PEOPLE Sales was where the action was this past month, with big changes at Random House, S&S, Abrams and elsewhere. Mary Wowk, Director of World Wide Sales at Black Dog & Leventhal, has been appointed VP, Sales of HNA, which includes Abrams, STC and distributed lines. In a separate announcement, Katrina Weidknecht has been appointed [...]

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Frankfurt’s Honoree Gets Into the Fast Lane Technology. Textbooks. Jhumpa Lahiri. Western book publishers have learned what to expect from their Indian counterparts. The industry has delivered, literally and figuratively, on much of what the Frankfurt Book Fair promised when they named it Guest of Honor in 1986. Presumably bestowed on a culture that could [...]

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Corpse Bride (and Groom), Travels With Democracy From Boxing to Bassoons While many eyes in Hall 8 at the Frankfurt Book Fair were ogling Google, international publishers were juggling a flurry of deals on the heels of a rather upbeat year for most. Here is a sampling of some of the most prominent and promising [...]

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Audiobooks Go Global, Competition Rises In Germany, Yoshi Mixes Tunes in Japan As PT continues its foray into the audio delivery of the word, we leave behind the car-loving Americans who drive twice the distance at a third of the cost, for the land of the TGV, the U-Bahn and the AVE. A land where [...]

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More BC at BEA

May 2005

BEA‘s back and Blackberrys are buzzing as everyone gears up for yet another three-day extravaganza chock full of authors, agents, air kisses and an international invasion. To help you get quadruple booked in all the right ways, Publishing Trends checked in with a number of show veterans and got the low down on this year’s [...]

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Though the personal life of Abraham Lincoln has, of late, been fodder for American readers, it may come as a surprise that Honest Abe, along with other prominent American historical figures, has become a figure of interest in Korea. “For awhile there, it seemed all anyone was interested in was our Lincoln-related backlist,” including Carl [...]

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People The beginning of a new year seems to have prompted some early spring cleaning, with an unusual number of moves around the industry. The one that got the most attention was Sara Nelson’s move to PW as its new Editor-in-Chief, replacing Nora Rawlinson, who may be reached at norar@nyc.rr.com. Lee Boudreaux has left Random [...]

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The Real Thing

November 2004

Russian Expose on Female Bombers, Germany’s 99-Euro Bestseller, and A Real Gouda Story from Holland There certainly was no shortage of politically charged books at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, and one of the most startling of all was penned by a 23-year-old Russian journalist Yulia Yuzik, who surveys the growing number of female [...]

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Sunshine and Noir

June 2003

BookExpo America Lands in LA, With Bouts of ‘Book Fair Fatigue’ By nearly all accounts, it’s a beastly time for a book convention. You’ve got the gangrenous economy. War-torn travel itineraries. SARS shut-downs. And cash-strapped rep groups (who’ve already splurged for sales conferences on the east coast). Throw in a liberal dose of what some [...]

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Forsaken Frankfurt?

November 2002

Amid Post-Book-Fair Grumbling, London Gains on the Buchmesse “Deplorable, but not lethal” was the official word on southbound exhibitor numbers at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair — they tumbled 4%, a figure direly reported to the trade as “the biggest decline in the fair’s 54-year history” — and it made for a condign summation of [...]

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