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Bob Mould Autobiography Goes To Little Brown

Andy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:46:07 +0000

Michael Pietsch, Publisher of Little, Brown and Company, announced today that rock legend Bob Mould, founder of the pioneering American punk band Husker Du, will write his memoir for publication in autumn 2010. Michael Azerrad, author of the bestselling Our Band Could Be Your Life and Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana will collaborate with Mould to tell the full story of his blazing, era-defining life and career.

Guitarist, singer, and songwriter Bob Mould founded the trio Husker Du in Minneapolis in 1979 and his memoir will delve deeply into his life as a musician, as a solo artist, and in his most commercially viable and successful work as leader of ’90s indie rock kingpins Sugar. He will also tell the story of his other lives, including his internal struggle with his sexuality, the coming-out process, and his subsequent embrace of, and service to, the LGBT community; his work as a creative consultant / director in the world of pro wrestling; his work as a record producer, including seminal projects by Soul Asylum and Magnapop; and his foray into electronic / dance music, including the popular BLOWOFF club events held nationwide.

Bob Mould said:

For many years, people have asked if and when I would write my autobiography. I have always looked forward to this point in time, where I could tell my stories, to answer the many questions about the music and the lifestyle, and how they inform the creative process. I have not been alone on this ride: friends and foes, mentors and associates, peers, lovers, all traveling by my side. The ride so far has been incredible, and I hope to do my memory right in documenting the journey.

“The gorgeous rage of Bob Mould’s music seemed like the best possible response to the Reagan ’80s for many music-loving young Americans,” says Michael Pietsch. “To hear firsthand what it was like to make that music, and to build the indie rock world that eventually brought us REM, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Green Day, and much of modern rock, is something that music lovers have awaited for years.”

Bob Mould was represented in the negotiation by his lawyer, Josh Grier of Dreier LLP, and by literary agent Dave Dunton of the Harvey Klinger Agency. Michael Azerrad was represented by agent Lydia Wills of the Paradigm Agency.

According to Billboard Magazine:

In addition, Mould has finished his next solo album, which will be released in March 2009 by Anti-. The follow-up to this year’s “District Line” is “a guitar album,” he writes on his blog, adding that he will tour with a full band in support of it next spring.

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Eliot Fremont-Smith Dies at Age 78

Sarah — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:43:59 +0000

Eliot Fremont-Smith, the former New York Times and Village Voice book critic, National Book Critics Circle President and editor-in-chief of Little, Brown when it was still based in Boston, died Wednesday in Mount Pleasant, S.C., where he lived. He was 78. The cause was heart failure, his wife, Leda Fremont-Smith, said to the NYT’s Motoko Rich, who wrote the obituary that ran in the paper this morning.

In his years at The Times, from 1961 to 1968, first at the Book Review and then as a daily book critic, Fremont-Smith helped usher in an era of modern criticism by tackling the types of books that his predecessors had largely shied away from. He was no stranger to controversy – a Village Voice piece purporting that Jerzy Kozinski had ghost-written much of his work set off a literary firestorm – but also cared chiefly about the books he wrote about. In addition to his wife, Fremont-Smith is survived by his son, Andrew Eliot Fremont-Smith, of New York City.

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UK Booksellers Missing Out on Manga, Publishers Warn

Sarah — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:33:27 +0000

The Bookseller’s Caroline Horn reports that UK publishers are warning booksellers that they are missing out on sales by failing to acknowledge consumer demand for manga. Publishers have been piling into the manga market for the past two years, with Little, Brown‘s Orbit the latest entrant through US list Yen Press this autumn. Random House launched its Tanoshimi imprint last year, while Orion‘s Gollancz started publishing manga in 2005, and Pan Macmillan signed an exclusive sales and distribution deal with manga publisher Tokyopop last summer.

“There is a lot of stock out there, but perhaps the growth in retail space allocated to manga is not keeping step with the amount of titles being published,” said Orbit business manager George Walkley. “In any of the major chains, manga is being under-cooked in terms of space.” Tokyopop UK sales director Dennis McGuirk added: “The issue is about the amount of space dedicated to this sector by high street retailersâ€”manga is not given a huge amount of space so fans are given a limited offering and need to seek out specialists or go online for purchases.”

