Sincere thanks to BookBrunch for all of their articles republished in the blog each week. Specific acknowledgements are made to them as copyright holders. If you have learned something new about publishing and the book trade or perhaps discovered a title you otherwise might not have read and enjoyed, all credit to the BookBrunch team.

New edition of Clark’s Publishing Agreements coming next year Clark’s Publishing Agreements: A Book of Precedents (Eleventh Edition) is set for publication in February by Bloomsbury Professional, with Lynette Owen as General Editor, and all royalties donated to the Book Trade Charity. Reviewing a previous edition, Martin Woodhead said: “It is a true tour de…

Parents prefer to read old classics to children ahead of new fiction The Oxford University Press survey gathered the views of 4,000 parents across the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and China. When asked what their favourite book or author was to read to their child, parents overwhelmingly named Roald Dahl as their top pick, 60…

Bloomsbury unveils plans for Harry Potter’s 25th Bloomsbury has unveiled early plans for the celebration of the 25th anniversary of publication of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first novel in her record-breaking seven-novel sequence. A silver anniversary paperback edition of the novel, illustrated by Jonny Duddle and emblazoned with a lightning…

The BookBrunch Report: How book publicity pivoted in 2021 For the companies we spoke to, the pandemic has been a time of difficulty but also opportunity; a moment to wipe the slate clean and reconsider what we thought possible. From clever usage of billboards and surprise pop-ups to leveraging digital social booms in TikTok, our…

Daunt: ‘Almost everyone will get the book they want’ James Daunt, head of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble, reasssured listeners to Radio 4’s You and Yours yesterday that Waterstones was “very, very full of books at the moment”, when asked about possible shortages in the run-up to Christmas. But he did imply that some titles…

Wilbur Smith dies Wilbur Smith, a bestselling writer of adventure stories since publication of When the Lion Feeds in 1964, has died at the age of 88. Smith was published for a large part of his career by Wm Heinemann and Pan, and then by Macmillan and Pan. He moved to HarperCollins in 2012, and…

Lost scripts find a home at BBC Audio BBC Audio announced, in partnership with Dancing Ledge Productions, the release of Unmade Movies – ‘a series of unproduced screenplays from globally celebrated writers’ – as digital downloads from next February. According to the publication announcement: ‘These lost treasures of movie history with their spectacular scripts from…

HarperCollins buys Pavilion HarperCollins (HC) is to buy illustrated publisher Pavilion Books. The imprints Collins & Brown, Pavilion, Portico and Robson will transfer to HarperCollins’ HQ and Mills & Boon division (under Lisa Milton), while National Trust Publishing will move to Collins Learning (Alex Beecroft), and Pavilion Children’s to Farshore (Cally Poplak). The Batsford and…

Hachette launches how-to guide to writing diversity in fiction Vaseem Khan, author of the Malabar House historical crime novels, is to present a series of videos offering a best practice guide to writing diversity in fiction for Hachette UK’s Future Bookshelf. Turning the Page: A Best Practice Guide to Writing Cultural Diversity in Fiction is…