Book Sense June Picks The June picks and notables have been posted online. My wife can certainly vouch for this month’s number one pick — she devoured THE HISTORIAN over spring break and happily declared it one of the most enjoyable books she’s read in a long time. 1. THE HISTORIAN: A Novel, by Elizabeth Kostova DARK HARBOR, by David Hosp ZORRO: A Novel, by Isabel Allende THE THIRD SECRET: A Novel of Suspense, by Steve Berry IF YOU LIVED HERE, I’D KNOW YOUR NAME: News From Small-Town Alaska, by Heather Lende FREAKONOMICS: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side […]
Lunch for Thursday, May 5
Soft Quarter for Harper As part of News Corp.’s just-released third quarter results, sales at HarperCollins fell 6.5 percent compared to the same period last year, registering $300 million. Profits fell 17 percent, to $30 million for the quarter. The new results come in comparison to a particularly strong quarterly report for Harper a year ago, driven by THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE. News Corp. release Oprah Boosts You A Tuesday feature on the Oprah Winfrey show for Michael Roizen and Memhet Oz’s health reference YOU: The Owners Manual has lifted the book to the top position at both Amazon and BN.com. […]
Lunch for May 4
Sales Down At: Harlequin, Waterstone’s Sales at Harlequin continue to slide, down $7.9 million for the first quarter to $129 million (Canadian), with most of the weakness in North American revenues. Same-store sales at UK bookseller Waterstone’s fell 2.8 percent in the first quarter. The slide comes after what had been a strong pre-Christmas period for the chain. Torstar/Harlequin release Guardian on Waterstone’s/HMV Agency Moves On the heels of Steve Wasserman’s departure from the LA Times comes the announcement that he will move back to New York, to run the city’s office of Boston-based agency Kneerim & Williams, alongside agents […]
Lunch for May 3
Server Limbo The good news is that our fast new dedicated server is working wonderfully. The less good news is that, of this morning’s serving, the “DNS records” that tell computers all over the world how to find our new server have not been updated yet. That process is supposed to start imminently — unless it doesn’t. In the meantime, we’ve had to disable the interactive/posting features at the old version of the site, which is also working wonderfully. Otherwise, changes to member pages, account records, posted pages, and so on would look like they were going through, but they […]
Lunch for Monday, May 2
Please Note Some time in the next day or two, we expect to be moving to a new, bigger, dedicated server for PublishersMarketplace. The move will present a variety of improvements for members — once we get there. It’s a bit of an open question exactly when we’ll officially jump from one computer to the other (and because of the way DNS updates work, different user computers may get directed to the new version of the site at different times.) As a result, it’s possible that you’ll encounter some minor site oddities (e.g. a change you made to a member […]
Lunch for Friday, April 29
Scholastic Buys Cunningham’s Chicken Scholastic has purchased the UK’s Chicken House, run by Barry Cunningham. The companies had been partners in the US, Canada and Australia, on such books as Cornelia Funke’s DRAGON RIDER (with 900,000 copies in print in North America) and recent Jonah’s Pick Stuart Hill’s THE CRY OF THE ICEMARK. Cunningham says in a statement, “Now with the resources and depth of experience that Scholastic offers, we will be able to offer our authors and artists even greater distribution and exposure worldwide.” Cunningham will continue to work out of the UK, but reports to US-based Scholastic Trade […]