The title has been published under the pseudonym Mark Owen, but Fox News reported that they discovered his real identity.

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Here’s an excerpt: “Certainly, there would be fewer places to sell books. Independents account for less than 10 percent of business, and Target, Walmart and the like carry far smaller selections than traditional bookstores. Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense, suddenly seems a reach. Marketing books via Twitter, and relying on reviews, advertising and perhaps an appearance on the Today show doesn’t sound like a winning plan.”

What do you think–could the publishing industry survive without Barnes & Noble? The article included a staggering comparison between the stock prices of the leading booksellers: Barnes & Noble was valued at $719 million and Amazon was valued at $88 billion.

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Over at the New York Times, reporter Julie Bosman covered how publishers are taking advantage of this popular show to promote historical fiction and biography.

One reader added this comment: “The poets who wrote of the horrors of World War I represent some of the greatest poets of all time. I’m not referring to Rupert Brooke, who romanticized the war, but to Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, and particularly to Wilfred Owen [pictured], who died a week before the armistice and whose poems are truly heartbreaking. Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is one of the best.”

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Maybe it’s because the current edition of Publishing Revolving Door takes me on a time warp all the way back to 2003 – ancient history for some, but important history nonetheless. Menaker, after 26 years at the New Yorker, first joined Random House in 1995 and continued uninterrupted there save for a sixteen-month stint at HarperCollins, which ended in 2003. The company he returned to was not the company he left behind. They had moved to sleek new offices in an office condominium between 55th and 56th streets; Ann Godoff was gone in one of the most publicized oustings in recent memory; Little Random had been absorbed in the same umbrella containing Ballantine and its holdings; and at the center of the new-look imprint was, and still is, president and publisher Gina Centrello. Taken together, these were clear signs of the company’s increasingly commercial shift that would play out in a major way over the next four-plus years. And yet Menaker was hired to give Little Random a distinct literary bent, which he did in the form of novelists Benjamin Kunkel, Arthur Phillips, Gary Shteyngart and Jon Clinch as well as former poet laureate Billy Collins, even if said acquisitions didn’t necessarily pay off in terms of sales.

No matter how much Menaker, Centrello and the Random House brass want to downplay the bottom line, it’s difficult to play by their rules in light of the company’s most recent shakeups – not to mention their gutting of the sales force, Bertelsmann‘s attempts to patch up the mothership after getting scared straight by former minority shareholder GBL’s threats to take their holdings public (Bookspan, anyone?) and a downturn in profits. All of which has to make one wonder about the overall health of Random House – and if more “unexpected” news is just lurking around the corner.

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The New York Times’ Julie Bosman has the scoop on the long-awaited name change for Warner Books: as of now (with an official launch at Book Expo in early June) the Hachette imprint will be known as Grand Central Publishing – a move happening just in time for the company to switch offices from the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue to 237 Park Avenue, closer to the famous train station. “I was very nervous,” Jamie Raab, the publisher of Warner Books, said in a telephone interview with Bosman. “It’s like suddenly being told that not only are you being sold, but you have to give up the name you’ve lived with your whole life.”

After trying on a host of names for size, Grand Central Publishing, Raab said, conveyed the company’s wide range of readers and the many genres it publishes. It pointedly omits the word “books,” a gesture to electronic and other emerging forms of publishing that go beyond ink and paper. The first books to carry the Grand Central Publishing imprint are expected to be on the fall 2007 list, which includes a novel by David Baldacci, a memoir by Rosie O’Donnell and a graphic novel by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman. And the new logo is music to Raab’s ears. “I hated it,” she said of the bulky “W” logo hearkening back to the imprint’s creation in 1970. “It’s a period piece. It probably looked really good in the ’70s.”

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Powell’s has enlisted Doug Biro, a former creative director at RCA Records and music video director, to direct the first film. It will have its debut on June 1 in Manhattan during BookExpo America, a widely attended annual gathering of publishers, booksellers and authors.

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“Whatever notions I had about people coming to Bellevue in shackles and wild hair have been long ago dispelled,” said Erika Goldman, a veteran of publishing houses like Simon & Schuster and Scribner’s and the imprint’s editorial director. “But coming into a hospital every day to come to my little office and do publishing is a very different experience.” And she, as well as publisher Jerome Lowenstein (whose original literary journal Bellevue Literary Review was the impetus for the publishing imprint) harbor no illusions about the connotations of the Bellevue name. Younger folks may forget, but older generations have not. “hey just think of Bellevue as a psychiatric ward.”

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“It was almost an ‘oh my God’ moment,” said Lissa Warren, publicity director for Da Capo Press. “There aren’t that many television shows that will have on serious authors. And when they do have one, it’s almost startling.” Part of the surprise, publishers said, is that the Comedy Central audience is more serious than its reputation allows. They aren’t just YouTube obsessives but a much more diverse – and book-buying – audience. “It’s the television equivalent of NPR,” Martha Levin, publisher of Free Press, said. “You have a very savvy, interested audience who are book buyers, people who do go into bookstores, people who are actually interested in books.”

