News from The Bookseller

Galley Beggar Press to launch short story list Independent publisher Galley Beggar Press will launch a new short story list in 2015 to help lesser-known writers, for whom “getting a collection out there is still something of a battle”. Galley Beggar Press co-founder Eloise Millar told The Bookseller that “publishers have an obligation to publish more widely and ambitiously when it comes to form”, and indies could help publish more short story collections that bigger publishers were not willing to take a chance on for commercial reasons.

Thames & Hudson to expand children’s list Thames & Hudson is expanding its children’s list and aims to publish 20 books per year, starting in 2015. New editorial director Roger Thorp, who joined Thames & Hudson in September from Tate publishing, said: “We were publishing very few titles for children until very recently, and in the last year or so have been publishing around five to ten titles per year. From 2015 we anticipate over twenty titles a year going forward.”

Busy bookshops see range of Christmas hits Booksellers have reported positive sales going into the final week of the Christmas rush, with Chris Hadfield’s You Are Here (Macmillan) breaking through as a last-minute favourite. However the leading celebrity memoirs are not racking up individual totals as substantial as they did last year, with sales in the genre more spread out across a range of titles.

Macmillan US does agency deal with Amazon Macmillan in the US has reached a new multi-year deal with Amazon, including an agency deal on e-books. But in a carefully worded blog and letter to authors, Macmillan chief executive John Sargent hit out at the failure to address “one of the big problems in the digital marketplace”, namely that Amazon has a 64% share of the company’s e-book business in the US. Sargent revealed that the company was planning to test a subscription model in the coming weeks, even though it has “long been opposed to subscription” but because it needed “broader channels to reach our readers”.