Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0500 Agents Keeping Foreign Publishers on Digital Leash As the London Book Fair goes through its annual run this week, American agents are trying to figure out the best way to sell digital rights to foreign publishers in markets that are far behind the U.S. in e-book sales. Even though many international publishers are just starting to dabble in producing e-books, almost all recognize that digital books are the future and that, in a few years, their local market will look more like the current one in America, where e-books are accounting for as much as 8% of revenue among the major houses. For this reason, most American agents are including digital rights in their foreign deals, but not without caveats.
Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500 Panel Examines Canadian School Library Crisis "Crisis or Opportunity? School Libraries in the 21st Century”: that was the question for panelists and the audience at an event hosted by the Canadian Book and Periodical Council and Ontario Library Association earlier this month, and the answer heard around the room pretty clearly was crisis. But there were also a lot of voices offering ideas of how to address the problems.
Fiction, Nonfiction Mix it Up: International Bestsellers January 2012 Germany’s top fiction title at the end of December, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out His Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson climbed up from #5, supplanting previous chart-topper Inheritance (Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance was also #2 in Spain). Jonasson’s novel has sold more than one million copies in Sweden, and rights have been sold in 24 languages. Hyperion acquired world English rights and has an October pub date set in the U.S.
Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500 Jobs Bio a Global Hit: International Bestsellers December 2011 A few days after Amazon announced that the Steve Jobs biography was its top-selling book of 2011 (combined print and e-book sales), the book debuted on bestseller charts around the world, including the three countries highlighted this month. Steve Jobs was #3 in France and the Netherlands, and atop Spain’s nonfiction list, where it knocked Pedro J. Ramírez’s The First Wreck to #2. Also on the nonfiction list in France, Stéphane Hessel has two titles including Indignez-vous!, which was released in the U.S. by Twelve in September as Time for Outrage.
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500 International Bestsellers, November 2011: Literary Novels Hit in Germany, Italy The top three fiction titles in Germany were all debuts in October, led by In Times of Fading Light, which recently won the 2011 German Book Prize and is set for publication in the U.S. by Graywolf Press in fall 2013. Umberto Eco’s newest book, The Prague Cemetery, which debuted at #3, is newly published in the U.S. from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500 Murakami in France, a Debut In Germany: International Bestsellers October, 2011 With Knopf set to release Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 this week in the U.S., the latest novel from the award-winning Japanese author was an instant bestseller in Japan and debuted at #3 in France in September. Topping the French fiction chart last month was The Passenger, the most recent thriller from the Paris-born author Jean-Christophe Grangé. Grangé has been published in the U.S. by a couple of different houses with limited success.
Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500 Canadian Publishing 2011: BookRiff Set for Launch The long awaited launch of BookRiff, the system that promises to let people mix and match content from various sources to create their own book, is now slated for the end of September.
Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500 Canadian Publishing 2011: Challenges and Changes This year Canadian publishers face a triple challenge—tough economic conditions, the first big surge of e-book sales, and a dramatic shift in strategy at Indigo Books & Music, Canada’s largest book retailer. But, as is often said, no one goes into publishing unless he or she is an optimist, so PW is devoting these pages to looking at these challenges for publishers north of the border, and the innovations and strategies they are employing to turn that optimism into results.
Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500 Canadian Publishing 2011: Distribution After the Fall of Fenn February’s news that the distributor H.B. Fenn and Company had filed for bankruptcy sent shock waves throughout the industry, and while the fallout has dissipated some, the industry is still examining what lessons can be drawn from Fenn’s demise. Although Fenn had few Canadian clients, its problems called into question the viability of independent distributors and further deepened concerns about how publishers might get their books to market.