"Unfortunately, as result of this reorganization, several positions within the group have been eliminated," S&S publisher Jonathan Karp wrote in an internal email about the reorganization. "On behalf of everyone who has worked with them, I want to thank our departing colleagues for their efforts on behalf of our authors and contributions to our success."

The news came as a  a surprise to those at the imprint.

"Across the board, the first response to the news was of heartfelt solidarity and regret," emailed Ms. Bastagli. "Followed by a healthy dose of soul-searching as we all try to figure out what’s next."

Free Press books will continue to be published under the imprint's name and Suzanne Donahue has been named the  associate publisher of Free Press.

"In the coming weeks, we will  be working to integrate approximately 100 Free Press authors with works-in-progress into the larger Simon & Schuster group, while also introducing ourselves to backlist authors," wrote Mr. Karp.

Ana Marie Cox, one of the authors named in the lawsuit

The Penguin Group is suing some pretty high profile authors  to recoup some of their advance money, The Smoking Gun reports.

Since an advance is really more of a gamble than a guarantee (authors can be hard to rely on! You can’t rush the creative process! Sometimes editors cancel books!), historically publishers have not held authors accountable. But it is a difficult time for publishing companies and they can probably use all the cash they can get.

Elizabeth Wurtzel signed a $100,000 advance in 2003 to write a "a book for teenagers to help them cope with depression." Penguin wants the Prozac Nation author to return $33,000 – or the first third that is usually given on signing – plus $7,500 in interest.

The publisher is suing New Yorker scribe Rebecca Mead for $20,000, plus interest. She got a book deal for $50,000 for a collection of her writing in 2003.

Former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox is getting sued for her $81,250 (and at least $50,000 in interest). She signed a deal in 2008 with Penguin imprint Riverhead for $325,000

Penguin is also suing "Hip-Hop Minister" Conrad Tillard for $38,000 for a memoir about his "epic journey from the Ivy League to the Nation of Islam," and his subsequent falling out with Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Tillard signed an $85,000 Penguin contract for the book in 2005.

Even Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat is getting sued for $30,000 for his memoir about love and survival. The book was cancelled after large parts were found to be fabrication (after he appeared on Oprah).

“Penguin regrets that it had to initiate litigation in these cases, and it did so reluctantly, only after its repeated attempts at amicable resolutions were ignored,” Penguin said when reached this afternoon.

"Penguin this is wrong headed. Authors beware. Books are rejected for reasons other than editorially and publishers then want their money back. Publishers want to reject manuscripts for any reason after an author has put time and effort into writing them all the while paying their bills. Another reason to have strong representation. If Penguin did this to one of Trident's authors we could cut them out of all our submissions," Robert Gottlieb, head of the major agency Trident Media Group, commented on The Smoking Gun post.

Looks like the publishing industry is starting to act more like an industry....

According to the WSJ, "Barnes & Noble is recasting itself as a technology company with emphasis on digital books and its Nook e-reading devices and Nook Tablet." Barnes & Noble has had a self-publishing platform, PubIt!, since 2010.

Weiland.

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."

Ecco, which was founded by Dan Halpern and purchased by HarperCollins in 1999, is one of the most prestigious boutique imprints in the industry. W.W. Norton, however, has the advantage of being owned by its employees (HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch). Norton also has a reputation for quality, producing both blockbusters (including most of Michael Lewis's books) and literary successes (like Nicole Krauss's Great House) but generally avoiding projects pitched more for their marketing potential than their content.

"It's a firm I’ve hugely admired for 20 years and whose books line my shelves," said Mr. Weiland. And it was not only that: "My whole life I’ve wanted to work on 42^nd Street and I thought if I don’t do this I’ll have to work for Port Authority." Norton's offices are on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

“Matt first captured everyone’s attention here as the exceptionally talented young editor of an anthology we published back in 1997," said publisher W. Drake McFeely in a statement from Norton. "It’s a thrill to bring him into the fold as an editor, at last.” The book in question was an anthology of articles from The Baffler magazine called Commodify Your Dissent.

Mr. Weiland was not at liberty to say all of the books that are on his list at Ecco that he'll be taking with him to Norton, but he did say that two high-profile projects — Mr Connors's second book, a memoir of his brother's suicide, and New York magazine contributor Wesley Yang's forthcoming book about the Asian-American experience of the American dream — will be moving with him to his new job.

As far as future acquisitions, Mr. Weiland said he will be acquiring books similar to those that made up his list at Ecco, what he calls "writerly non-fiction and some fiction too" and books that "appeal to all sorts of readers."

Wylie.

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 that the increased scrutiny on the company recently "will perhaps turn on some lights in rooms that have been left dark previously and look more closely at what is profitable and what is not and what is proper behaviour and what isn't."

Mr. Wylie made no reference to any specific instances of impropriety, saying only that the heads of HarperCollins have been "unusually shrill and punitive towards authors."

Whether this warrants the kinds of investigations and resignations reverberating around other segments of Murdoch's empire is unclear. We wrote Mr. Wylie earlier requesting elaboration, but did not receive a reply.

A HarperCollins spokesperson told The Bookseller, "The more mundane truth is that HarperCollins have had differences of opinion on business matters with Mr Wylie in recent times." And on Twitter, there was a choice re-tweet on the HarperCollins feed referencing Mr. Wylie.

