BTW News Briefs

B&T’s Global Publisher Services Signs New Publishers

Baker & Taylor Global Publisher Services (GPS) has announced agreements to distribute several new publishers.

Starting January 1, 2018, GPS will distribute Gibbs Smith in all international markets except for the U.K., Australia, and Canada. GPS also recently began distributing Familius in all open markets and will be adding the U.K. and Australia in February 2018.

As of September 1, GPS began distributing ABDO Publishing in all international markets. GPS will also now distribute internationally for Hal Leonard (excluding the U.K. and Australia) and Sounds True (excluding the U.K.).

Ripped Bodice Owners Report Lack of Diversity in Romance Publishing

Leah and Bea Koch, owners of Los Angeles’ The Ripped Bodice, the only bookstore in the U.S. to exclusively sell romance novels, recently published a report that reveals a lack of diversity in the romance publishing industry.

The new report, “The State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing,” which includes 20 major romance publishers, focuses on the year 2016. The sisters plan to release a new report every year and track industry change. According to the report, for every 100 books published by the leading romance publishers in 2016, only 7.8 were written by people of color. In addition, 50 percent of publishers surveyed had fewer than 5 percent of their books written by people of color.

In an e-mail to news outlets, the Kochs wrote, “We’ve been open a year and half now and the number one problem we’ve encountered in publishing is the lack of diverse stories and authors. Every conversation we have had with industry professionals underscored the fact that there is little data on the subject and this seems to allow for a lot of equivocating on the subject. So, we decided to do something about it.”

The report was released to the public on Thursday, October 5, and was covered in Entertainment Weekly (article contains the report PDF) and The New York Times.

Ingram Adds New Publishers

Ingram Content Group has added six new clients to CoreSource, its digital asset management and distribution platform, including Author Solutions LLC, Center for Creative Leadership, Wits University Press, Hymns Ancient & Modern, Edinburgh University Press, and The American Nurses Association, the company announced Wednesday.

The CoreSource platform lets book publishers and distributors archive, manage, and streamline digital asset management and distribution through a single platform.

Two Leave Media Coalition Board of Directors

This summer, Chris Finan and Judith Platt stepped down from the Media Coalition Board of Directors, according to the organization’s newsletter.

Finan was serving as chair of the MC board when he left his role as director of the American Booksellers for Free Expression to become the new executive director at the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). He joined Media Coalition as a part-time organizer in 1982 and went on to become the free speech organization’s executive director. He eventually joined the board when he was hired as president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE).

Platt, now retired from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), has stepped down after serving on the board for over 20 years, including two terms as chair.

Tom Foulkes has taken over as chair for the remainder of Finan’s term. The organization also welcomed Sofia Castillo to the board as the new representative for AAP.

Kazuo Ishiguro Wins 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature

Japanese-English author Kazuo Ishiguro is this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Guardian reported. The author of The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant, among other books, was praised by the Swedish Academy for novels that “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” and were driven by a “great emotional force,” according to The Guardian.

Ishiguro’s win was announced on Thursday, October 5, in Sweden. According to Publishers Lunch, Knopf will reprint 200,000 copies of his assorted backlist with reprinted jackets that have the Nobel seal; a poster was created for bookstores as well, with more promotional efforts to come.