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| Michael Pietsch, grateful for "every display, every tweet." |
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"I can't say a lot, but one thing I learned very powerfully during the course of this is that when times are hard, you learn who your friends are," Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch said Wednesday about his company's dispute with Amazon while speaking to members of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association during an all-day open house at the Hachette offices. "And indie booksellers are definitely our friends. What I want to say most of all is thank you, for every iota of support from booksellers, every display, every tweet."
The day's events also included a question and answer session with Evan Schnittman, Hachette's executive v-p and chief marketing sales officer, Linda Paone, executive director of fulfillment, and Mike Heuer, executive director of Hachette's national field force, and a speed-dating lunch with several Hachette editors, including Emily Griffin, senior editor at Grand Central Publishing, Paul Whitlatch, senior editor at Hachette Books, Josh Kendall, executive editor and editorial director of Mulholland Books, and Judy Clain, v-p and editor-in-chief of Little, Brown.
After lunch, a panel discussion featured five Hachette authors: Christopher Scotton, whose debut novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, will be in stores next January; Wendy Mass, author of the early readers series Space Taxi; Melissa de la Cruz, author of the Blue Bloods series and its upcoming new-adult successor, The Vampires of Manhattan, the first of the New Blue Bloods Coven series; Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air and the author of So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures; and musician Amanda Palmer, whose book The Art of Asking will arrive in stores in November.
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L.-r.: Amanda Palmer, Maureen Corrigan, Melissa de la Cruz, Wendy Mass and Christopher Scotton. |
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During his session after the author panel, Pietsch also discussed the big year Hachette has had in terms of both bestselling and prize-winning titles, along with the company's planned move to new offices in October. He praised David Shafer's new book, Whisky Tango Foxtrot, which had been enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Times that morning.
"The most valuable resource and the most limited resource in all of book publishing is your reading time," remarked Pietsch. "You're offered every book in the universe to sell and discuss and take inside yourself--your willingness to come here and talk to us about the books that are coming out is something we're really, incredibly grateful for." --Alex Mutter