bookpublishing

Some very welcome news today! Bookstore sales from August are up. According to PW:

For one of the few times this year, August gains in bookstore sales outpaced increases posted by the entire retail segment. According to preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau, bookstore sales rose 5.4% in August, helped no doubt by solid sales in college bookstores. Sales for all of retail were flat. For the first eight months of the year, bookstore sales were up 2.4%, to $11.24 billion, while the entire retail segment had a 2.8% increase.

It’s encouraging, but I doubt anyone’s going to be throwing a party to celebrate. Hold onto those gains!

The industry is slow this week because everyone’s at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and news of the goings-on is reaching us gradually. PW reports that:

Two major deals are currently underway for novels by U.K. authors. The first buzz-worthy deal is for a book called Heresy by S.J. Parriss that is currently on auction in the U.K. with two high six figures offers on the table. Rep’d by Curtis Brown, the novel, which is set in the late 1500’s in England and is the first in a planned series, follows a “renegade monk” who stumbles on a series of murders at the University of Oxford while working undercover there (in the Queen’s service) to foil Catholic assassination schemes being hatched against the monarch. Parriss is a pseudonym for Stephanie Merritt, who’s written two novels published by Faber as well as the memoir The Devil Within…
The other big U.K. deal, from Janklow & Nesbit, is for a novel called Ruby’s Spoon by Anna Lawrence Pietroni. Tina Bennett, working from New York, has sold the book for a large (but still undisclosed) sum, to the Random House U.K. imprint Chatto. Lucie Whitehouse, who’s handling translation rights, said she’s been getting inundated with requests on the manuscript. More details to come on the book and the U.K. deal.

You can read more news about the Book Fair here.