Earnings Reports: Harper and Dover Earnings were nearly flat at HarperCollins for their fiscal first quarter, rising $1 million from a year ago to $60 million, as sales grew almost 5 percent, to $364 million. At Courier’s Dover Publishing, sales for the full fiscal year were nearly flat, rising $.5 million to $36.9 million, but profits rose 8 percent, to $6.3 million. One growth sector for the company continues to be direct-to-consumer sales, which rose 7 percent in the fourth quarter and 5 percent for the full year. International sales, though flat in the fourth quarter, also rose sharply for […]

Personnel News and Features The election has trumped most industry news today, but there is always more to report from the deal and job fronts. (As noted yesterday, our own small bit of job news is that we’ve added an RSS feed to our thriving Job Board; if you know what that means, just go to the job board page to add it to your RSS aggregator of choice.) Larry Zilavy will leave his post as evp of corporate finance and strategic planning at Barnes & Noble “to devote more time to his personal investments and philanthropic interests.” His responsibilities […]

Tenet Sale Coming Soon, with Other Agents In the Wings Former CIA director George Tenet has wrapped up a couple of weeks of meetings with publishers, guided by attorney Bob Barnett, and an auction for rights is likely to begin next week or the week after. Sources indicate 12 publishers (or imprints) are interested in the project, and informal reports from Tenet’s meetings indicate that he made a strong impression and intends to write a candid book that will look both at his service — under both Democratic and Republican presidents — during difficult and historic times, as well as […]

Riggio Says Customers Don’t Read Political Books, They Just Buy Them Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio provides a pre-election report in the NYT Op-ed column today. We always suspected that the buying of inflammatory political books is more like voting than reading, which he confirms: “Informal polls taken by our store managers indicate that some 70 percent of our customers say they have no intention of reading these books; 15 percent say they will; and 15 percent are undecided.” He also claims that, “Liberal books sell at lower price points, and especially in paperback, while conservative books sell mostly […]

Another Plot to Change America Penguin’s Riverhead imprint has acquired a book that tantalizingly hints at what it calls a thwarted “plot to disrupt the presidential election.” But like the missing explosives in Iraq, the full details of this story may well not emerge until long after the election is history, with publication not scheduled until fall of next year. Author Larry J. Kolb promises to reveal the full details of a sensational case in which he says one American citizen has already been arrested, with the other still being sought by law enforcement authorities. The men, both described as […]