Today at 3 That’s when this year’s Pulitzer winners will be announced, including book awards in five categories. Prize administrator Sig Gissler tells Columbia’s Spectator they receive 1,000 book submissions annually. On the deliberations, Gissler says: “We talk about quality of writing, imagination, and if it is likely to be an enduring work… [The board] is open to imaginative, inventive work. Often the books are not on the best-seller list, and they’re not necessarily reflective of popular sentiment.” Spectator Turow to Try NYT Slot Scott Turow is the next bestselling author who will try to overcome overwhelming lack of interest […]

Monday, April 10 Advertisement DO SOMETHING IMPORTANT WITH YOUR SUMMER. Spend a week with other mid-career publishing professionals at the Stanford Professional Publishing Course (July 14-22). Make a difference to your organization by benchmarking your company against others in today’s fast-changing publishing landscape. This 9-day course is designed for mid-career professionals being groomed to take on broader responsibilities. Application deadline is May 1. publishingcourses.stanford.edu/sppc/ Our Usual Reminder If for some reason this has reached you even though you are not a paying member of PublishersMarketplace, please visit the link below to join us all the time for complete deal reports […]

Jesus the Bestseller Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam looks at the bestseller lists and observes, “Jesus Christ will be putting up big numbers. Five of the 15 entries on the upcoming fiction list owe their existence to our collective fascination with Christ and Christianity.… Over on the nonfiction list, the laughable Jesus Papers debuts at the No. 5 spot. Misquoting Jesus, a proto-academic howler, ranks No. 8, followed by the conversational Home with God at No. 10, and Garry Wills’s What Jesus Meant at No. 16.” Seaparately, a news piece in the Globe sports a fine picture of the “small […]

Cohen Leaving Bulfinch; LB and Warner Share Her Divisions Bulfinch Press publisher Jill Cohen “has made the decision to leave the company” at the end of April, and Hachette Book Group USA has made the decision to split her units between their two largest divisions. As of May, Bulfinch will become part of Little, Brown with executive editor Michael Sand reporting to LB editor-in-chief Geoff Shandler. Cohen’s other line, the recently-started Springboard Press, will become part of Warner Books, with editorial director Karen Murgolo reporting to Warner publisher Jamie Raab. Maureen Egen comments in the announcement, “Jill brought a vision […]

Personnel News Plume editor-in-chief Trena Keating has been named associate publisher as well, still reporting to Plume and Penguin publisher Kathryn Court. Additionally, Elda Rotor will join the company as executive editor of Penguin Classics, reporting to Penguin associate publisher and editor-in-chief Stephen Morrison. Most recently she has been a senior editor at Oxford University Press, focusing on nonfiction in the humanities including literature, religion, cultural history and philosophy. At Vintage/Anchor, Furaha Norton started last week as an editor. She, too, was previously at Oxford University Press, as an associate editor. Lee Talks Harper Lee gave a blurb for Star […]

On Liz Maguire Elizabeth Maguire, 47, publisher of Basic Books, died Saturday of ovarian cancer. She was also a member of the board of directors of the University of Chicago Press and the board of directors of Columbia University Press. Author of the novel Thinner, Blonder, Whiter, she was working on a novel about the life of Constance Fenimore Woolson. In statement from Basic, her author Michael Eric Dyson calls her “a world-class thinker and my mind’s most faithful companion. She nurtured in me and so many other writers a hunger for conceptual rigor, literary beauty and moral clarity.” Perseus […]