Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear Written by Lindsay Mattick Illustrated by Sophie Blackall Little, Brown and Company   10/20/2015 978-0-316-32490-8 32 pages Ages 4—8 . . “Before Winnie-the-Pooh, there was a real bear named Winnie. In 1914, Harry Colebourn, a veterinarian on his way to tend horses in World …

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David Young, CEO of the Orion Publishing Group and Deputy CEO of Hachette UK, is retiring at the end of the year.

David Shelley will take over Young’s role on January 1, 2016, and will also continue as  CEO of Little, Brown Book Group.

Young began his career in publishing in the UK at Thorsons in 1970.  During his career he served as Managing Director of HarperCollins Trade Division UK and Chief Executive of Time Warner Book Group UK, as well as CEO of Hachette Book Group.

“For me, one of the great joys of Hachette’s acquisition of the Time Warner Book Group was getting to know David.  From the very beginning of our working relationship, David was a pleasure to work with,” stated Arnaud Nourry, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hachette Livre. “Under his leadership, the newly-created Hachette Book Group quickly grew to be one of the most successful and admired publishing houses in the US, discovering great talent and publishing many wonderful and original books and authors to global success.”

“David Shelley is the perfect successor to David Young,” stated Tim Hely Hutchinson, group CEO of Hachette UK. “They share much more than just a name; David Shelley has the flair, vision and talent needed to lead Orion and Katie Espiner’s appointment is his first stroke of brilliance.”

In addition to the change in leadership, the publisher has revealed several people moves. Katie Espiner, the current publisher of The Borough Press and HarperFiction (including HarperVoyager) will be appointed managing director of the Orion Publishing Group later this year.(Lisa Milton will continue as managing director until then after which she will become a consultant to the company). Jon Wood, currently Deputy Group Publisher and Managing Director of Fiction for Orion, will become Publisher of the Orion Publishing Group in January, reporting to Espiner.

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Hachette Book Group’s revenues dropped 12.3 percent in Q1 2015, Hachette’s parent company Lagardère revealed in its earning release today.

The company attributed the drop to softer sales and a drop in e-book sales. “Hachette Book Group’s results this quarter reflect tough comparisons to Q1 2014 when we saw ‘The Goldfinch,’ ‘I am Malala,’ and ‘Grain Brain’ surging beyond the holidays into the first part of the year, and a Q1 2015 publishing program that was lighter than usual on major hardcover lead titles,” stated Michael Pietsch, CEO of HBG.

Overall, Hachette Livre saw net sales reach $474M, up 7.1 percent from the comparable quarter last year. In France, sales were up 10.4 percent and in the UK, sales were down 4 percent.

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Hachette Book Group’s revenues were down 4.9 percent in 2014 as compared to 2013, the company revealed this week. HBG’s annual sales accounted for 24 percent of parent company Hachette Livre’s overall sales last year, a slight drop from 25 percent in 2013.

For a significant portion of the year, many of the company’s books were unavailable on Amazon while the two companies disputed terms for months.

“Hachette came through a challenging year having achieved many successes — including publishing hundreds of bestsellers, winning several major awards, and acquiring Black Dog & Leventhal at the close of 2014,” stated Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch. “We’ve had a superb start to the year, with a Caldecott Medal and a Grammy Award, and we’re looking forward to one of the strongest lineups that we’ve ever published coming in 2015.”

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I was lucky enough to receive this ARC a long time ago. It was irresistible.  I mean, look at that cover! Read that title! I am a person who has never even had a twinkie, but I knew I needed to read this one.  Sometimes a book just gives you a feeling, and this one was calling to me.

Twelve year old Gigi (short for Galileo Galilei) and big sister Didi (short for Delta Dawn) have moved from their trailer park digs in South Carolina to an apartment in Long Island.  One of the only things they have brought with them is their late mother's recipe book which helped the girls win big money in a cooking contest, and Didi is set on giving Gigi a better life that she had.  Gigi is all registered to go to Hill on the Harbor Preparatory School and as long as she keeps following Didi's recipe for success by studying hard and getting top grades, everything will be great.

