Trade
August 9, 2016 at 12:35 pm
Yesterday CEO Markus Dohle sent a memo to New-York-based Penguin Random House staff informing them that their separate offices would be combined in early 2019. PRH staff working at 375 and 345 Hudson Street will join their colleagues at 1745 Broadway. This marks the next step in the integration of the Penguin and Random House…
August 3, 2016 at 2:34 pm
Change has always been a constant in the publishing business, and of course change is a natural state in all of our lives. What’s different today is that change is occurring faster than it ever has before. Carolyn Pittis, director of Welman Digital, pointed out at the Yale Publishing Course on Monday, that the Agricultural…
August 1, 2016 at 4:19 pm
Let me preface this by saying I run a literary fiction micro-publisher operating much in the mold of how full-service traditional publishing has for years, although because my overheads are so low, I pay my authors 50% of print and 70% of ebook royalties, something I realize large publishers cannot do. As self-publishing continues evolving,…
July 28, 2016 at 11:12 am
Washington, DC - Publishers’ revenues were up Feb. 2016, compared to Feb. 2015. Despite gains in Children's/YA Books and Religious Presses, a decline in Adult Books meant an overall decline for Trade books of 0.9% Feb. 2016 vs. Feb. 2015 and 8.2% year-to-date vs. 2015. Also within trade, downloaded audio and print formats continued to…
July 18, 2016 at 11:34 am
For better or worse, writers and readers live in an age of the million-dollar book deal. The Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) increasingly gamble on massive book advances in hopes that they might put out one of the biggest hits of the year. Last fall, Knopf—a division…
July 15, 2016 at 1:26 pm
Bookstore sales cooled slightly in May, but spending still rose for the fifth straight month this year. According to estimates released Friday morning by the U.S. Census Bureau, bookstore sales increased 3.1% in May over May 2015, rising to $826 million. The gain in bookstore sales outpaced the sales increase posted by the entire retail…
July 12, 2016 at 2:54 pm
Yesterday the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released its annual Statshot report for 2015, tracking the net revenue of the U.S. book market. While overall publishing revenue remained flat, decreasing 0.6% from 2014 to $27.78 billion, the AAP painted a positive picture of the year-end results. Sales of print formats, particularly in trade publishing, increased,…
July 8, 2016 at 2:30 pm
The big news about Barnes & Noble is that after twenty years of battling with Amazon they have finally made a competitive move that Amazon cannot match. Barnes & Noble, with 640 bookstores in 50 states, is giving self-published authors a chance to get access to their hallowed bookshelves. Meanwhile, Amazon runs one bookstore in Seattle (albeit with 3 more slated). Barnes & Noble…
July 1, 2016 at 1:00 pm
In a move that will help retailers and librarians more easily find and shelve children's and young adult graphic novels, the Book Industry Study Group will offer expanded options for BISAC codes and subject headings for the kids’ graphic novel category. BISAC codes are the standard descriptors for different types of books and are used…
July 1, 2016 at 10:23 am
The video below is excerpted from the recent Book Business webinar, “Publishers: It’s About Innovation!” The full webinar is available on-demand here. According to Sourcebooks CEO and publisher Dominique Raccah (and many entrepreneurs that have cut their teeth in the startup world) the key to innovation is iteration. And not enough book publishers are embracing…
