Tag: Now in Paperback

By JULIE BOSMAN and MICHAEL BARBARO
Georgina Bloomberg’s new book, “The A Circuit,” is about a family headed by a blunt-talking Wall Street billionaire who lives in a Manhattan town house and “owns half of New York.”

Kitson, a group of boutiques based in Los Angeles, is the kind of store that appears regularly in the tabloids for both its stylish clothes and its celebrity clientele like Sean Combs and Joe Jonas.

But in a town that is all about flash, Kitson is finding a surprising source of revenue that is not from its fashionable shoes or accessories. It is from books.

The company’s owner, Fraser Ross, estimates that Kitson sold 100,000 books in 2010, double what it had the previous year.

Publishers turned aggressive about selling to Kitson, Mr. Ross said, as traditional bookstores switched focus or closed. That “has been good for us,” he said. “If there’s a good book, we’ll go deep into it.” And publishers, he said, “realize what a specialty store can do for their business, with the window and the table.”

Publishers have stocked books in nonbook retailers for decades — a coffee-table book in the home department, a novelty book in Urban Outfitters. In the last year, though, some publishers have increased their efforts as the two largest bookstore chains have changed course.

Barnes & Noble has been devoting more floor space for displays of e-readers, games and educational toys. Borders, after filing for bankruptcy protection in February, has begun liquidating some 200 of its superstores.

“The national bookstore chain has peaked as a sales channel, and the growth is not going to come from there,” said David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “But it doesn’t mean that all brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back.”

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: February 10, 2009
The ax continued to fall in the New York publishing world on Tuesday, as HarperCollins Publishers announced a restructuring and layoffs that claimed the jobs of two of its top executives.

The industry had been expecting some news from HarperCollins, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, as it was one of the few major publishing houses not to have announced layoffs during the current punishing retail downturn. Random House, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Macmillan, which operates divisions including Farrar, Straus & Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, have all announced job losses in recent months.

And so the shoe finally dropped at HarperCollins: the company said it was closing down its Collins division, the publisher of blockbusters like “The Dangerous Book for Boys” and “Deceptively Delicious,” a cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld. In a memo to the staff, Michael Morrison, president and publisher of the general books division for the United States and Canada, said that Steve Ross, the president and publisher of Collins, was leaving the company.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123093737793850127.html

By ANITA ELBERSE

Dark days are upon the book industry. Last month alone, Random House announced a massive restructuring; Simon & Schuster laid off 35 staffers; the adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stopped acquiring manuscripts for the rest of the year; and HarperCollins sent comedian Sarah Silverman a contract worth $2.5 million to write her first book.

Yes, that’s right — amid the worst economic crisis to hit the United States in decades, publishing executives are still making what many see as outrageous gambles on new manuscripts.

The move by HarperCollins is only one of the latest in a string of big bets by companies employing a blockbuster strategy — a common approach among movie studios, television-production companies and music labels. A spokeswoman for the publishing house says it doesn’t disclose author advances. (HarperCollins Publishers is a unit of News Corp., which also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.)

Most large media firms make outsized investments to acquire and market a small number of titles with strong hit potential, and bank on their sales to make up for middling performance in the rest of their catalogs.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1873122,00.html

Here’s a literary parable for the 21st century. Lisa Genova, 38, was a health-care-industry consultant in Belmont, Mass., who wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn’t get her book published for love or money. She had a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, but she couldn’t get an agent. “I did what you’re supposed to do,” she says. “I queried literary agents. I went to writers’ conferences and tried to network. I e-mailed editors. Nobody wanted it.” So Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse and published her book, Still Alice, herself.
That was in 2007. By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all–and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5. “So this is extreme to extreme, right?” Genova says. “This time last year, I was selling the book out of the trunk of my car.” (See the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008.)
Something has changed, and it’s not just the contents of Lisa Genova’s trunk. We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries, the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century. This wasn’t an accident, and it didn’t happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.
Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industr

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/apr/01/hollywood-publishing-bullock-proposal

Why is it, exactly, that the world of books exerts such an irresistible draw to the world of film? Not literary adaptations – you can see why they’re so popular – but the rather less obvious charms of publishing’s back rooms.

The latest addition to the field is The Proposal, in which Sandra Bullock plays a “high-powered book editor” facing deportation to her native Canada (she looks amazing in her fitted black suit and high heels in the poster, but far more sharply dressed than any book editor I’ve ever met). It’s a romantic comedy, so naturally there’s a fake engagement to be dealt with, and “one comedic fish-out-of-water situation after another”. I’m loath to say it’s unlikely to win critical plaudits, as I’ve only seen the trailer, but I’m going to say it anyway: it looks awful.

The Proposal joins the publishing sub-genre of the movie books world, nestling nicely next to Bridget Jones, who works in publishing PR, book editors Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction and Sarah Michelle Gellar in Suburban Girl (tagline “Sometimes the end is only the beginning”). Not to mention Will Ferrell’s children’s publisher father in Elf.

There’s also the bookshop sub-genre: Hugh Grant’s bumbling bookshop owner in Notting Hill, for example, or Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks’s battle of the independent versus the chain in You’ve Got Mail. The genre also includes the film of 84 Charing Cross Road, and not forgetting Pamela Anderson ever so slightly unlikely casting as a bookshop employee in the 2005 television series Stacked.