Personnel News Marisa Bulzone will join Sterling in the new position of editorial director, Hearst Books next week, reporting to Sterling editorial director Patricia Gift. She was executive editor at Stewart, Tabori & Chang. Kathy Daneman is leaving her position as publicity director of Soho Press to become publicity manager at Farrar, Straus. Colleen Lindsay will take over as Soho Press’s publicity director. She has worked as an independent publicist and assistant director of publicity at Ballantine. Urban Books has renewed its distribution agreement with Kensington through 2013. Assorted Briefs — eWeek’s Googlewatch notes that the deadline for motions for […]

Hosseini for Spring Riverhead has announced the release of Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, now called A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, for May 22, 2007. The house says they have shipped more than 4 million copies of the trade paperback of Kite Runner. A first printing has not been announced yet, but Hosseini will tour for the new title. Buyers In Talks with Informa Informa, the UK-based conglomerate that owns Taylor & Francis, is in early discussions with private equity firms Cinven and Candover about a sale. The private equity players are partners in Springer Science & Business Media, […]

Crowds for Obama People stood in line on a rainy Chicago street for up to three hours before the Borders bookstore even opened as Barack Obama began his book tour for THE AUDACITY OF HOPE: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. And in Seattle, Elliott Bay Book Co. sold 2,100 tickets at five dollars each in just two hours for Obama’s appearance there later this month. They “turned away at least 100 people,” the Seattle PI reports. It will be the bookseller’s biggest speech/signing ever, filling a larger venue than they used for appearances by Bill Clinton and Colin Powell. […]

Indies: Celebration and Struggle Menlo Park-based independent Kepler’s celebrated the one-year anniversary of the store’s rescue by local investors and about 2,000 supporting members over the weekend. But the Mercury news reports, “In spite of the community outpouring, store owner Clark Kepler said sales are about the same as they were when the store closed last year and he expects to break even in the coming year.” To the north in Salem, Oregon, Jackson’s Books will close at the end of the year, following years of sales declines. SJ Mercury News Salem paper Dreaming Bigger PC Advisor magazine reports that […]

Schaden Freud Thriller The swing-for-the-fences commercial fiction game unfortunately produces more expensive misses than hits, and today’s WSJ offers one of those classic chronicles of a book that didn’t make it. Today’s focus is Jed Rubenfeld’s INTERPRETATION OF MURDER, though it’s easy to list other novels this year that have shared the same fate (including those from bloggers, a descendant of Jesus, and a brain tumor survivor). These stories always work better when there is some answer for why the book didn’t work in the marketplace the way the publisher, booksellers and press thought it would, but of course that […]

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