Publishing Industry News: Feb. 14, 2020

• Penguin Random House and Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue teamed up recently to release a collection of classic books with new, “culturally diverse” covers, but after receiving backlash on the internet, they decided to suspend the project, which had been set to launch Feb. 5. People were upset that instead of promoting writers of color, they had just slapped “cartoon POC on books by white folks” while the content of the books doesn’t “promote anything but the white narrative.”

• Mary Higgins Clark, who published her first mystery in 1975 and went on to be known as the Queen of Suspense, died Jan. 31. Among her best-known works were her 1975 novel Where Are the Children? and 2005’s No Place Like Home.

• The adult and children/young-adult (YA) segments had large sales declines in November compared to the year before. Despite the bad November, sales of children/YA titles were up 5.2 percent during the first 11 months of 2019. Sales of adult books were down 3.3 percent during that period.

• After 50 years of rejecting adaptation offers, Judy Blume has given rights to Brooks, Craig and Gracie Films for Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

• In a resolution announced Feb. 6, the Association of American Publishers has succeeded in stopping Audible from generating its “Captions” feature on publishers’ audiobooks without those publishers’ express permission.

• Hachette Book Group has acquired more than 1,000 titles published by Disney Book Group – a deal that involves bestselling authors, award winners, backlist titles, recently published books and some unpublished works.

• The new, annual Carol Shields Prize for Fiction will begin in 2022 and will award 150,000 Canadian dollars (about $113,000 U.S.) for a work of fiction published during the previous year by a woman or nonbinary person. In addition to the grand prize, four finalists will each receive 12,500 Canadian dollars (about $9,400 U.S.).

• Stephen Joyce, the grandson of writer James Joyce, has died. This has opened questions about access to his grandfather’s literary estate because, as executor and protector of his family’s private papers and manuscripts, he was notoriously guarded, often comparing scholars and critics to pests. He once even destroyed thousands of Joyce family letters in the name of privacy.