A Deal in the Making Mel Gibson set off a flurry of rights interest when it was announced about a month ago that he had licensed a little-known Holocaust memoir, Flory Van Beek’s FLORY: Survival in the Valley of Death, for development as a mini-series, likely for ABC. (Gibson’s Con Artist Prods. is producing along with Jaffe/Braunstein and Sladek/Taaffe, where Daniel Sladek brought the project in.) Now Trident Media Group agent Eileen Cope — brought in by Sladek, with whom she had collaborated previously — is preparing a broad submission for next week, expecting to close a US deal first […]

Santa Visits BAM The holiday sales season has been kind to Books-A-Million (BAM) for three years running now, as once again the retailer recovered from a bad third quarter to enjoy a solid year-end increase. Same-store sales rose 4.1 percent for the last nine weeks of the calendar year, hitting $124 million, and earnings guidance for the fourth quarter and full year has been increased in light of recent results. (The company had lowered its projections in early September.) With 11 months of the current fiscal year over, the company says comparable store sales have risen 3.3 percent — helped […]

Jordan Named AAP VP BEA special events and public relations director Tina Jordan will become vice president of the AAP later this month, taking over as Kathryn Blough departs to pursue a career as a teacher. Jordan’s responsibilities will include oversight of the trade organization’s Trade Executive Committee, the Smaller and Independent Publishers Group, the Get Caught Reading campaign, industry statistics program, and educational programs. Separately, Emily van Beek has been promoted to literary agent at Pippin Properties, in addition to continuing as foreign rights director. John Sellers has joined the agency as an associate. He was in publicity at […]

Year Starts with State of War Free Press moved up the release date for James Risen’s STATE OF WAR: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration to today. The AP says “the major revelation” in the book was already disclosed in last month’s controversial NYT article about secret eavesdropping on US citizens. The AP also reports on a story in the book that “illustrates how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction.” Time magazine dubs it “the book behind the bombshell.” Their take: “State of War provides an account of the […]

Happy New Year, and Meet the New Owners Ready or not, the calendar calls for the annual ritual of pulling out the crystal ball — or in our case, a ball covered with a few crystals — to muse about the year ahead in publishing. (NB: No points will be awarded to anyone who predicts that Simon & Schuster will be sold; book sales will be stagnant; or that a few months after the release of the film version of the DA VINCI CODE, the NYT will run a story about sales of the book appearing to slow down.) This […]

Amazon Pushes Textbooks Amazon Connect, the e-tailer’s fake “blogs,” struck me as a non-story (or at least a missed/late opportunity), but another new initiative not fed to the media is potentially much more significant: The company has launched a “new and used textbooks store.” Amazon Hershey Settles Hershey settled their lawsuit against and Simon & Schuster in expected fashion: the jacket of HERSHEY: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams will be modified to indicate that the book is not authorized by the candy maker. Press release E-verything Old is New Again 2006 is already looking […]