Barnes & Noble has owned a book publisher, Sterling Publishing, since 2003. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that B&N wants to sell Sterling, an interesting move as B&N competitor Amazon ramps up its own publishing business. Read More
Matt Weiland announced yesterday that he will be leaving his job at HarperCollins imprint Ecco to take a position as senior editor at W.W. Norton on October 24. It’s an exciting move for Mr. Weiland, whose books at Ecco have included Padgett Powell’s conceptual novel The Interrogative Mood and Philip Connors’s nature memoir Fire Season. A native of Minnesota and a Columbia alumnus, Mr. Weiland came to Ecco in 2008 by way of The Paris Review and Granta Books in London. He fills a vacancy left by Robert Weil, whom Norton tapped earlier this year to revive its dormant imprint Liveright & Co.
“I’ve just loved it these past three years at Ecco,” said an exuberant Mr. Weiland on the phone with The Observer yesterday. “[Publisher] Dan Halpern and everyone at Ecco are the best colleagues I’ve ever had and I’d never imagined leaving.” He said the unexpected offer from Norton “feels like some crazy good bank shot.” Read More
Speaking earlier today on BBC Radio 4, Andrew Wylie, the literary agent, expressed his thoughts on HarperCollins, the publishing house owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
According to The Bookseller, a British industry publication, Wylie said he had personally told Mr. Murdoch that HarperCollins should be “looked after a little more closely,” and added Read More
At the end of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, in a not too distant future, a promoter is secretly hired to pay his most influential friends to pretend to be really excited about an upcoming slide guitar concert.
Our headline that this plot point is coming true might be misleading: Penguin UK Read More
Amazon Publishing has already shown little interest in industry traditions, and The Observer has now learned how Amazon is looking to revolutionize the process of getting author blurbs: provide a review for a book on an Amazon imprint and Amazon will give the reviewer — and his or her book — extra promotion as Read More
“Seems Glenn Beck and I chose the same day to announce our imprints. OK, Beck–it is ON,” wrote Eamon Dolan on Twitter yesterday, when news broke that Glenn Beck will be expanding his empire of wild-eyed zealotry with Mercury Ink, a new publishing imprint with Simon & Schuster. Mr. Dolan, for his part, announced his Read More
Amazon continues its inexorable expansion into book publishing with Thomas & Mercer, a mystery and thriller imprint that brings Amazon’s total number of imprints to five, with onlookers expecting more to come. Thomas & Mercer is “named for streets that flank the Amazon headquarters in Seattle,” a West Coast emphasis perhaps intended to Read More
Self-help mogul Deepak Chopra will join the growing ranks of celebrities hired to draw from their “broad network of contacts” to “initiate, recommend and submit” books for publication at divisions of Random House. Unlike Dana Perino or Ruth Reichl, Dr. Chopra will have his own eponymous imprint at Crown, Deepak Chopra Books. According Read More
In 1975, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widowed for the second time, was confronting the long and desolate road of leisure that unfurled bleakly before her. She decided to dabble in work. According to a recently published history, Jackie as Editor, by Greg Lawrence, a friend in the publishing business told her she might be able to Read More
So it turns out people still buy books: “For all of the Sturm und Drang accompanying the change, publishing in 2010 was as profitable as it has ever been.”
For 2009-2010 Penguin had “record earnings” and Random House saw “its largest increase in sales since 2006.”
So as long as people keep writing about Read More