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Hachette Continues to Mark European Territory

Sarah — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:08:16 +0000

Continuing its bid to make sure that only its titles are distributed through mainland Europe – and not those pesky American editions – Hachette Livre UK hosted its first ever European Seminar this past week, paying for nearly 40 leading European booksellers and distributors to attend. Publishing News reports that guests stayed at the Savoy on Monday night – where the guest speaker was Ian Rankin – and were taken by boat to the Globe Theatre for the seminar on Tuesday, where divisional presentations were made by Hachette’s UK companies, and Little, Brown CEO Ursula Mackenzie outlined why making Europe exclusive would be to their mutual benefit.

In essence, PN says, Hachette maintains that European booksellers will sell more copies of a single edition of a name author, than the combined sales of a UK and US edition. To help achieve this, it is prepared to provide marketing spend for European campaigns, just as if it was the domestic market, and intends to tour more authors in Europe. Monica Richter of The Bookshop in Zurich welcomed the marketing spend and said that English editions “tend to be more popular, closer to European taste. However, having both editions does give the shop a more international atmosphere which our customers enjoy. And we have to stock both at present because we never know which edition will arrive first.”

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If the WSJ Says Stephenie Meyer is the Next Big Thing, It Must Be True

Sarah — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:34:02 +0000

And for once, a headline is both cheeky and sincere; every message board I lurk on and nearly every bookstore I frequent seems to have someone swooning over the romantic adventures of Bella and Edward, starcrossed lovers because he’s a vampire and she isn’t. So no wonder Stephenie Meyer – whose books were originally bought by Little, Brown for $750,000 in a world rights deal- has more than earned out the publisher’s investment. And now, with ECLIPSE selling more than 150,000 copies in its opening day of sales, it is safe to say that “life after Harry” might not be so bad after all.

“We were anticipating the book would be very big, but it has exceeded our expectations,” Steve Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, told Jeff Trachtenberg. “As booksellers, we’re thrilled.” Little, Brown, too, thought ECLIPSE might sell 40,000 copies in its first week based on past success of TWILIGHT and NEW MOON. “I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Megan Tingley, the imprint’s publisher. So they’ve gone back to press, Meyer continues to pack in thousands at signings and it should be interesting to see what the reception will be when the fourth and final volume comes out next year.

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Another “Unexpected” Publishing Success Story

Sarah — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 09:11:03 +0000

The New York Times’ Motoko Rich reports on the bestseller status of former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell‘s LONE SURVIVOR, a dramatic memoir of his time in Afghanistan. Luttrell’s book, with 275,000 copies in print, describes how was the only one of four men on the mission to survive after a violent clash with dozens of Taliban fighters. Eight members of the Seals and eight Army special operations soldiers who came by helicopter to rescue the original four were shot down, and all aboard were killed.

So no wonder the book (which was co-authored with Patrick Robinson and bought by Little, Brown in an auction for a seven-figure advance) been doing well, but the surprise is that so far, LONE SURVIVOR has outsold books about Pat Tillman or Jessica Lynch, and that it’s crawled up to the top of the NYT Bestseller list. Less surprising is how this happened: strong support from military blogs and right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin as well as appearances with Matt Lauer on the TODAY Show with Glenn Beck on the radio and on CNN Headline News. But the media exposure helped regular readers like to find, and then buy, the book. “It’s obvious that there are some people reading it who aren’t traditional military readers,” said Mary McCarthy, director of merchandising at wholesaler Ingram Book Group.

Luttrell said that his main goal was to tell the story of his comrades who did not make it out alive. “Now I think the American public knows who they are, and now they are forever immortalized,” said Luttrell, who added that he has set up a trust with all the proceeds from the book to help the families of the dead and to donate to military charities. “Their memory will never die out, and that’s what I wanted.”

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Piatkus Reveals Reasons for Selling to Little, Brown UK

Sarah — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:00:55 +0000

The Bookseller recently launched a spate of blogs and guest posts, and today’s batch includes a letter from Judy Piatkus, who sold her company to Little, Brown UK earlier this week. And after 28 years of growth, especially three years of “exceptional and profitable growth which has taken us from a turnover of 6.4 million pounds at the end of 2004 to our current level of just under 10 million pounds,” did Piatkus opt to sell now?

