According to HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, there was a “confluence of events” that caused Harper to launch its Speakers Bureau, the first in what has become (with Penguin‘s recent entrance), a must-have accessory for major publishers. “Ever since the Bantam Speakers Bureau 30 years ago, I’ve thought ‘Wouldn’t it be a wonderful adjunct to our…Continue Reading
Rarely a week goes by without a PW or Publishers Lunch announcement of a newly formed, merged or expanded literary agency. Larry Kirshbaum‘s well-publicized move from TWBG to form LJK Literary Management last fall drew attention to publishers-turned-agents, and both Gawker and MediaBistro consistently blog about who’s merging with whom to spawn the newest so-called…Continue Reading
70,000-Odd Small Publishers Might Be Wagging Your Dog They’re out there — all 73,000 of them — scrabbling for your shelf-space, mucking up your mindshare. That’s the number of book publishers in the US, according to Bowker’s Books in Print database, and it has nearly doubled in the past decade. Blame the go-go ’90s, the…Continue Reading
Apocalypse Now Amnesia Hits Spain, Horror Bloodies France, and Pokémon Ravages Australia Perhaps in compensation for the underwhelming arrival of Y2K, this month’s bestsellers have registered a potent desire for all those missed connections, fatal errors, and world-historical upheavals we were so tantalizingly promised. In Spain, Nativel Preciado’s The Narcissist plunges into the abyss of…Continue Reading
