titles are meant to represent a range of experimentation with the form, which embeds original video clips within a browser-based version of a digital book. Titles will be sold through a dedicated section of S&S’s web site and Vook’s site, though the primary driver–and most […]
BN Completes BN College Acquisition
Barnes & Noble announced after the close of the market that they completed their acquisition of privately-held Barnes & Noble College Booksellers from Len Riggio. The purchase price was reduced from $596 million to $514 million, “reflect $82 million in cash bonuses paid by College to 192 members of its management team and employees” (not including Riggio.) The original purchase price acknowledged that BN College had about $136 million in cash on hand, making the effective price $460 million, which presumably has not changed materially. The company did say that the refinancing of their lightly-used $1 billion revolving credit facility […]
Sales Stats, the Week After
According to Nielsen BookScan numbers released yesterday for sales through last Saturday, September 26, in the outlets tracked by the service Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL sold another 401,000 copies. (NB that BookScan does not currently include ebook sales. And in the UK, Symbol sold another 175,040 copies, reported by The Bookseller.) Diana Gabaldon’s AN ECHO IN THE BONE had the best opening sale for a new book last week, moving approximately 94,000 units. Second-week sales for Ted Kennedy’s TRUE COMPASS were approximately 69,000 copies, and the first full week of sales for the Oprah edition of Uwem Akpan’s SAY […]
People and Awards: New Head for RH Mondadori, Harper's Chief Digital Officer, Also on the Gallery Editorial Team, and More
Following the previous announcement of the elevation of Random House Mondadori ceo Riccardo Cavallero to general manager of trade publishing at Mondadori (which is a joint venture partner in RH Mondadori), the owners have jointly named Nuria Cabuti, 42 as the unit’s new ceo, effective January 1, based in Barcelona. She has been publisher and editorial director of the Random House Mondadori Children’s and Paperback divisions. A letter from Random House ceo Markus Dohle and Mondadori Group chief executive Maurizio Costa notes that “as a publishing leader she has significantly improved our children’s books results, and increased our paperback revenues […]
S&S Creates Gallery Books As Pocket Returns to Mass-Market Only
Simon & Schuster is taking their successful Simon Spotlight Entertainment line and merging it with Pocket Books’ hardcovers and trade paperbacks to create a new imprint, Gallery Books. Pocket itself will return to focusing entirely on mass market publishing, as partner for all of the S&S imprints and continuing with paperback originals for “rising authors” such as Kresley Cole and Thomas Greanias. The new line is expected to launch in spring 2010. CEO Carolyn Reidy writes to employees that “as a company we need to insure that each of our imprints has sufficient strength and support, especially in this difficult […]