On the Page and In Your Mail As noted yesterday, since we’ve already reported a lot of “London deals,” we’re hoping to send out the weekly round-up tonight before traveling. As another reminder, you can check out the first copies of our jam-packed BOOK DEALS: 2004 in London at these booths: American Collective Stand BEA Frankfurt Book Fair As of Sunday, PublishersMarketplace members can take advantage of a short window for discounted copies through this page at our site. Deal Book info page Departures: Radwell Leaves the Club; Wicker Leaves Vista; Travel Publisher Lacks Leck In the clearest indication yet […]

Notes We’re headed for another week of well over a hundred new deal reports — to help those of you buying and selling at London, we will try to dispatch the handy weekly round-up on Friday night before getting on a plane ourselves. Of course if you think the weekly reports are handy, you really need to check out the jam-packed DEAL BOOK: 2004 book that we announced yesterday. As noted, sample copies will be on display at LBF in the American Collective Stand, BEA, and Frankfurt Book Fair booths. We should be open for web orders by then, too. […]

Giving Information Power and Personalization Following our big update of the Who Represents database, we’re pleased to announce two more cool PublishersMarketplace initiatives. The next time you use your Book Tracker, you’ll notice that we’ve added pop-up “review histories,” similar to the sales and bestseller history tables. On the top level, it shows you how many reviews we have for the title in our database; when you click the link, it takes you straight to relevant results in the Book Review Index. The feature has also been integrated into all of our Bestseller charts, next to the bestseller history button. […]

Harper Plus Again, with Burnham; Avalon Absorbs Shoemaker in Full; Anansi is Minus Sharpe One of our favored rumored candidates for an executive position at Harper has gotten the job, as the company announced yesterday that Miramax Books president and editor-in-chief Jonathan Burnham will join as publisher of the Harper imprint, reporting to Michael Morrison. His starting date is “being determined.” Burnham’s news merits short items in such papers as the LA Times and the NY Daily News, in the context of the practically-foregone conclusion of what happens to Miramax Books after the Weinstein’s finalize their exit from Disney. With […]

More Personnel News Lynn Grady will become associate publisher for Morrow, HarperEntertainment and Eos starting next week, reporting to Lisa Gallagher. Grady moves over from her job as marketing director at Regan Books. Kim Hadney will take Grady’s old post at Regan Books. She was most recently director of advertising and promotion at Dutton and Gotham. On the publishing minus side of the equation, PW notes that Susan Weinberg, who was publisher for the HarperCollins imprint, is leaving the house. On the scouting front, Japanese publisher Aspect has named Altair Book Scouts and Nicholas Smith as their US scout for […]

Our Own News We have a number of new initiatives and refinements to tell you about. The first is that we have significantly improved and relaunched our Who Represents database. The new version presents about 12,500 individual representation records, and along the way implements more consistent agent and agency names, and eliminates previous duplication. As before, the search page also presents matches from a couple hundred PublishersMarketplace pages posted by agents, as well as deal database matches. (We’re now shuttling relevant data more quickly from the deal reports over to Who Represents.) To encourage and facilitate continuing improvement of the […]