But here's the thing...Gigi is ready for some changes.   She has even come up with her own recipe for success that doesn't include studying in the library every extra moment of the day.  Instead she wants to find friends her own age, try on a new version of her name, and find ways to have the qualities she knows her late mother would see in her shine.  Gigi (now Leia) is feeling confident about memorizing her locker combination and her schedule and is ready for her first class on her first day when she crashes into Trip who just happens to be the most beautiful boy she's ever seen, and is also in her English class.  All of a sudden this front row girl was sitting in the back row next to Trip.

But change isn't alway smooth or easy, and even though Trip and most of his friends are super nice, mean girl Mace notices Leia's dollar store shoes and less-than-healthy E-Z Cheeze sandwich and makes sure that Leia knows that she is the square peg at school.  Leia can handle the insult about the shoes, but nobody makes fun of Didi's cooking!

Readers will be rooting for Leia as she navigates through all sorts of changes in her life. From the tony world of private school to freshly unearthed family secrets, Leia's life is not following any recipe!  Kat Yeh has written a treat of a middle grade story that will tug on your heart strings and make you smile in equal measure.  The multifaceted characters and rich turns of phrase that had me reading with a twang are only a couple of the reasons I read this book in one big gulp.  The Truth About Twinkie Pie is a book with honesty and heart and I cannot wait to share it with the tweens in my life!

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I've posted about the Gallery Project before--this was the brainchild of Art Director Kirk Benshoff, and he brought it to Hachette Brook Group three years ago. Two weeks ago, the third annual Gallery Project in the NY office was held. Publishers Weekly reported on the event here:

Editors, designers, and publicists spend their days refining and supporting a writer’s art—his or her book. But, in an effort to once again put its employees’ own talents on display, the third annual Hachette Book Group Gallery Project was held by the publisher last week in HBG’s New York office.

The art on display ranged from photography, to painting, to book sculptures, and more. I didn't take a lot of pictures, but a few of the creations were children's book related, like this felt recreation of Ethan Long's Chamelia (posing with the book's editor, Connie Hsu).

Artist: Glen Davis

Jonathan Lopes, Mr. Tiger, and me

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Today we bring you our weekly sampler of cool youth media and marketing gigs. If your company has an open position in the youth media or marketing space, we encourage you to join the Ypulse LinkedIn group, if you haven’t yet, and post there for... Read the rest of this post

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This week, we have an amazing batch of openings for you. Penguin Group is looking for a new director of digital publishing, and Hachette Book Group needs a mobile analyst. The American Library Association is hiring a senior production editor, while Rodale Books is seeking an editorial director. Get the details on these jobs and more below, and find additional just-posted publishing gigs on mediabistro.com.

• Director, Digital Publishing Penguin Group (New York, NY)
• Mobile Analyst Hachette Book Group (New York, NY)
• Editorial Director Rodale Books (New York, NY)
• Senior Production Editor American Library Association (Chicago, IL)
• Managing Editor, Children’s Books Highlights for Children (Honesdale, PA)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Today we bring you our weekly sampler of cool youth media and marketing gigs. If your company has an open position in the youth media or marketing space, we encourage you to join the Ypulse LinkedIn group, if you haven’t yet, and post there for... Read the rest of this post

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This picture book combines two major Fall events in the lives of children - The First Day of School and Halloween. It is the story of a troublemaking elementary school class whose teacher calls in with a case of "frazzled nerves," leaving the kids in the hands of a green, one-eyed monster known as the Substitute Creacher. The Creacher, who speaks only in rhyme, shares stories of children he has known who have behaved badly and met with horrific fates.

There is Sara, who never cleaned out her desk:

Her desk was so full
that it started to shake.
It rattled and lurched
like a minor earthquake.

There is also Kylie, the artist who was "always the best/ at drawing when she / should be taking a test." whose dragon illustration comes to life and throws flames about the room.

And at the end of the litany, there is Chris, whose behavior is so terrible he is forced to become a one-eyed green monster and a substitute teacher. 

The text of this story is entertaining, but what drew me in right away was the illustrations. The end papers set the stage, depicting typical Fall weather - wind blowing around, and golden leaves falling from the trees. A shadow of a strange monster man appears in the distance, and in the foreground, a gnome hides in a garbage can. Before reading a single word, the reader is already in just the right mood for the strange and mysterious tale that follows.

