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Harlequin Gets Serious About Nonfiction
Harlequin’s plans to enter the nonfiction market have begun to take shape in recent weeks. Last month the company signed radio talk-show host Delilah to a three-book contract (Deals, Oct. 8), with her first book likely to be the lead nonfiction title when it is released next October. Last week, the company announced that McGraw-Hill editor Deb Brody has been hired as executive editor for ...
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From Prose to Manga
This fall, Digital Manga Publishing, an independent manga publisher in Southern California, will release its first original manga, an adaptation of Japanese novelist Hideyuki Kikuchi's popular prose novel series, Vampire Hunter D, which will be published simultaneously in the U.S., Japan and Europe.
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Wiley Hits 200
Business books are filled with examples of family-owned businesses that have been sold to a company with deeper pockets. The most recent case is that of the Bancrofts, who, after a drawn-out debate, decided to sell the Dow Jones Company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. So how has the Wiley clan been able keep control of the publishing house that began in 1807 as a print shop in New York City?
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Amazon Book Prize Capped; ‘Tycoons’ Wins FT
Amazon's new contest for first time authors has reached it limit of 5,000 submissions. The eventual winner will be published by Penguin.
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Penguin Sales Up 2%; Publisher Pulls Out of eMusic Deal
Pearson reported this morning that sales at Penguin rose 2% for the first nine months of the year; the company reiterated that for the full year it expects the publisher to have improved operating margins.
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Naggar Leaving Random
David Naggar, who runs three different Random divisions, will leave the company by the end of the year.
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Guernica: Lit Mag Beats the Odds
Former M.F.A. students Joel Whitney and Michael Archer had no grand plan, much less a business plan, when they started the online-only lit mag Guernica. Compelled by a shared passion for international literature and serious journalism, the duo, who met during a teaching program in Puerto Rico, decided to try their hand at publishing a magazine and launched their vision online.
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Indie Houses Try Social Networking
Larger publishers and authors have been doing it for some time, and now independent presses are experimenting with ways to use social networking sites, promoting their books and authors on Facebook and MySpace, as well as on sites more specifically geared toward bibliophiles, like Shelfari and LibraryThing.
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McGraw-Hill Education Posts Strong Third Quarter
With both its school group and higher education, professional and international groups posting solid gains, third quarter revenue at McGraw-Hill Education rose 9.9%, to $1.12 billion. Sales of digital products contributed to the increase.
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Olivieri to Leave Wiley-Blackwell
René Olivieri will leave as COO of John Wiley's STM subsidiary, Wiley-Blackwell, at the end of the year.
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B&N Adds Mobile Sales Partner
Barnes & Noble has teamed with the mobile commerce provider Digby to sell books, music and movies to BlackBerry users.
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B&N's and Borders's New Sites
This month, BN.com received a major makeover and Borders released a test version of its new site (http://beta.bordersstores.com/online/store/Home). Here's a comparison of the sites' new offerings.
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Can Small Press Distributors Survive?
The recent liquidation of Sarasota, Fla.—based BookWorld Companies, coupled with National Book Network's announcement just two months ago that it will phase out small-press specialty sister company, Biblio, highlights the fragile economics that underpin the distribution of self-publishers and presses that do just a handful of books.
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RH Films Debuts
What are book people doing in the movie business?” This was the question Random House Films president Peter Gethers said he kept hearing after his new division was announced in 2005. Speaking to a crowd at the recent New York gala screening of RH Films' first feature, Reservation Road, Gethers was in a decidedly celebratory mood; the film's debut had proven, as the RH team noted, that th...
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Macmillan Rises from the Dustbin
Last week's announcement that Holtzbrinck's U.S. businesses have been rebranded Macmillan restored a name that had once been among the most prominent in American publishing, including a long run as an independent, publicly traded company. The demise of Macmillan—and its name—began in 1988 when the company became the target of corporate raider Robert Maxwell.
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Books-A-Million Accelerates Store Openings, Will Enter Pennsylvania, Nebraska
Books-A-Million will open 15 to 20 new stores next year and enter Nebraska and Pennsylvania for the first time, a move that will give the Alabama-based chain bookstores in 22 states.
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Lessing´s Nobel Win Thrills Publisher
As news spread through the Frankfurt Book Fair Thursday afternoon that HarperCollins author Doris Lessing had just won the Nobel Prize for literature, her publisher´s booth filled up with journalists brandishing cameras and notebooks and colleagues offering hugs and congratulations. For just a few minutes, the search for the next big thing became secondary to celebrating the the 87-year-old British writer´s decades of achievement.
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National Lampoon, Six Others Join PGW
National Lampoon Press and two travel publishers are moving their distribution to PGW.
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African American Community Rallies Around Eso Wan
A week after the news circulated that Eso Won bookstore, Los Angeles’ premier bookseller specializing in African American authors, was facing bankruptcy and contemplating closure at the end of the year, the community churches (led by the powerful First African Methodist Episcopal) took action by telling their congregations to buy books at the store or risk losing a community treasure.
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Holtzbrinck’s U.S. Arm Now Macmillan
Holtzbrinck has changed the name of its U.S. publishing operation to Macmillan, a move that puts the German company's English and Spanish global publishing businesses under the same brand.
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