HBG Big News This Week: October 1-5, 2018

Following is a recap of major news at Hachette Book Group for the week of October 1-5, 2018:

Bestsellers: The Magic Misfits: The Second Story by Neil Patrick Harris & Alec Azam (LBYR) debuts at #1 on the Children’s Bestsellers (Middle Grade Hardcover) list. HBG has 17 titles on the list overall. Our distribution clients have four titles on the list this week, including one #1—Princesses Save the World by Savannah Guthrie & Allison Oppenheim (Abrams), on the Picture Book list. HBG also has 15 titles on the USA Today list—see the full list here.

Acquisition news: GCP announced their acquisition of the highly anticipated new novel by Thomas Harris, the international bestselling author of Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. It will be Harris’s first standalone thriller since 1975, and is sure to be a major publishing event. The Associated Press broke the news, and the story got great national pickup, in ABC News, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Kansas City Star, Miami Herald, San Diego Union Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, Minneapolis Star Tribune, National Post (Canada), NY Daily News, Paste, and Publishers Weekly, as well as 100+ regional newspapers and TV outlets.

A Gold for Rick Steves: Rick Steves Iceland (Avalon) won the Gold Prize for Best Guidebook in the Society of American Travel Writers’ Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards, the most prestigious honor in travel writing. “Rick Steves’ Europe” TV show, airing on PBS, won a Silver Award for its special on European festivals.

Royal Society Prize: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, author of Inventing Ourselves (PublicAffairs), has won the Royal Society Prize for Science Book of the Year. The £25,000 award is the only major international prize that celebrates science writing for a non-specialist audience. You can read further coverage in The Guardian. 

Carnegie Medals: Two Little, Brown titles have been longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction—Circe by Madeline Miller (Fiction) and Dopesick by Beth Macy (Nonfiction). The awards recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year, and are given by the American Library Association. See the full longlist here. The shortlist will be announced on October 24.

Méndez Prize: Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno’s There Are No Dead Here (Nation Books) has been shortlisted for the Méndez Prize from the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke. This award honors an outstanding book of non-fiction published in English on human rights, democracy and social justice in contemporary Latin America. The winner will be announced on December 15. You can read more about the prize here.

Baillie Gifford Prize: Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl (Basic Books) made the shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction (UK). The winner will be named on November 14 and will receive £30,000. See the announcement here.

MAJOR release: LBYR’s biggest book of the year, Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel, goes on sale next week, riding a wave of anticipation that has been building for months. Lots of great coverage for the book has already run (Associated Press video interview, Associated Press print interview, Entertainment Weekly, Playbill, PopSugar, Goodreads, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today), with tons more to come. The DEH: The Novel team—Val Emmich, Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek & Justin Paul—will be interviewed on ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Megyn Kelly TODAY next week, and national coverage will appear in Woman’s Day magazine, PEOPLE magazine, Family Circle, Psychology Today, NPR’s Here and Now, Variety’s Stagecraft podcast, Hypable, Teen Vogue, HelloGiggles, BuzzFeed’sAM 2 DM, WAMC’s Roundtable, and more. The team will embark on a national tour visiting ten cities (visit the NOVL page for tour details). The launch event at Town Hall in New York on Monday October 8 looks amazing—find out about it here.

New Osteen: Joel Osteen’s Next Level Thinking (FaithWords) went on sale this week. Joel did two interviews on the TODAY Show (watch them here and here), an appearance on Fox & Friends and Good Day New York, and heads out on the road for a multi-city throughout the month.

BIG boxed set: The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons (Black Dog & Leventhal) published this week, and is on its way to becoming the gift book of the holiday season. The gorgeous boxed set will be included in the Associated Press’s coffee table gift guide (which will be picked up by hundreds of outlets on the AP wire), and gift guide coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and theStar Tribune, with more to come. The New Yorker‘s David Remnick will appear on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers on November 8 for an interview about the book and the next installment of their recurring segment “Live New Yorker Cartoons” (enjoy the last segment here).