The answer is fairly easy: “running a company is a 24/7 commitment and I am ready for a change.” And in Little, Brown, Piatkus found a buyer with a similar ethos to publishing books and treating its authors. “With access to some resources that have never previously been available, we believe that Piatkus will, in the years to come, be an even more formidable force in the marketplace than we are already.”

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Little, Brown UK Buys Piatkus

Sarah — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:45:14 +0000

The Bookseller’s Alison Flood reports that Little, Brown Book Group has acquired independent publisher Piatkus Books. Founder Judy Piatkus will continue as m.d. until the end of the year, when she will retire from publishing. Piatkus, which has a turnover of around Â£10m, will become an independent imprint within Little, Brown. It will continue trading at its current premises until the end of October, after which the team will move to Little, Brown’s new offices at 100 Victoria Embankment.

Little, Brown said it would ask “the majority of the directors and staff” to stay with the business. It added that while a small number of staff may not have continuing roles within Piatkus, they would wherever possible be offered jobs within Little, Brown or the wider Hachette Livre UK group to keep job losses “to an absolute minimum”. The news may quell some rumors of Little, Brown’s eventual demise as an independent imprint within the Hachette rubric, but then again, let’s talk again in six months, shall we?

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Real-life Abduction Affects UK Novel Promotion Plans

Sarah — Fri, 25 May 2007 11:44:28 +0000

The Bookseller reports that Little, Brown UK has decided to pull publicity for a new fiction title about the abduction of a young girl, in the wake of Madeleine McCann‘s disappearance in Portugal more than three weeks ago. Canadian author Barbara Gowdy‘s planned visit to the UK to promote her new book HELPLESS (which has been out in the US since late March but doesn’t drop till June 7th in the UK) has been canceled, and Little, Brown is also reworking its advertising campaign for the title, which centers around the abduction of a nine-year-old girl.

Little, Brown publicity director Susan de Soissons said the decision was made “out of respect” but stressed the book handled the issue of child abduction “intelligently and sensibly. It wouldn’t be proper to put an author into a position where she would have to discuss a real-life case,” she said, adding that Little, Brown hoped Gowdy would visit the UK next summer for the paperback. If this gambit seems reminiscent of what happened to Chris Cleave a couple of years ago when his debut novel INCENDIARY was released at the same time as the 7/7 London bombings, you’d be correct. What’s surprising to me is that it’s Gowdy’s novel affected and not another Little, Brown title centering around a similar topic in a more overt fashion: Mark Giminez‘s THE ABDUCTION. But in that case, the book’s been out since March and perhaps has had its day in the promotional sun…

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Rosie De Courcy Joins Random House UK

Sarah — Wed, 23 May 2007 06:25:26 +0000

The Bookseller reports that veteran publisher Rosie de Courcy has joined Trevor Dolby‘s new imprint at Random House. She starts immediately as publishing director of the as-yet unnamed imprint, with plans to publish in the region of 6 to 8 novels each year. De Courcy was a founding member of three start ups in British publishing â€“ Futura, Century and Orion. Most recently she has been editor at Little, Brown UK.

Dolby said: “When I first discussed the imprint with Random House, Rosie was the only person I wanted to publish the fiction. She is quite simply an iconic publisher, one of the great editors of the last 25 years. Itâ€™s a privilege and a thrill that sheâ€™s agreed to join me.”

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Hillary Books: What’s the Rush?

Sarah — Tue, 22 May 2007 08:56:33 +0000

For those keeping score, last month Knopf announced that it was publishing Carl Bernstein‘s 640-page book A WOMAN IN CHARGE: THE LIFE OF HILLARY CLINTON, originally planned for the fall, on June 19, surprising Little, Brown, which was scheduled to publish its own Hillary book by Jeff Nerth and Don Van Natta Jr., HER WAY: THE HOPES AND AMBITIONS OF HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, on Aug. 28. Then, this month, Little, Brown said it had also decided to move its publication date to June 19, making the rivalry abundantly clear.

