I remember reading about their hunt for a new name in Publisher’s Weekly a while back. Well, they’ve announced it: Grand Central Publishing. From The New York Times:

”We are ‘grand’ because we are big, impressive, even magnificent at times. And the word ‘central’ reflects the fact that we recognize the huge audience of readers between New York City and the West Coast who are looking for books across a wide range of tastes,” Grand Central’s senior vice president and publisher, Jamie Raab, said Monday in a statement.

Full story is available on NYTimes.com.

Publisher Scholastic Corp. said on Wednesday it would release a record-breaking 12 million copies for the first U.S. printing of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which hits stores on July 21.

Reuters has the full story. To compare, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had a first printing of 10.8 million copies.

“7: The Mickey Mantle Novel,” Peter Golenbock’s occasionally racy account of the life of Mickey Mantle, which was canceled last month by its publisher, HarperCollins, was revived yesterday by Lyons Press.

Read the story on NYTimes.com. For some reason, it’s filed under the Sports section - Baseball, to be specific - rather than Books.

From Reuters:

The dusty world of book publishing has taken a step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins letting customers browse books online.

Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.

Continue reading on Reuters.co.uk. 

In front of a packed hall at the second annual ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference, ICv2 CEO Milton Griepp reported that graphic novel sales in the U.S. and Canada hit $330 million in 2006, a 12% increase over revised sales figures for 2005.

Griepp reported that sales of graphic novels passed comics periodicals as “the most popular format,” in 2006. He reported that 2006 sales of comics periodicals was about $310 million.

Griepp sees more growth for the category in 2007, noting plans by bestselling prose authors such as Stephen King and Laurell K. Hamilton to release comics work in the coming year. While manga continued to lead the category in sales, he noted that American genre comics were also doing well. He also said that acclaimed nonfiction titles like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the comics adaptation of the 9/11 report and Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen were attracting new readers, female readers in particular, to the category.

Link to the Publishers Weekly article

Patricia Schroeder, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said US publishers in China last year suffered an estimated 52 million dollars in losses due to piracy on the Internet.

“Visits to China and discussions with our member publishers reveal a staggering amount of book piracy plaguing this most promising of markets,” she said.

Book piracy also includes illegal commercial scale photocopying of academic materials, print piracy and unauthorized translations as well as trademark counterfeiting, Schroeder said.

Bestsellers such as the Harry Potter series, Dan Brown’s novels and political autobiographies are pirated in English and Chinese within days of their home country releases, Schroeder said.

Link to the Yahoo! News article

Based on the principles of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, the novel, called A Million Penguins, is open to anyone to join in, write and edit. None of the words, characters or plot twists will be attributed to any individual and - and this is the element of the project most likely to bruise delicate egos - participants are free to edit, chop and change other writers’ work.

“To be honest, we don’t know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out,” says Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin’s digital publisher. “We hope people will enter into it in the spirit we intend and leave their egos at the door. It’s not about individual work and individual brilliance - it’s about people working together as a community”.

Link to the Guardian article; link to the A Million Penguins wiki.

Boaz Publishing, a tiny literary publisher in Albany, Calif., has created a new $10,000 award for unpublished novels. The Frances Fabri Literary Prize for Fiction honors the memory of holocaust survivor Frances Fabri, an unpublished poet and fiction writer who spent much of her later years recording oral histories of fellow survivors. Boaz publisher Tom Southern said he sees the prize as an ideal way for agents to find an outlet for “those books that they believed in, but just haven’t made it into print yet.”

In addition to the cash award and hardcover publication by Boaz, the endowment for the prize includes $5,000 for marketing. Southern said that the prize is being funded by investments from anonymous donors. The funds are sufficient for Boaz to plan a second book prize—most likely also for unpublished fiction—sometime later this year.

The deadline for the first Frances Fabri Prize is February 28. The winner will be announced April 15. Submission details can be found online at www.boazpublishing.com.

Read the full Publishers Weekly article here.