New Releases: Sachar and Bremer Louis Sachar’s first big book since 1998’s Holes releases today with an announced 500,000-copy first printing. SMALL STEPS is billed as a companion to Holes, but the Seattle PI says “don’t read too much into that. The two books have little in common apart from sharing a couple of characters.” Sachar says “I think (the new book) definitely stands on its own.” Despite the big printing, the paper says pre-pub notice was slim: “The countdown, however, has generated surprisingly little word of mouth, possibly because Sachar is so tight-lipped about his projects that even his […]

Frey Accused of Gross Fabrications The Smoking Gun went looking for some mug shots of A MILLION LITTLE PIECES author James Frey, which turned into an extensive examination of his account of his years as a drug addict, alcoholic and criminal. After searching police and criminal records in multiple states, and interviewing numerous law enforcement officials and Frey himself, TSG concludes he “demonstrably fabricated key parts of the book” and “wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw ‘wanted in three states.'” Besides accounts they call “patently dishonest,” TSG says […]

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 […]