BTW News Briefs

Publishers Lunch Releases Buzz Books’ Spring/Summer Adult and YA Titles

Publishers Lunch has gathered excerpts from 60 buzzed-about books scheduled for publication this spring and summer in two free e-books: Buzz Books 2016: Spring/Summer, which presents excerpts from 40 adult books, and Buzz Books 2016: Young Adult Spring/Summer, which contains excerpts from 20 upcoming young adult and middle-grade novels.

The consumer edition of each volume is available via the Buzz Books website, which has easy download links for Kobo, iBooks Store, Nook, Google Play, and Kindle, while the trade edition, which includes marketing and publicity information on all of the titles, along with click-throughs to read or request full digital galleys on most, can be ordered at PublishersMarketplace.com or through NetGalley.

AAUP Member Presses to Launch Diversity Fellowship

Four members of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) — the University of Washington Press, MIT Press, Duke University Press, and the University of Georgia Press — have plans to launch the University Press Diversity Fellowship Program, a collaborative program “intended to address the marked lack of diversity present across the publishing industry.”

Via a $682,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded to the University of Washington, the program will “create a pipeline program to diversify academic publishing by offering apprenticeships in acquisitions departments.”

For each of the next three years, the Mellon grant will fund cohorts of four fellows, one at each participating publisher. Fellows will have “significant personal experience and engagement with diverse communities and a demonstrated ability to bring the understandings gleaned from such engagement to the daily work of academic publishing.”

The program will offer each fellow one-on-one mentoring opportunities and monthly video conferences led by staff at partner presses, and each cohort will be invited to attend two AAUP Annual Meetings.

AAP Partners With United Negro College Fund in Diversity Initiative

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is partnering with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to provide paid internships to high-achieving students from historically black colleges and universities as a way to increase diverse hiring in the publishing industry.

The partnership will offer a maximum of 10 paid summer internships spread across editorial, marketing, publicity, sales and digital engineering at a number of major publishing houses, including Cengage, Elsevier, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Scholastic, and W.W. Norton.

The internships, which will send students to New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, or St. Louis, will be awarded to African American students who display strong leadership and writing skills and maintain at least a GPA of 3.0. Juniors and seniors at any of the 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities can apply for the internships online by February 22 via the UNCF website or at the AAP’s Bookjobs.com.

Chronicle Books to Distribute Hardie Grant Books in North America

San Francisco-based publisher Chronicle Books announced last week that it has entered into an agreement to distribute Hardie Grant Books in North America.

Hardie Grant Books, a Melbourne-based publisher of illustrated books, is part of the Hardie Grant Publishing Group. Chronicle Books has been distributing titles from Quadrille Publishing, another Hardie Grant Publishing Group company, for one season.

Starting with titles for fall 2016, Chronicle Books and Raincoast Books, its Canadian distributor, will sell approximately 40 titles a season. Hardie Grant Publishing will also hire a marketing and publicity executive to work on both Quadrille and Hardie Grant Books out of the Chronicle Books office.

Eleven Publishers Sign with IPG and its Subsidiaries

Independent Publishers Group (IPG) has signed distribution deals with 11 indie publishers, the company announced last week.

As of January 1, 2016, IPG began distributing titles for Pelican Book Group, a Christian fiction publisher.

Trafalgar Square Publishing, a subsidiary of IPG, has signed four publishers as distribution clients: as of July 1, 2016, it will distribute Top That Publishing, a U.K.-based children’s publisher, and Melbournestyle Books, which specializes in children’s books and adult contemporary culture and history books. Beginning in fall 2016, Trafalgar will also distribute titles form BookLife, a new U.K. publisher of nonfiction children’s books, and Jonnie Rocket, a small U.K. children’s publisher founded by author John Chapman.

As of January 1, 2016, River North Editions, the academic distribution arm of IPG, began distributing titles from CAST Professional Publishing, the publishing arm of CAST, a nonprofit education research and advocacy organization.

