Longtime president and publisher of the Random House Publishing Group Gina Centrello has decided to retire from her position. She will take the new role of strategic advisor to the US Board going forward, and “will continue to participate actively in the industry through her work supporting Literacy Partners.” PRH US ceo Madeline McIntosh writes, “I’ve valued Gina as a friend and colleague for more than two decades, so I’m having a hard time imagining this place without her–and I know I’m not alone in that.” One of the company’s longest serving top executives, Centrello has led the Random House Group […]
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Ed Spade has been appointed president of sales at Harper Collins, reporting to CEO Brian Murray and joining the company’s global executive committee.
SPARE Sold Over 1.4 Million Units On Its First Day
Prince Harry’s memoir SPARE sold a total 1,430,000 million units on its opening day across the US, Canada and the UK — or about 1 million units in the US and Canada alone, given the earlier report of first-day sales of 400,000 units from Transworld in the UK. Penguin Random House said in a release that this is the “largest first-day sales total for any nonfiction book” they have ever published. (The previous record for Penguin Random House was the release of Barack Obama’s A PROMISED LAND in 2020, which sold over 887,000 units in the US and Canada on […]
Russian IBBY Award President Resigns Amid Criticism
Hans Christian Andersen Award jury president Anastasia Arkhipova has resigned from the 2024 award committee. Reuters reports that Arkhipova, a Russian illustrator, is on the board of the Moscow Branch of Artists Association of Russia (MOCX), which last year ran a contest for artists to create Russian war propaganda. After Arkhipova was elected to the award committee in September, several IBBY member countries protested and withdrew from participation in the award, which has been called the Nobel Prize of children’s literature, reports Danish broadcaster DR. The queen of Denmark, Queen Margrethe II, withdrew her patronage of the award, and the […]
Spare Opening Day Sales
Prince Harry’s memoir SPARE sold a reported 400,000 units in the UK on its opening day yesterday, with the US sales figures to be announced later on Wednesday. Barnes & Noble reported lines out the door at some locations, comparing the crowds to the launch day of Michelle Obama’s 2018 memoir Belonging, and said the book “looks certain to set record-breaking day-one sales at Barnes & Noble.” (As we’ve pointed out in the past, the chain does not actually publish their “sales records,” so every time they make a declaration like this, it is left unspecified how many copies were sold, […]
2022: The Year In Deals
Today we report both fourth quarter and full-year 2022 statistics for US deal reports. Dealmaking patterns were somewhat in line with sales in 2022, as most key domestic deal statistics ebbed from record levels in 2021 but still held at high levels relative to previous years. Things did soften after a strong first quarter, and then picked up a bit in the fourth quarter. In particular: – US deals finished down by only 1.5 percent, with just over 7,000 reported transactions — still 8.9 percent more transactions than we recorded in 2020, and well ahead of earlier years. – Adult Fiction rose […]