Hari Kunzru: the eigenvectors will find his fans.

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 is not going to pay influential people to disseminate a good word about the British novelist Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men, but it will offer them a free copy of his book. What this really amounts to is a redefinition of who gets to be influential. From PaidContent:

In what the publisher is calling an industry first, Penguin today is launching a campaign to tap “influencers” on Peer Index to read and spread the word about a new book—Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men. The idea behind the campaign is this: PeerIndex uses an algorithm that identifies people who are influential on particular topics. In this case, the topics, says PeerIndex, will be philosophy, science, politics, music, activism, India, America and science fiction. Those targeted people are invited to visit a microsite, where they are offered free copies of the book, with the ability to introduce friends to buy a copy, too.

Naturally our first reaction is one of terror—what if the algorithms tell the publishers that the staff of The New York Observer is not influential? The mountains of advance reading copies that regularly threaten to topple and engulf entire intern classes would cease, and we would have nothing to read!

Mr. Kunzru, who lives in New York (along with Zadie Smith and Martin Amis and god knows how many of the other major producers of British contemporary fiction), confirms our fears on his blog, where he writes:

Peer Index have used their technology (based on eigenvectors, which also form the basis of Google PageRank) to identify a group of influential people who have some connection either to me, or to the themes and ideas in the book. The first list, unsurprisingly, had rather too many fiction writers and book journalists on it, so we weeded it and added some other names. As I say, this is an experiment. It’s a way of testing a hunch about social media, and acknowledging that professional literary journalists (excellent as many of them are) shouldn’t be the only gatekeepers when it comes to literary fiction.

May the eigenvectors reveal the truly influential!

P.S. Today The Paris Review has a post on "Jennifer Egan fever." Is anybody else feeling a touch of Jennifer Egan fatigue? (And, by the way, we paid for that book, at our local indie bookstore no less.)

What would James Joyce do?

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 a thank you.

While it’s easy to be cynical about old publishing’s faux-gentlemanly approach to getting promotional quotes (send advanced reading copies to an author’s MFA supervisor or writer friends with handwritten requests on nice letterhead for “thoughts”) Amazon Publishing dispenses with the niceties altogether.

Exhibit A is an email that was sent in January to Elyse Cheney, a New York literary agent, asking for a quote from one of Ms. Cheney’s authors for a book called Stalina, “by an exciting author named Emily Rubin.” The book was coming out on AmazonEncore, the Amazon imprint that republishes successfully self-published books.

I'm interested in knowing whether [name redacted] would be willing to take a look at Stalina and if he likes it, provide a guest review in which we'd also  promote [name redacted] and his works, including any upcoming projects.

“They referred to her as a man!” said Ms. Cheney with disdain. The client in question is a woman.

The email went on to detail its promotional efforts:

The review would be prominently featured on Amazon.com in customer emails, rotating campaigns in the Amazon.com Books and Kindle stores, and on the Stalina detail page (to which our marketing and PR efforts will be driving significant traffic).  This would be a great way to get added exposure on Amazon for [name redacted]'s backlist or upcoming releases.

“It’s completely unethical,” said Ms. Cheney. “That’s just not how blurbs are done.”

Another agent, however, saw no problems with the approach. The exclusive review that ultimately ran on Stalina’s page came from the novelist Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter.

“Amazon did contact us, as they were fans of Russian Winter and felt Daphne would be appropriate given the overlapping interest in Russia,” wrote her agent, WME’s Dorian Karchmar, in an email to The Observer. Ms. Karchmar said there were no stipulations about what Ms. Kalatoy could write and added that they weren’t “aware of any exchange in terms of featured placement.”

“There are a number of publishers, including Amazon Publishing, that try to secure guest reviews for their books,” said Sarah Gelman, PR manager for Amazon Publishing. “The guest reviewer often receives some on-site promotion as an added incentive to write the review.” Of course, most publishers are not also retailers.

We considered an actual Beck/Dolan rivalry. What sort of narrative non-fiction young adult book could Mr. Dolan possibly acquire to rival Mercury Ink's first announced book, a young adult novel by Richard Paul Evans, who is a purveyor of feel-good, Jesus-exalting stories like The Christmas Box? (The book to be published by Mercury, Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25, is about a 14-year-old who not only has Tourette's syndrome but also "electric powers.")

Mr. Dolan could consult his Houghton Mifflin backlist -- Eric Schlosser might produce something, except that everyone in high school already reads The Jungle. Or Jerome Groopman, except books about being a doctor are boring if you're not a doctor, or a hypochondriac. What to do?

Beck: 1 Dolan: 0

The announcement comes only two weeks after the debut of Amazon's Montlake Romance, which "takes its name from the central Seattle neighborhood of Montlake" (where Mr. Darcy-types roam the streets on white stallions?) Hopefully any potential sci-fi imprint will reference the Space Needle.

Genre fiction today; tomorrow, the world.

Dr. Chopra is already something of a one-man imprint: according to his web site, where he is described as "a global force in the field of human empowerment," he has authored more than 55 books, including The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success; The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents; The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success for Parents; The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga; The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes; Kama Sutra: Including the Seven Spiritual Laws of Love and Golf For Enlightenment: The Seven Lessons for the Game of Life. Followers of Dr. Chopra can rest assured that if there is any remaining area of their lives lacking seven spiritual laws, he will eventually get around to it.