Beginning in spring 2016, Art Stock Books, IPG’s distributor of high-quality illustrated books, will begin distributing titles for Lund Humphries Publishers, a British publisher of specialist illustrated art books.

IPG Spanish Books will begin distributing Spanish language nonfiction publisher Editorial Alma on February 1, 2016. It has also signed agreements to distribute three other Spanish language publishers starting in fall 2016: Plaza y Valdés, an academic publisher based in Madrid, Spain; Primerapersona, a bilingual publisher that focuses on educational books for children and young adults; and Creotz, which publishes bilingual children’s books that focus on teaching about morals and values.

National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees Announced

On Monday, January 18, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced the nominees for its awards honoring the outstanding books of 2015 in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, criticism, and poetry.

The nominees include:

Fiction 

• The Sellout, by Paul Beatty (FSG)
• Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
• The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House)
• The Tsar of Love and Techno, by Anthony Marra (Hogarth)
• Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction

• SPQR: A History of Rome, by Mary Beard (Liveright)
• Give Us the Ballot, by Ari Berman (FSG)
• Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau)
• Dreamland, by Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury)
• What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, by Brian Seibert (FSG)

Autobiography

• The Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander (Grand Central)
• The Odd Woman and the City, by Vivian Gornick (FSG)
• Bettyville, by George Hodgman (Viking)
• Negroland, by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon)
• H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald (Grove)

The NBCC also announced several award winners on Monday, including the John Leonard First Book Prize to Kirstin Valdez Quade for Night at the Fiestas (Norton); the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing to Carlos Lozada; and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award to Wendell Berry.

The complete list of nominees can be found on the NBCC website. The winners will be named March 17 at a ceremony at the New School in New York City.

2016 Edgar Nominees Announced

The nominees for the 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, also known as the Edgars, were announced Tuesday morning, January 19.

The awards, which are presented by the Mystery Writers of America, honor the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction, and television published or produced in 2015. The Edgars will be presented at the 70th gala banquet awards ceremony on April 28 in New York City.

A full list of the nominees can be found here.

Book Tech Startups Named Winners in 1440 Accelerator Program

Seven book tech startups from around the world have been selected to participate in the 1440 Accelerator program for publishing innovation, sponsored by Ingram Content Group and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

The participants are:

• Authorpad Publishing, led by McWhilton Chikwenengere, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe
• Authorship.me, led by Roberto Machado de Campos, Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Freenters, led by Rho Kook Song, Chicago, Illinois
• Leafless, led by Richard Billings, Memphis, Tennessee
• PiracyTrace, led by Scott La Counte, Anaheim, California
• PublishSoSimply, led by Michal Majewski, Poznan, Poland
• Woodpie, led by Anuradha Bajpai, Bangalore, India

The 14-week business-building workshop, which begins January 31 and ends May 9, 2016, will be held onsite at the Entrepreneur Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Participants in the 1440 Accelerator program, which was named for the year Johannes Gutenberg perfected his printing press technology, were selected from applicants from 14 countries across six continents.

BookExpo America Announces Library, Children’s, and Self-Publishing Programming

BookExpo America has announced that it will partner with the American Library Association (ALA) to create programming for librarians at the 2016 trade show in Chicago.

The new Library Insight track will include sessions by “Libraries Transform: ALA@BEA,” which is sponsored by Libraries Transform, the ALA’s national public awareness campaign, and by Overdrive, Inc. Organizers hope these sessions, which cover Readers Advisory, nurturing local writers, and working with marketing teams from the Big Five publishers, will draw hundreds of additional librarians to BEA.

BEA also announced that its Content & Digital Conference programming will focus on two key tracks: children’s and self-publishing. Programming in children’s publishing will address current trends and take a look ahead in one of the strongest areas of the publishing and bookselling industry. Programming within the self-publishing conference track will allow authors and service providers to explore opportunities to reach readers, build sales, and establish a social presence with readers.

All registered attendees and exhibitors have free access to the BEA Content & Digital Conference sessions. To register or to get more information, go to the BEA website.