Category Archives: Uncategorized

Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs Launch food52

Today marks the official launch of food52, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs‘s new food site geared toward serious home cooks. The site’s first project, a crowd-sourced cookbook, will be published by HarperStudio in late 2010. Hesser is an author and the former New York Times food editor and editor of T Living. Stubbs is a…Continue Reading

Freelance Publicists 2009

You may not have been counting as closely as we have, but our freelance publicist contact sheet has about 50% more entries than it did when we first started running it in 2004. In addition, freelance publicists are increasingly offering brand development and online strategies to their lists of services. As they are forced to…Continue Reading

International Best: Recovering in Russia

Russian publishing has been hit with a double dose of trouble this year, from the economic crunch to an excess of published titles. At the beginning of the recession, 100,000 new titles were being published a year, many with inflated print runs. Russian news site polit.ru reports the 2008 estimate of the size of Russia’s…Continue Reading

Calling All Scouts and Publicists

Are you a literary scout or publicist who would like to be included in our annual Publicity Contact Sheet or Guide to Literary Scouts? Please let us know.

The Puzzlers

When the sudoku craze swept the country in 2005, AdAge questioned whether it was the “Rubik’s cube for the 21st century” but also pointed out that it had been around in various versions for thousands of years. Its modern guise was invented by an American architect, Howard Garns; his “Number Place” ran in Dell Pencil…Continue Reading

Google Book Search Settlement Update

Though the Google Book Search settlement has been in the news quite a bit, we admit we were glad to get a gloss from the panel of participants in the negotiations at the New York Public Library, “Expanding Access to Books: Implications of the Google Books Settlement Agreement,” on July 28. While the main points…Continue Reading

Bookview, August 2009

PEOPLE ROUNDUP Rodale CEO Steve Murphy is leaving the company and will be replaced by Maria Rodale, who also continues in her role as Chairman of the Board. Don Linn, SVP and Publisher of the Taunton Press, is leaving to launch a digital publishing house, Quartet Press. Linn will have principal responsibility for Quartet Press’…Continue Reading

Summer at The Chatauqua Institution

In 1995, Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner created the Disney Institute, his commercial homage to the Chautauqua Institution, a 135-year-old center of learning and recreation in western New York that comes alive for nine weeks every year.  Disney Institute, which is located on the periphery of Disney World, never became as successful as Eisner had hoped,…Continue Reading

Publishing in China

While the rest of the world suffers the economic squeeze, the government-run Chinese publishing industry has counterintuitively managed to cultivate opportunity for expansion both for local entrepreneurs and international publishers. Talk of less state interference and mounting interest from foreign markets is encouraging some publishers to brave the censors, fears of piracy, and the cultural…Continue Reading

Bunny-Eat-Bunny World

A much-anticipated panel on children’s books at NYU‘s Summer Publishing Institute brought out an amazing array of publishing talent, with newly minted literary agent Brenda Bowen moderating. Included in the lineup were Ellie Berger, President of Scholastic Trade Publishing; Megan Tingley, Publisher of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Don Weisberg, President of Penguin’s Young…Continue Reading