Warner Books - GalleyCat

No Chance of Evanovich/Cannell Collaboration

Sarah — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:56:02 +0000

When Warner Books – now, of course, known to one and all as Grand Central Publishing – first announced that Janet Evanovich and Stephen Cannell would be joining forces for a new series, it did so with a few hiccups. The deal was first posted, then taken back down, then put back again. It seemed a minor point, something to forget about – not a harbinger of things to come.

Earlier this month, Sarah Wendell at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books got a tip from an anonymous reader wondering why Evanovich’s site, after trumpeting the upcoming collaboration, no longer mentioned the book anywhere. Anonymous had read chapter one, posted on June 1, and when she went back on July 1, there was no chapter two – or chapter one, for that matter. And things got even stranger. “If you type “no chance” site:evanovich.com into a Google search, there’s remnants of quite a few pages – but they’re all 404s,” reported the tipster. “Meanwhile, Cannell used to have it on his news page, home page and appearances page – those mentions are gone, too.” An excerpt was still available on Cannell’s website as of July 9, and is now, but that’s about it.

And that’s about all we’ll see, thanks to Wendell’s update yesterday. According to her source at an unnamed Big Box Bookstore, “the Evanovich/Cannell novel NO CHANCE has ‘no chance’ of being published. The book has been canceled with no date for rescheduling.” When reached for comment yesterday evening, Evanovich confirmed the news. “Steve [Cannell] and I ran into scheduling problems,” she said by email. “We still have an active partnership but the project is on hold right now. As of right now we haven’t a publishing date.” Interestingly, the Amazon page remains active, though that may not be for much longer…

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Oliver Joins Endeavor Book Division

Sarah — Wed, 09 May 2007 07:40:33 +0000

PW Daily reports that Rebecca Oliver, last with Grand Central Publishing, has joined Endeavor‘s New York book division as a literary agent. She will oversee foreign and domestic subsidiary rights and work alongside Richard Abate, who recently created the agency’s East Coast book division. Oliver had been at Grand Central Publishing (formerly Warner Books) since 1999, first as associate director of domestic rights and most recently as associate director of subsidiary Rights, handling serial and translation rights for GCP and its imprints. In 2001, she oversaw the launch of the Hachette Book Group’s large print program.

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Warner Books Morphs into Grand Central Publishing

Sarah — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:35:36 +0000

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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Regan a Clef and More Publishing-Inspired Books

Sarah — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 08:43:17 +0000

AP’s Hillel Italie is the latest reporter to profile Bridie Clark and her debut novel BECAUSE SHE CAN. No matter how much she and Warner Books, the book’s publisher, swear up and down that the dragon-lady boss character, Vivian Grant, bears no resemblance to Judith Regan, about the only major difference is that Grant is a blonde and Regan’s a brunette. But the piece is more fun for who gets quoted about the paucity of insider-ish novels about our favorite industry. “It isn’t that kind of business,” says Jason Epstein, a longtime editor with Doubleday and Random House whose many authors have included Norman Mailer and E.L. Doctorow. “It’s very gentlemanly, and there isn’t a lot of scandal to write about. You publish a book, it sells or it doesn’t sell, and then you publish another one.”

Other editors who get ink include Rob Weisbach (who namechecks Adam Davies‘ THE FROG KING as a publishing-drenched novel and praises Clark for her good editing skills!) and Robert Gottlieb, who cited Herman Wouk‘s YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE, a 1961 novel about a publishing sensation who lives fast and dies faster. “But publishing is not a glamorous business,” Gottlieb says. “It involves people sitting home and reading long manuscripts and then putting their pencils on the paper and making notations. Someone may set a novel in the publishing industry, but I don’t see it as the basis for a strong novel.”

Strong, no; vivid, yes, but then there are certain scenes in Olivia Goldsmith‘s THE BESTSELLER that are impossible to clear from our heads…

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