Archives: December 2008

• 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 Steve Rubin were immediately displaced; the first wave of additional job cuts came a few weeks later.

• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt went into what outside observers quickly decided was a freefall: One day after the resignation of publisher Rebecca Saletan, executive editor Ann Patty broke the news of her own firing, after which we were hit with insider accounts of layoffs throughout the company.
• Other publishing companies that laid off employees in December: Thomas Nelson, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. (Macmillan had also implemented a salary freeze for employees making more than $50K a year, as did the Penguin Group.)
• In the midst of all this upheaveal, somebody’s always ready to complain, but we want no part of that death culture. One day soon, it’ll all settle down, even if everything seems to be up in the air at this time.

Oh! We almost forgot: Over the holidays, another memoirist turned out to be a big phony: Berkley cancelled the publication of Herman Rosenblat‘s Angel at the Fence when the author admitted that he did not actually meet his wife from opposite sides of the barbed wire fence at Buchenwald twelve years before their first date. As HarperStudio chief Bob Miller pointed out, everybody rushed to blame Oprah for Rosenblat’s ability to perpetuate his fraud as far as he did.

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• 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.
• Radar claimed that Sarah Palin was close to a $7 million book deal—to be honest, we were amazed anybody took the story seriously.
• Michael Crichton and John Leonard both died of cancer, a day apart from each other.
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt declared a “freeze” on new acquisitions. This prompted a bunch of outside observers to declare the publishing apocalypse had begun…

• 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 isolated [and] too insular” to produce real literature, like they do in Europe.

• The New York Observer added to the aura of doom, gloom, agony, and despair within the Manhattan publishing community, but at least this time the diagnosis wasn’t fatal—just the arrival of “an age in which the gambling spirit that has kept book publishing exciting gives way to a shabby, predictable environment” where only celebrities and authors who’ve already proven themselves are likely to get book deals.
• Donna Tartt left Knopf, her publisher of nearly two decades, and sold her third novel to Little, Brown.
• Doubleday laid off several employees; we considered the possible explanations—could it be Dan Brown‘s fault?
• It’s taken nearly 20 years, but Nick Cave finally finished his second novel.

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 American publisher; The Jewel of Medina was also picked up for UK publication by Gibson Square, although a firebombing of that publisher’s offices derailed those plans.
• Oprah Winfrey picked The Story of Edgar Sawtelle for her book club; GalleyCat readers saw that coming a mile away, even if the blog’s senior editor couldn’t.
• Much time was spent wondering whether Sarah Palin was a book-banning fool. Technically, she wasn’t, but not for lack of trying, especially where the gays were concerned.
• David Foster Wallace committed suicide; legendary publisher Robert Giroux died in his sleep.
  

• 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 debate over censorhsip with much posturing on both sides. All of this controversy, Jones told us in one of her first interviews, came as a complete surprise. None of this was good for Random House’s reputation, but they didn’t come out of it nearly as badly as Denise Spellberg, the woman who sabotaged Jones’s path to publication. (Though only briefly, as we’ll see in later posts.)

• Chelsea Green had a book about Barack Obama they wanted to rush to market; they weren’t going to have finished copies in time for the Democratic National Convention, so they distributed coupons for an exclusive print-on-demand edition available only through Amazon.com. That got indie booksellers good and mad; even Barnes & Noble cancelled its order in retaliation. But the issue wasn’t that simple.
• Threshold, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, published a book called Obama Nation written by one of the guys who swiftboated John Kerry in 2004, which was good for a couple days of fake controversy.

• 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 to a book deal for Pausch and WSJ reporter Jeffrey Zaslow, and when the book came out in April, it was an immediate bestseller.

• Science fiction writer, poet, and literary critic Thomas M. Disch committed suicide, in between the publication of his last novel and a collection of short stories.
• Twelve publisher Jon Karp wrote an article about the state of the industry, which argued for establishing a quality niche rather than trying to be everything to everybody; Richard Nash of Soft Skull expanded on the idea.

• 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 Simon Spotlight Entertainment announced an embargoed memoir with a 350,000-copy print run that turned out to be from Madonna’s brother? Boy, that was something, wasn’t it? Good times.
• A dispute over cover art prompted us to ask: “Who peed in Dan Savage‘s cornflakes?”
• Emily Gould went on vacation and never came back; towards the end of the month, we realized she had a book proposal making the rounds. This led to ridiculous speculation that book publishers might fear Gawker. Free Press picked up the collection of autobiographical essays in early July.

• 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, though, who knows when it’ll come out?

• We hung out with Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Ford, talking about how real literature doesn’t make genre distinctions.
• We helped Michael Gross and the Metropolitan Museum of Art bury the hatchet, at least as far as Gross’s cover art problems were concerned. It was all a big misunderstanding!
• John McCain may have gotten the Republican presidential nomination, but Ron Paul sold more books.
• Doubleday promoted Chuck Palahniuk‘s latest novel, Snuff, with fake porn trailers.

• 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 unrelated move, Hyperion children’s book executives Alessandra Balzer and Donna Bray soon followed.
• Grant Morrison came to New York Comic-Con and blew everyone’s mind.
• Jane Smiley read Jennifer Weiner‘s latest novel and saw pink.
• Lexus paid a bunch of authors to take turns writing chapters of a road trip novel, starring the Lexus IS F.
• Aaron Greenspan, the young man who claims he’s the true inventor of Facebook, decided to self-publish his memoirs, telling us he was doing it from a position of strength.

• 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 reporter that the paper’s publishing correspondent, Motoko Rich, uncovered the truth about Love and Consequences. While pundits were quick to blame the book’s editor, Seltzer’s early supporters denied responsibility, reviewers excused themselves for not spotting the fake, and hand-wringing liberals argued that society was to blame for her actions.

• All this attention to Seltzer must have pleased Misha Defonseca no end, since it distracted people from talking about what a big phony she was, and all that stuff in her memoir about hiding from the Nazis in the woods with a wolf pack never really happened.
• British memoirist Sebastian Horsley tried to do an American book tour, but was turned away by homeland security. Everybody still came to his party and drank in his defense, though.
• Stuff White People Like got a book deal, which blew people’s minds.