Decent Holiday for Borders, As Books Rise More — And Private Equity Groups are on the Prowl Our traditional rule of thumb is that when Borders manages to match Barnes & Noble’s performance in a given time period, the No. 2 chain is doing about as well as they can. Which means Borders had a good holiday period, reporting a quarter-to-date same-store sales increase of 2.2 percent at their domestic superstores, or $800.5 million in all. For publishers the news is even better, as book sales alone rose 6 percent compared to a year, while music sales continue to fall. […]

Frey: Some Facts Consumers posting on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club message board indicate that Random House is providing refunds to buyers of A MILLION LITTLE PIECES who call their customer service line to complain in the wake of the unanswered charges made by The Smoking Gun earlier this week. One correspondent posts: “Tell them you wanted fact not fiction.… They are very nice and will tell you how to return the book for a full refund… “ James Frey will appear on the Larry King Show tonight, though a spokesperson indicates to the AP that he “would not be interviewed […]

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 […]