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And with the 1 million copies-plus success of Barack Obama‘s THE AUDACITY OF HOPE, most presidential hopefuls – and publishers – are after similar success. The 2008 campaign season is the time to rerelease forgotten titles, sign unpublished candidates and, if they’re lucky, laugh all the way to the bank as they reap sales from best-selling political books. “What you have, essentially, is a celebrity with built-in press coverage,” said David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. But sometimes a strong candidate won’t see big sales with his book; 2000′s A CHARGE TO KEEP by a certain George W. Bush was dismissed by critics as an expanded stump speech mostly written by Karen Hughes. The lesson? “Candidates can win,” said Halperin, “even if their books don’t sell well.”

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Last fall, Carole Stuart, the publisher of Barricade Books, had observed Smith’s recent troubles, notably, the death of her 20-year-old son and the paternity dispute over her newborn daughter. “I just thought, so much has happened in the 10 years since the first book came out that it would make a good trade paperback,” Stuart said. “Then of course last week she dies. And so we suddenly got really, really attractive to the distributors and to the book buyers.” So attractive that booksellers and retailers have ordered thousands of copies of the book, sending it into an additional printing of 15,000 copies, a significant number for a publisher like Barricade, which puts out a modest 20 titles a year. And first editions of the book are retailing at used bookshops at $200 or higher.

No wonder Stuart had to add the caveat that “we didn’t kill her or anything” though she admits there’s lots of dough to be made. A French publisher called, wanting to buy the rights for a French version, and a Japanese agent wants to represent it in Asia, she said. An agent in Los Angeles and two in New York are competing to bid on the film rights to the book. “I think we’re probably going to make a quick deal for a TV movie,” she said. “Watch for it on Lifetime.”

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But once it’s done and in shelves, he’ll put the blame for various CIA screwups on other people’s shoulders – maybe. “George is a born politician and he wants everyone to love him, but in order to sell books he’s going to have to throw somebody out of the lifeboat,” said a former colleague who wished to remain anonymous. And no matter what, this will just be one account of many. “Because of the nature of intelligence work, you can never totally set the record straight,” said former Senator Bob Kerrey, a member of the Sept. 11 commission who has known Tenet since the two worked together on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The record is always going to be a little bit murky.”

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The New York Times’ Julie Bosman gets a hold of Turkish writer Elif Shafak on her one and only American stop – a tour curtailed from six cities to one as a result of the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish newspaper editor of Armenian ancestry and a close friend of Shafak. It also didn’t help that Shafak herself was on trial for “insulting Turkishness,” a charge that’s nabbed Orhan Pamuk (though both he and she were acquitted.) “A writer is always more than a writer in Turkey, much more so than in America,” Shafak said. “We don’t discuss the writing, but we discuss the writer herself. Eventually, every writer has to face the question- are you ready to be a public intellectual?”

She’s also wondering if she’s ready to write again after the recent birth of her first child. “After giving birth, I couldn’t write for a while,” she said. “The novel is such a selfish genre, and novelists are self-centered people. You live with those characters you create. When you are raising a kid, you can’t be selfish anymore.” Which might explain her thoughts on a potential new novel. “I think it will be, in a way, about a withdrawal into a cocoon. That’s how I feel right now.”

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Though Julie Bosman and Motoko Rich don’t flat-out ask this question in their New York Times piece about the Harry Potter VII publication date announcement, this paragraph mid-way expresses the sentiment just as clearly:

It is hard to imagine how the publishing industry will ever replace the sensation that spawned midnight parties and all-night lines to get the books the moment they went on sale. When HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE, the sixth in the series, was published in July 2005, it sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours.

Especially as the answer is plainly obvious: they can’t. And to its credit, Scholastic isn’t pretending they can, though they do hope future projects will compensate for the revenue lost by their being nothing quite like the Potter phenomenon in the pipeline.

Then again, there might be; who would have expected the series to hit as it did when the first volume was released ten years ago? But even if one can be supremely confident that lightning will strike the bottle again – and that it won’t be aping what made J.K. Rowling‘s series so mega-successful – actively looking for that future success is, and always will be, a crapshoot. And unlike what J.P. Morgan analyst Frederick Searby thinks, even if Rowling were to “come out of retirement and pull a Michael Jordan” there’s little likelihood she’ll ever be able to replicate the success of the Potter books. Then again, she doesn’t really need to.

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And the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that a Jan. 31 hearing has been scheduled on AMS proposal to establish procedures to sell all or part of the company or to find an investor willing to put up new capital or refinance its debt.

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Regan also issued a statement about her namesake imprint’s closing, saying she was “blessed to have the opportunity to work with hundreds of fascinating authors over the years and honored to have published them under my name.” Such magnanimous words were a far cry from comments made about Newsweek’s OJ Simpson article on her namesake Sirius satellite radio show, as Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici reported. When Regan’s producer, Howie Green, slipped up and said the chapter recounted “how [Simpson] would have committed the crime,” Regan snapped at him. “No, it was how he committed the crime. Even today the mistakes the media made have been repeated by you, my producer, because it is so inundated, so insidious.”

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