BAM Speeds Store Openings

Books-A-Million will open as many as 20 new stores next year and enter two new states, Nebraska and Pennsylvania. The chain currently has 200 stores in 20 states, with the majority of its outlets in the Southeast. Along with store openings, BAM plans to shut 2–4 new stores and move perhaps as many as 10 stores.

Hachette Book Group USA has signed on with LibreDigital to have the company handle many of its Web applications. LibreDigital, which currently provides a similar service to HarperCollins (and is partially owned by HC), will allow Hachette to offer online browsers more access to its titles through technology like widgets. Hachette is calling its new digital search capabilities OpenBook.

Author Karen Hunter has teamed with Pocket Books to launch her own imprint, Karen Hunter Publishing. Hunter, best known for co-writing Karrine Steffans’s memoir Confessions of a Video Vixen, said that the new imprint will publish about 15 titles annually in fiction and nonfiction.

Lerner Publishing Group has formed Lerner Books UK and will begin selling its first 184-book collection there in January to schools and libraries. The titles, originally published in the U.S., were updated and edited for publication by Discovery Books Ltd. Pat Shepherd, former sales director at Random House Children’s Books UK, has been hired by Lerner as project manager. Sales and marketing will be handled by Bounce Sales and Marketing with distribution through Grantham Book Services.

Doris Lessing, the author of more than 50 books, was named the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. Her American publisher, HarperCollins, has published 22 of her titles in the U.S., and the company said it will likely go back to press on most books. HC said it expected that most interest will focus on The Golden Notebook, originally released in 1962 and considered Lessing’s breakthrough work. Her most recent novel, The Cleft, was published by HarperCollins this year.

Following the announcement that former vice-president Al Gore will share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rodale Press, publisher of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, said it was heading back to press on the title and will add a sticker on the cover about the award.

Maureen O’Brien, executive editor of HarperCollins’s creative development group, is leaving the company Oct. 19 and will work as an independent editorial consultant and project coordinator. O’Brien, a former PW editor, has been at HC since 2002 and has worked with such authors as Bill Cosby, Tatum O’Neal and Sidney Sheldon. She will have offices in New York and Los Angeles, and beginning Oct. 19 can be reached at MaureenOB@aol.com.

Carol Morgan, former publicity director for Abrams, has launched her own public relations firm, Carol Morgan Associates. Morgan will specialize in running campaigns for authors, magazines, museums and other organizations. At Abrams since 1993, Morgan has worked with a variety of clients including the Library of Congress, Tiffany & Co., and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In the “On Sale in November” feature that ran October 8, the correct publisher of the new Dean Koontz novel, The Darkest Evening of the Year, is Bantam Books, the price is $27 and the first printing is 750,000 copies.