News and opinion on the changing world of book publishing
July 2008
PEOPLE HarperCollins announced a new management structure following Jane Friedman’s June 4 resignation and the appointment of Brian Murray as President and CEO HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. Michael Morrison was also promoted to President and Publisher, U.S. General Books and Canada, and Victoria Barnsley has been promoted to CEO and Publisher HCUK and International, overseeing the [...]
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April 2007
You could call them secret shoppers. Like the plainclothes informants who check out department stores for a lapse in customer service, publishers who slip on authors’ shoes return from their writing experience armed with anecdotes and tips that market research can’t devine. What many intelligencers see shocks them. Even thirty-year publishing veterans see their industry [...]
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March 2007
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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Whether it is the best of times for the publishing industry, or the times that try publishers’ souls, depends on whom you ask, and of course, what you really want to know. But there’s little doubt that these are the best of times for anyone who wants his or her oeuvre to be published. The [...]
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September 2006
Publishers Brandish New Models to Support Authors: Joint-, Co-, & Assisted Self-Publishing When Arthur Klebanoff began shopping around longtime BBDO CEO Allen Rosenshine’s book Funny Business a few years ago, nobody bit. Rather than a straight how-to-succeed-in-business type of book, Rosenshine had written an anecdotal memoir about his experiences in the ad industry. “Here was [...]
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April 2006
PEOPLE Brian Napack has been named President of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. In the newly created position, Napack will share general management responsibilities with CEO John Sargent over all of Holtzbrinck’s divisions, including both trade and educational operations. Steve Sorrentino, most recently an author (Luncheonette) has gone to B&N as Director, Author Promotions & Special [...]
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June 2004
Book View People May was another busy month for publishers’ human resource directors: Michael Jacobs has gone to Abrams as CEO. He was most recently SVP of Scholastic’s trade division. In addition, Ron Longe has been named Director of Publicity for STC, also part of the Martinière Group. He was most recently at Routledge. Michael [...]
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May 2004
It’s just possible that vanity presses — or print-on-demand subsidy publishers, as most prefer to be called — may be improving their reputations and, in some cases, even gaining respect among traditional publishers. Not only is the list of self-published books that have been picked up by traditional houses growing, but the vanity presses are [...]
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May 2003
Call them what you will — “print-on-demand subsidy publishers” or “glorified vanity houses” — the three leading POD publishers are subtly rethinking their roles in the realm of pay-to-play publishing. Collectively, iUniverse, Xlibris, and 1stBooks Library are banging out some 20,000 titles per year — with that market growing 40% or more annually — and [...]
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February 2001
Are Bulked-Up Book Distributors The Industry’s Next Goliaths? Time was, you would call a guy like Gilbert Perlman a book distributor. The warehouse, the sales staff, the publishing clients, even the name on the door — Client Distribution Services — all fit the modus operandi of firms schlepping books from the presses to the masses. [...]
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