Inside, the book is designed much like a comic book, with panels on each page showing flashbacks and the passage of time, and separating the Creacher's words, all surrounded with green slime, from the words of the students and the narrator, which are written in the white space around the illustrations. It reminded me a lot of the Magic School Bus series, in the sense that there are a lot of little things to read and notice before turning from one page to the next.

I really love the way the author uses rhyme. I find it difficult - and often annoying - to read children's books written entirely in rhyme, especially if the rhyme feels forced. But in this case, the rhyme is part of the Creacher's strangeness and his charm. The kids even comment on his weird way of speaking, and the verse becomes a character trait, rather than just a cutesy device.

Because of the subject matter, as I was reading Substitute Creacher, I found myself thinking about Miss Nelson Is Missing, where Miss Viola Swamp substitutes for Miss Nelson in an effort to combat her students' bad behavior. As it turns out, the comparison becomes even more apt at the end of the book, where there is a surprise twist. I won't spoil it here, but it left me feeling tingly, and reminded me a lot of the Twilight Zone. I also loved the bonus illustration on the back cover, where the regular classroom teacher sits, with pencils sticking out of her desk, and one shoe untied, writing a letter to the class which will explain her absence - "due to a serious case of frazzled nerves" presumably due to the upcoming Halloween pranks she'd be sure to endure if she showed up to school.

Overall, I thought this was a great, fresh take on the subject of

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Hold the phone! Hachette Book Group is looking for a mobile analyst to join its digital technology group in New York. The company is looking for a “hands-on, creatively minded technologist” to oversee a team of remote developers, and ensure that mobile apps are built correctly, efficiently and effectively.

In this role, you’ll be creating, reviewing and revising designs for new and existing mobile systems, while evaluating them from a technical perspective. You’ll create prototypes, templates and more, and define solutions and mobile development best practices. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Several US law firms have now filed lawsuits against Apple and major US publishers alleging what one described as a "horizontal conspiracy" to fix and increase the price of e-books in the US. One firm also now moved for the lawsuits to be heard under one judge either in California, where two of the suits have been registered, or Manhattan, where three have been filed.

read more

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Starting this winter, Penguin Group (USA) will distribute review copies through NetGalley–a digital option for book reviewers.

Penguin can now invite reviewers, media contacts, and other professional readers to access digital galleys (some in full color) and promotional materials. NetGalley works on both computers and eReading devices (including Nook, Kobo, Sony eReader, and iPad).

According to the release, 85 publishers currently use NetGalley and its services. Some of those publishers include Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins Publishers.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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In a letter to book publishers, Digg product manager Mike Cieri announced that the troubled social news website will no longer accept content submitted via RSS.

The ability for book publishers to submit all of their stories to Digg automatically using an RSS feed seemed like an efficient way to open up a firehose of content for Digg. However, Cieri says this idea had unintended consequences.

According to Cieri, “Most RSS-submitted content is not performing well on Digg.” He says the site’s analytics show that only a mere 4.5% of Digg’s “Top News” content comes from the RSS submissions. He adds that the ability to submit an RSS feed to Digg “has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content.” Cieri praised the manual method of submitting stories to Digg, saying that manual submissions “ensure that quality content appears on Digg.”

With this move, the site takes yet another step back toward the old version 3.0, the site design that was in use before radical changes resulted in a user revolt and a 24% decline in U.S. visitors in the first 11 weeks. In response, Digg has slowly added back features that readers missed, such as the ability to bury stories, andlast month’s overhaul that included the return of user profiles and story statistics. Since that first fateful redesign last summer, Digg has laid off more than a third of its staffers.

I’m just wondering why Digg stubbornly refused to modify its obviously unpopular redesign after it became apparent that it was resulting in large percentages of its readership turning away. After a few days of this, why didn’t Digg simply revert to the old version and its rules that seemed to be working pretty well? If not a few days later, why not a month later?

