Category Archives: Featured Articles

Pixie Dust at Stationery Show

The message from last week’s gargantuan National Stationery Show — all 270,000 square feet of it, sprawled over New York’s Javits Center from May 19-22 — was a gold-embossed, watermarked greeting card carrying that shopworn mantra: content is king. Well, this time around content was king, as an estimated 15,000 buyers seemed to breeze right…Continue Reading

Price and Prejudice

As Riggio Guns for Lower Prices, There’s No Sure Cure for Sticker Shock Pantyhose, Len Riggio once said, lecturing publishers on the finer price points for L’eggs, sell blissfully at $6.99. But books are not leggings. And if publishers think $6.99 is a good price for the upscale products in bookstores, they’re hosed. Moreover, he…Continue Reading

International Fiction Bestsellers

Blowin’ in the Wind Grandes Gusts in Spain, Bewitchery in Greece, And Crazy Birds Flutter Aloft in Israel Breezes, gales, gusts, and tempests swirl like suspicious characters through this month’s bestselling Spanish novel Difficult Airs, the latest effort from well-known erotica queen Almudena Grandes. The author’s fifth novel sets out to map the meaning of…Continue Reading

Price and Peril in Euroland

By the end of February the 12 countries that have adopted the euro had all come to the end of their transitional period when old and new currencies could be used in parallel. So the whole of Euroland is now well and truly into life with a single currency. Except that the new currency is…Continue Reading

The Undead E-Book

Ebooks are: (a) dead (b) undead (c) other. If you answered “all of the above,” you are more correct than you know. As spring turns to summer, not just the trees but oddly enough ebooks — through whose black heart the New York Times drove a stake last fall — are sprouting. Palm, which has…Continue Reading

Distribution Daybook

This year Publishing Trends abandoned its vendor survey, because trying to rate players in the fulfillment and distribution arena was like trying to judge a warehouse full of Rube Goldberg contraptions — there are too many moving pieces, and they all move in different (some might say mysterious) ways. But one thing is certain: they…Continue Reading

Book View, June 2002

PEOPLE Harcourt reports that Laurie Brown has been hired as SVP, Director of Trade Sales and Marketing for Adult and Juvenile Publishing. She formerly held that position at FSG. Lori Benton rejoins Harcourt as VP Publisher of Children’s Books, replacing Louise Pelan, who has taken early retirement. She comes from Holt, where she was Associate…Continue Reading

All Accolades at PNBA

There were 11% fewer exhibitors compared to last year at the spring Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association show in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. But business was reportedly brisk on the floor, with a sense of community in full flower this year. The festive mood in the air no doubt sprung from the presentation of the PNBA Awards,…Continue Reading

Books Without Borders?

Thirteen years after the Berlin Wall bit the dust, global publishing giants have staked out beachheads across the Balkans, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, with a gimlet eye turned to each country’s potential print-runs, GDP data, and reading habits. On the up side, these strategic investments in Eastern Europe have pumped up flagging local…Continue Reading

International Fiction Bestsellers

Damsels In Distress Calmel in Aquitaine, Hermann Does Damascus, And Norway’s Queen of Crime Druids, troubadours, wenches, and the golden-haired, green-eyed Duchess of Aquitaine make for a rambunctious menagerie who all wind up in Eleanor’s Bed, a first novel that’s had ladies-in-waiting sighing all over France. This medieval coming-of-age story from Mireille Calmel unfolds in…Continue Reading