Now the release date wars have really heated up, reports the New York Times’ Motoko Rich. Bernstein’s book will now publish on June 5, with Nerth and Van Natta’s to follow only three days later. Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards said the push-up correlates to the Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire on June 3 which “presented a significant coverage event for our book.” Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch explained HER WAY would be excerpted in The New York Times Magazine on June 3, which prompted the move of its on-sale date to June 8. “It’s not Belmont, mind you,” Bogaards said, “but I like the fact that our horse is already saddled up and in the paddock, ready to run, shall we say.” Thankfully, Pietsch did not engage in any horse metaphors, and the books can’t be moved up any further lest booksellers’ headaches worsen..

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Good News for Lagardere

Sarah — Fri, 11 May 2007 06:18:14 +0000

Lagardere, parent company of Hachette Book Group (as well as Hachette’s UK arm comprising Hodder Headline, Orion and Little, Brown Book Group) reports its first quarter revenues and for the publishing arm, revenues rose by 29.2% to 411.2m euros (or ($554 million), largely due to the consolidation of 83m euros of sales from Time Warner Book Group. On a like-for-like basis, revenues to end March 2007 advanced by 3.0%. They report that the 2007 outlook for Lagardere Publishing is good, especially for Education in France and Spain and for Literature in the United States.

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The Perils of the Misblurb

Sarah — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:14:06 +0000

Though we at GalleyCat have taken issue from time to time – okay, often – with Henry Alford‘s contributions at the New York Times Book Review, I must say up front that I quite enjoyed his recent piece on how publishers take a perfectly neutral or negative review and mine it for any and all positive words in order to fashion a blurb out of it. Take what happened to Time Magazine book critic Lev Grossman, who was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier‘s novel THIRTEEN MOONS that included a one-word quotation – “Genius” – attributed to Time. Grossman was confused, Alford reports, because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”

Alford continues with many more examples (including one from his own reviewing past, when Little, Brown transformed his “tour-de-farce” about David Sedaris‘s NAKED into “tour-de-force) and explanations from the publishing world. “We get tempted and we get desperate,” Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said. “We publish over 100 books a year. I know we make mistakes. But we try to obey the rules.” To him, that means not changing the wording or the meaning of reviews. Paul Slovak, the publisher of Viking, says part of what keeps the house honest is the desire to maintain “good relationships” with book reviewers. “Michiko Kakutani wouldnâ€™t be happy if we pulled two words of praise out of a negative review,” he said, referring to the chief book critic of The New York Times.

And as for what happened to Grossman, I am sooooo not buying Random House associate publisher Tom Perry‘s denial of any misblurbing. “We were being very short and punchy,” he said. “We have limited space.” Sure, see that pig overhead? Its flight patterns don’t like misappropriated blurbs, either…

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Petition Circulating to Save AJC Books Section

Sarah — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:45:24 +0000

In the wake of this week’s shocker announcement that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had let go its books editor, Teresa Weaver, in a cost-cutting measure, the literary community in Atlanta is mobilizing in full force. Wordsmith Bookstore owner Zachary Steele expressed his dismay at the move. “the AJC is depriving us all of that literate touch and in the process, I believe, showing how completely little they understand their readers and what it is that they want out of their paper.” In the comments section of that post, Little, Brown publicity manager Shannon Byrne (who works remotely from her Atlanta home) has posted a petition (which is reprinted after the jump) which she emailed to AJC editor Julia Wallace.

According to PW Daily, Byrne received an automated response stating “We are not killing our book coverage or book pages…. We will be using freelancers, established news services and our staff to provide stories about books of interest to our readers and the local literary community.” Byrneâ€™s response to Wallaceâ€™s message? “I donâ€™t buy it for one minute.”

continued…

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Not Giving Up the Ghost

Sarah — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:21:49 +0000

Aside from making my debut LA Times Book Review column, “Dark Passages”, on ghostwriters going solo, the Arizona Republic’s Kerry Lengel tackled the same subject, interviewing a slew of mystery & suspense staples (like yours truly) as well as Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch. But if that isn’t enough, the Women’s National Book Association will host a discussion on the same topic Wednesday evening at the Small Press Center. Join panelists Meg Leder (editor at Perigee Books), ghostwriter-centric agent Madeline Morel, Emily Heckman and Stephanie Gunning as they discuss, as moderator Janet Reid terms it, “the business of ghost writing, co-writing, ‘as told to’ and other forms of ‘invisible writing’ from the authors who write it, an agent who sells it and an editor who acquires it.”

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