Here’s the full text of the letter we received from Digg product manager Mike Cieri:

Publishers,

We hope this message finds you well. After a bumpy second half of 2010 at Digg, we are starting to see positive signs of improvement and are optimistic about the direction Digg is headed. In January 2011, we saw double digit growth of diggs and comments, as well as an increase in unique visitors and exit clicks out to publisher sites. We’ve taken a number of concrete steps to stay better connected with the Digg community, and we are taking action to improve Digg based on our community’s feedback. One important point of feedback we’ve heard is that RSS submitted stories are hurting Digg in a number of ways, and in the next week we are going to discontinue the ability to submit content via RSS. We’d like to share the reasoning behind the decision, and let you know what you can do to improve your performance on Digg.

Put very simply, most RSS submitted content is not performing well on Digg. For many of our users, RSS submissions take the fun out of finding and submitting great content. When users try to submit a story to Digg and find that the story has already been auto-submitted via RSS, they lose interest in helping spread the story on Digg by commenting and sharing with friends. Removing a user’s desire to champion a story results in less diggs, comments, exit clicks, and ultimately a much smaller chance of making the Top News section. Our analytics reflect this point – only 4.5% of all Top News content comes from RSS submitted content (95.5% is manually submitted).

At its core, Digg is a community of passionate users who take pride in the content they submit and engage with one another in discussion and promotion of viral content. There is a perception that some publishers don’t participate in the community, use RSS submit as an “auto-pilot” tool to submit content without discretion, and do little to promote submitted content o

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Stephen King’s book, The Stand, may be adapted for the big screen sometime soon, according to sources in the film and e-book publishing world. Apparently, Warner Brothers and CBS films have formed an alliance to attempt to convert the book, which is over 1,000 pages, into a film.

CBS films has apparently had the rights to the film for several years but recently went searching for a partner company to help them attempt the large task of creating an adaptation.

The Stand was first released in 1978, and then in the 1990s, King edited it, adding even more pages. It was already an ABC miniseries in 1994 and has also been adapted by Marvel into a comic book series.

Another Stephen King novel is being worked on for the big screen as well. Ron Howard will direct The Dark Tower, which is rumored to be getting Javier Bardem to star.

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Only a few weeks ago, the Cairo Book Fair was being welcomed onto the world stage and Egyptian book publishers forging new links with China and the West. Today, Aljazeera the major Arabic news outlet is banned across Egypt – including all of their writers and related book publishers, social media is banned, and Cairo is in flames. International press institutes and several christian book publishers have come out strongly against Egyptian authorities’ suppression of the media, following the withdrawal of Al Jazeera’s license to broadcast from the North African country.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned on Sunday the information ministry’s move to shutdown Al Jazeera’s bureau in the country.

The CPJ described the move as an attempt to “disrupt media coverage by Al Jazeera and calls on them to reverse the decision immediately”.

The official Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported that the order was to take effect on Sunday, and transmissions originating from Egypt ceased within an hour of the announcement. Nilesat, the satellite transmission company owned by Egyptian radio and television stopped the transmission of Al Jazeera’s primary channel and others.

Reporters without borders added to the condemnation of Egyptian authorities attempt to quell the media.

“By banning Al Jazeera, the government is trying to limit the circulation of TV footage of the six-day-old wave of protests,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard said.

“Thus totally archaic decision is in completely contradiction with President Hosni Mubarak’s promise of ‘democratic’ measures on 28 January. It is also the exact opposite of the increase in freedom sought by the Egyptian population.”

‘Press freedom violation’

The Doha Centre for Media Freedom also criticised the move, saying it was following with major concern the Egyptian authorities’ obstruction of local and foreign journalists from performing their duties in covering the unusual events currently taking place.

“The DCMF considers the harassment a severe press freedom violation and urges the Egyptian authorities to respect international laws on freedom of expression and to allow Egyptian and foreign journalists to freely cover the current events there.” DCMF said in a press released issued on Sunday.

The withdrawal of Al Jazeera’s license came on the fifth day of protests that gripped the country and follows the authorities’ attempts to control the flow of self-publishing information after the internet and mobile phone services were suspended on Thursday.

Mobile services were partly restored on Saturday, though the CPJ says that 90 per cent of internet connections in the country remain disconnected.

On Friday, Reporters without Borders condemned the arrest of four French journalists and book publisher and around a dozen Egyptian journalists who had been arrested by authorities.