Book Biz The Year in Publishing: December 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 2:08 PM Random House, fed up with the performance of its Doubleday and Bantam Dell divisions, tore them apart and redistributed the pieces among the Knopf, Crown, and Random House publishing groups. Top executives Irwyn Applebaum and Stev ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: November 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 1:46 PM Barack Obama won the presidential election, and it wasn’t long before publishers began announcing new Obama books. Leonard Riggio of Barnes & Noble predicted the worst holiday season for booksellers in 40-some years. Rad ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: October 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 1:16 PM Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, declared that it wasn’t likely an American writer would be getting the Nobel Prize for literature any time soon, because the United States was “too isolat ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: September 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 12:14 PM Jason Boog joined the GalleyCat team, and the industry news kicked into high gear… New York warned that the end was near for book publishing, which was good for a laugh. Beaufort Books became Sherry Jones‘s new America ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: August 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 11:49 AM Random House told Sherry Jones that, after signing her to a six-figure deal for two novels about one of the wives of the prophet Muhammad, they were afraid of terrorist retaliation, so they cut her loose. This spurred a lively deb ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: July 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 11:32 AM Randy Pausch died. After being diagnosed with cancer in 2007, the Carnegie Mellon professor had skyrocketed to fame after delivering a “last lecture” to students; the Wall Street Journal article about that lecture led ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: June 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 10:56 AM Darin Strauss sings! And then sings some more! (Plus solo numbers from Jonathan Coulton.) Glenn Beck said contemporary books for young readers are emasculating, except for the ones his guest Ted Bell writes. Remember that time Sim ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: May 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 10:53 AM Warner Bros. announced that Tales from the Black Freighter, the comic-within-a-comic from Watchmen, would be a spinoff DVD released concurrently with the theatrical movie. Given all the legal wrangling over the main attraction, th ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: April 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 10:35 AM mediabistro.com hired Emily Gould and Andy Heidel to share the GalleyCat workload, and we went to Sloane Crosley‘s book party to celebrate. Bob Miller left Hyperion to start his own imprint at HarperCollins; in a totally unr ...
Book Biz The Year in Publishing: March 2008 By Neal on Dec. 31, 2008 - 8:02 AM Margaret B. Jones, or Peggy Seltzer as her real name turned out to be, became the latest in a string of phony memoirists, but it wasn’t until a glowing review from Michiko Kakutani and a lengthy profile from a NY Times style ...