Nov 11 2008
The New York Times reports nervousness among publishers and booksellers as the holiday season approaches. Meanwhile Bertelsmann, the company that owns Random House (which includes Doubleday, Vintage, Crown and many other well known publishers) reported a 0.7% drop in worldwide sales for the first nine months of 2008 but a rise in net profit.
According to a Random House spokesman, USA Random House CEO Markus Dohle has "challenged our sales group to see what we can do as a company on behalf of the larger trade to get people in to the book-buying habit for the holiday season." The result is an ambitious promotional campaign described as a "got milk campaign for books," with the unifying slogan of "Books = Gifts". A number of Random House authors, including Dan Brown, Dean Koontz, Christopher Paolini, and Maya Angelou, will appear in promotional video clips set to run on online bookselling sites.
Herz hopes the effort will endure past Christmas to "other gift-giving times" and says they are "absolutely open to working in partnership with any other house that's interested."
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
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