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Publishing Industry News: Oct. 25, 2019

Curious about what’s happening in the world of books and publishing? Catch up on the biggest acquisitions, news, adaptations and more here!

• Random House Children’s Books will launch Random House Graphic, an imprint dedicated to graphic novels, in January 2020. Gina Gagliano, a former associate director of marketing and publicity at Macmillan Publishing’s First Second Books imprint, will head the new venture.

• The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature have gone to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian author Peter Handke, respectively. The Swedish Academy, which selects the Nobel laureates in literature, did not award a prize last year after a sexual-assault scandal led to mass resignations and doubts about the academy’s legitimacy.

• Booker Prize judges have defied a 1993 rule against splitting the prize between two authors to award this year’s honor to Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.

• The number of books that were self-published in the U.S. in 2018 has jumped 40 percent compared to 2017, according to Bowker’s annual survey of the self-publishing market. More than 1.6 million books were self-published last year.

• Inventory Press will publish Jordan Peele’s Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay next month. It expertly combines elements of horror films with a sobering allegory about race in America and will include an essay by Tannarive Due.

• Netflix will adapt Jeff Smith’s popular graphic novel series, Bone, as an animated series. The story follows the Bone cousins – Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone – as they’re driven out of their home in Boneville. After crossing a desert, they end up in mystical valley where dark things are starting to stir, and an old evil is coming back to life.

• A rare, first-edition, mint-condition, hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has sold at auction for £57,040 ($73,843.13). It’s just one of 500 original copies released in 1997 before J.K. Rowling became famous, and it had been kept in a coded, locked briefcase.

• Lupita Nyong’o – the actress known for Black Panther, 12 Years a Slave, Us and more – released her first book, Sulwe, on Oct. 1. It follows a little girl named Sulwe who has “skin the color of midnight” as she learns to love her skin – and herself – just the way they are.

• Public libraries are taking a stand against Macmillan and its proposed embargo of new-release e-books to libraries. Starting Nov. 1, e-books published by Macmillan and all of its imprints will have a two-month waiting period before they will be released to libraries. A petition is circulating to stop this action, and some libraries are boycotting the publisher by not purchasing embargoed books.