Ten Speed Press

Penguin Random House announced today the launch of an online bookstore attached to its food community site, TasteBook. The Bookshop, as it's called, sells new and classic food-related titles, such as The Chopped Cookbook, The Hungry Girl Diet, and My Paris Kitchen. The Bookshop launched with 10,000 titles across all publishers.

With some of its better-known and wackier titles including "The Complete Far Side," "What the Duck: A W.T. Duck Collection," "Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong" and "Butter My Butt & Call Me a Biscuit: And Other Country Sayings, Say-So's, Hoots & Hollers," one might think that Andrews McMeel Publishing's (AMP) strategic advantage comes from its funny bone. But, while humor is one of the company's leading product categories, there is no doubt that it's serious about its approach to publishing.

In a memo to employees, Random House Chairman and CEO Markus Dohle announced that the company would be "splitting off the current Crown Publishing Group into separately structured and distinct groups: one comprised of the Crown trade-publishing imprints; the other with the Random House Audio Group and the Random House Information Group."

Ten Speed Press, a Berkeley, Calif.-based independent publisher of nonfiction books, has been acquired by Random House Inc. The purchase was completed late last month and the terms of the agreement between the two companies, which are both privately held, were not disclosed.

Publishers of all sizes have to manage detailed and vital information about the rights they own, the rights they have sold, and the royalties they either owe or are owed. It can be a significant accounting undertaking. Especially with the burgeoning digital marketplace, book publishers are increasingly redistributing their content in any number of ways and thus, generating additional revenue––as well as the need to manage additional rights and royalties. Fortunately, there are a number of solutions on the market today, from services that help publishers license their content to those that help automate the tracking and payments process to save time and

The good news is that book marketing professionals have more channels through which to promote their titles than ever. But with so many choices and decisions to be made, crafting an effective, far-reaching multichannel marketing campaign is more confusing than ever. Book Business spoke with several book marketing gurus to get their takes on what makes a multichannel marketing campaign work. 1. Take advantage of all available marketing channels. Noreen Henson, marketing manager for Demos Medical Publishing, says her biggest difficulty today is “the electronic revolution in information delivery”—and her constant challenge is to ensure Demos’ campaigns take advantage of this evolution. Among

Children’s books may be about finding the kid in all of us, but everyone in the children’s publishing business agrees that they have to grow up when it comes to taking advantage of profitable opportunities. The Internet is clearly not going away, yet with the need to protect children from cyberspace predators, publishers have to go through parents to get through to their young audiences. Once you reach them, however, it can’t hurt to be as multidimensional as possible. Jason Wells, publicity and marketing director for New York-based Harry N. Abrams Inc., says kids are looking for books that are not just self-contained