According to HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, there was a “confluence of events” that caused Harper to launch its Speakers Bureau, the first in what has become (with Penguin‘s recent entrance), a must-have accessory for major publishers. “Ever since the Bantam Speakers Bureau 30 years ago, I’ve thought ‘Wouldn’t it be a wonderful adjunct to our…Continue Reading
Like most publishers’ ebook expectations in this deflated era of digital publishing, Seven Stories Press had fairly unspectacular ones. They dutifully digitized their files. They hung out their e-shingle. They even wrangled a way to sell ebooks directly from their site. And the results trickled in. “Tiny” is the word one executive used. Even Noam…Continue Reading
70,000-Odd Small Publishers Might Be Wagging Your Dog They’re out there — all 73,000 of them — scrabbling for your shelf-space, mucking up your mindshare. That’s the number of book publishers in the US, according to Bowker’s Books in Print database, and it has nearly doubled in the past decade. Blame the go-go ’90s, the…Continue Reading
Goodness, Gracious Do-Gooders in Denmark, Laughing Last in France, and Oz Goes Feral in Israel A wave of irrational exuberance crashes over Denmark this month as the nation just can’t stop reading a novel in which the citizens of a small Danish town become pathologically obsessed with doing good deeds for their neighbors. Hitting the…Continue Reading
