King Tops First Round of Auction The online auction for the right to name a character in Stephen King’s forthcoming book CELL yielded a winning bid of $25,100, with proceeds going to the First Amendment Project. The next highest winning bids in the first round of the auction included: Lemony Snicket ($6,350) Michael Chabon ($6,000) Amy Tan ($3,338.88) Peter Straub ($2,125) Jonathan Lethem ($2,025) Karen Jay Fowler ($1,853.88) And here are the leading bids so far in the second round of the auction: John Grisham ($7,940) Nora Roberts ($5,100) Neil Gaiman ($2,750) Brad Meltzer ($810) Dave Eggers ($761) AP NY […]

Personnel News Daniel Slager is leaving Harcourt to become editor in chief of Milkweed Editions, starting in mid-October, joining managing director Hilary Reeves as co-leader of the nonprofit literary publisher. Slager was selected from a field of 100 candidates. Before joining Harcourt in 2000, he was an editor at the Grand Street quarterly. Advanced Marketing Services (AMS) has named Jack Dollard as EVP and COO, “responsible for a broad range of activities in the company’s distribution centers, logistics, publishing, process improvement and corporate operations areas.” He previously ran JND Consulting in San Diego, and previously held executive positions at Gateway […]

Trying to Save Stores Downtown Washington bookstore Chapters celebrated its twentieth birthday yesterday, but the Washington Post notes the store is struggling to make it to the next birthday. Co-owners Terri Merz and Steve Moyer are pursuing an unusual strategy that could hold lessons for other independent stores: They want to sell the store to the nonprofit foundation Wordfest that they established in 2001 to sponsor the D.C. International Poetry Festival. The sums involved are quite modest. They need to raise approximately $80,000 to fund the purchase, and are hoping to elicit $50 contributions from 1,600 people. In order to […]

Bertelsmann Buys FAZ Imprints Random House continues its international expansion plan with yesterday’s announcement that its German unit, Verlagsgruppe Random House, will acquire the book publishing imprints owned by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Terms were not disclosed, though Random House’s Jeorg Pfuhl is reported by AFX as saying the three imprints — DVA (Deutsche Verlagsanstalt), Manesse and Koesel — will add 20 million euros in sales, pending approval of the deal by the government’s monopoly commission. Random CEO Peter Olson was among those present at the announcement in Munich. AFX Bloomsbury Would Like to Buy Imprints, For Less On the […]

Storm Hits BAM Forecasts — And Problems May Run Deep At the end of the day on Friday when traders were long gone Books-A-Million announced it was lowering earnings guidance for the third quarter following poor sales, now projecting a lost of six to nine cents per share instead of one to three cents a share. The announcement attributes the poor performance to after-effects of Hurricane Katrina: approximately 15 BAM stores were closed for anywhere from two ten days following the storm and “significant comparable store sales decreases occurred in stores that were not closed due to the hurricane.” A […]

The Best Thing to Appear in TBR In Weeks, By Far In case you didn’t catch Donald Trump’s letter to the editor. NYT Personnel News Jaci Updike has been promoted to director of Random House adult sales, reporting to Don Weisberg, and taking over from Madeline McIntosh, who became publisher of the Random House Audio and Large Print earlier this month. Updike has been with the company since 1989, most recently as vp, national accounts for Barnes & Noble. Most of the company’s trade sales directors will report to Updike, as George Fisher and the mass merchandising group reports to […]