Author Archives: PT Editors

Job Hunting? Click Here

Going, going, gone are the good old days of dropping lunchtime crumbs over the “Positions Open” section in the back of PW, when you’d gamely search for that next dream gig. (“Marketing Director, U. of Hawaii Press”? Hmmm.) Yes, clickability has hit the hiring game, with Internet job boards humming away 24/7 and recruitment field…Continue Reading

International Fiction Bestsellers

Bruit on the Baltic Johansson in Sweden, Delerm Dines On in France, and Noll Gets Warped in Germany A “determinedly girls-eye view of events” has captivated Sweden this month, as the third and final volume in 70-year-old Swedish writer Elsie Johansson’s trilogy hits the stands with what’s been praised as “an unusual kind of bildungsroman.”…Continue Reading

Book View, March 2001

PEOPLE A relatively quiet month, personnel-wise: Peter Bernstein has taken a new position as Editor-in-Chief of the University Alliance for Life-Long Learning, an online venture of Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale Universities to develop distance learning courses. He had been working on an author website, AuthorByAuthor. . . . VP and Managing Director Scott Lubeck…Continue Reading

In the Know

Vault.com is a web site used by job seekers to get the lowdown on what it’s really like to work for a company — in full, unexpurgated, and unsubstantiated glory. Many publishers aren’t even listed, including the entire Holtzbrinck group, while Norton gets little traffic and virtually no messages. Same with S&S, which has had…Continue Reading

Talk Miramax Books Finally Takes Off

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (2/6/01) It’s been a dramatic couple of weeks for Talk Miramax Books, which, after a shaky start, seems to be finding itself as a nonfiction publisher of high-profile books. Last month the house bought super-lawyer David Boies‘s memoirs, and last week it paid $3 million for a memoir and a business…Continue Reading

The Shelf Life of Books: It All Depends on Who’s Stacking and Tracking

Laura Bush ranks her shoes by color, keeps her record collection impeccably dust-free and swabs her cabinets with Clorox for kicks. And as we all read in the New York Times, the nation’s First Librarian also shelves the family volumes by the Dewey decimal system. While Washington’s power brokers eyed their dottily piled-up volumes and…Continue Reading

One-Stop Shopping

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….Continue Reading

All Crisis, All the Time

In an address to the Publishers Lunch Club last month, industry veteran Tom McCormack looked back on forty years in publishing, finding that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here’s a condensed version of his remarks. When I first came down to New York, some folks asked me why I was…Continue Reading

International Fiction Bestsellers

Time Regained Eco Back in Italy, Dahl Redux in Spain, and Harry Potter Everywhere Else Umberto Eco is at it again. Romance, that is. His fourth such novel to date — featuring the picaresque adventures of the title character, Baudolino — has hit the stands in Italy, and we’re told its pages are bursting with…Continue Reading

Dominoes Fall in Deutschland

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