This morning Lynn Andriani, who oversees PW‘s Cooking The Books e-newsletter, moderated a cookbook panel that brought out an SRO crowd, and uncovered some surprising areas of agreement and disagreement among the panelists. These included Clarkson Potter‘s Doris Cooper, EatYourBooks.com‘s Jane Kelly, Cookstr‘s Will Schwalbe, and Bruce Shaw from the Harvard Common Press. Everyone agreed…Continue Reading
At the American Book Producer Association’s recent panel, Jon Fine, Director of Author & Publisher Relations for Amazon.com, spoke about the ways smaller publishers and self-publishers can use Amazon to produce, promote, and distribute books in what he anticipates will one day be an “inventory-free” process. The event reflected Amazon’s recent attempts to present its…Continue Reading
In a recent interview, Random House CEO Markus Dohle said he is “convinced that publishers have to become more reader oriented in a marketing and trend finding/setting way rather than in a direct to consumer selling way.” The tricky part: How can publishers be trendspotters? In this two-part series, we will try to address that…Continue Reading
PEOPLE At Macmillan, Troy Williams has been appointed to the new position of VP & GM, New Ventures. Williams founded Questia Media, which he sold in 2007, and PeoplePad. Meanwhile, Dan Farley is leaving Macmillan, where he was President and Publisher of the Children’s Publishing Group, after 14 years of bicoastal commuting. Mark Polizzotti has…Continue Reading
PEOPLE So much for the dog days of August. . . . Jim King, SVP and General Manager at Nielsen BookScan, has left the company to become a consultant to the industry. He may be reached at jim.king.j [at] gmail dot com. Simon & Schuster Publisher Jon Karp has announced several more changes over the…Continue Reading
In this age of undead Bennets and robo-Karenina, a different kind of mash-up is on the literary horizon: cross-vertical social media. Startups like GetGlue, LivingSocial, and Blippr are all-in-one social media hubs for a user’s complete entertainment discussion needs: books, films, TV shows, music, even beer and wine. Cross-vertical referrals match books with films or…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Random House SVP and Editor-in-Chief Susan Kamil has been given the additional position of Publisher of the Random House and Dial Press imprints. Tom Perry, EVP, Deputy Publisher of the Random House Publishing Group, will join her at the Random House imprint and will also become Publisher of the Modern Library. Theresa Zoro has…Continue Reading
Since part of the mission of museum publishing is to produce great, big, beautiful books, June’s D.C.–based National Museum Publishing Seminar, “Print and the Digital Network,” offered anachronisms and anomalies galore. Most of the seminar’s sponsors are high-end European and Far Eastern printers like Mondadori and CS Graphics. They declared that the illustrated, printed exhibition…Continue Reading
PT thanks marketing consultant and science enthusiast Rich Kelley for this piece. Considering the star power of the participating scientist/authors—Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Sacks, among many others—what was perhaps most surprising about the 2010 World Science Festival was how few opportunities attendees had to purchase books by the minds they came clamoring…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Jonathan Karp is now settled in as EVP and Publisher of the Simon & Schuster trade imprint. Karp, who succeeds David Rosenthal, came from Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group that he founded in 2005. A new Publisher for Twelve is actively being recruited. Isabel Swift, who was Editor Emeritus at Harlequin,…Continue Reading
