While the name certainly implies a technological slant, the Digital Kids Conference at the 2013 Toy Fair on Tuesday and Wednesday was not all app-talk and virtual worlds. In fact, a theme emerged as quite the opposite: many new products in the toy market are combining digital with some physical product. Just as Skylanders was…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Carrie Kania, Publisher of Harper Perennial, Harper Paperbacks, and It Books, will be leaving HarperCollins at the end of August to become an agent in London with Conville & Walsh. (See Promotions and Internal Changes.) Meanwhile, Leah Wasielewski announced that Katie O’Callaghan has joined the Harper imprint as Associate Director, Marketing. She was at…Continue Reading
PT Examines the Non-Traditional Publishing Spectrum; Major Houses Ramp Up Custom Forget public service announcements: The American Heart Association wants you to know that Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s first boyfriend had Wildberry Skittles breath. As part of their effort to get women “to band together to wipe out heart disease” the AHA and national sponsor Macy’s commissioned…Continue Reading
PEOPLE The Book Industry Study Group has a new Executive Director in the person of Michael Healy, Editorial Director of Nielsen Book Services. He will be the keynote speaker at BISG’s September 8 annual meeting and may be reached at michael@bisg.org. BISG’s previous Director, Jeff Abraham, left at the beginning of the year to become…Continue Reading
In its first two weeks in print, He Who Blinks is Afraid of Death (Aschehoug) sold 4,000 copies in Denmark, a huge number for a debut novel. An autobiographical narrative set in the 1960s, the novel tracks the odd life of a young boy whose German mother is schizophrenic. His Danish father, an insurance agent,…Continue Reading
Not So Foreign Family Problems Fill the Lists The bright blue and red cover of YOU’RE JOKING, MONSIEUR TANNER (l’Olivier), French author Jean-Paul Dubois‘ most recent bestseller, shows a man on hands and knees who’s painted himself into a corner. This is Paul Tanner, a wildlife documentary filmmaker who suddenly inherits the grand family manse,…Continue Reading
The conventional press rarely covers them, but these days the action is with the literary agencies more than publishers. And oh, the changes we’ll see. Small shops will partner up in all kinds of unexpected combinations, creating a whole new landscape of mid-sized agencies. More British shops will follow the lead of PFD in planting…Continue Reading
As the year drew to a close in Germany, so did the long-running speculation about who would pick up the venerable Heyne Verlag, which for years was subject to rumors about an imminent sale to one of the four major players in the country: Bertelsmann, Holtzbrinck, Bonnier, and in the end the winning bidder for…Continue Reading
