News from Publishers Lunch

Briefs

The Costco Pennie's Pick for January is Amy Stewart's Girl Waits With Gun (HMH) while the company's book club pick for the month is The Tumbling Turner Sisters (Gallery) by Juliette Fay.

Updating our very best of the best books of 2016 report, Jacqueline Woodson is represented now by Kathleen Nishimoto at William Morris Endeavor. Also, USA Today weighed in with their top 10 books of the year (now added to our vote count), also naming Colson Whitehead as their author of the year.

Announcements

The

Ward & Balkin Agency is being acquired by Roam Agency as of July 1, 2017, when Rick Balkin retires after more than 40 years as an agent.

All Romance eBooks announced on their website that they will shut down at the end of the year, after having "accepted that there is not a viable path forward." The posted message says they incurred a loss for the first year since opening in 2006 and "the financial forecast for 2017 isn't hopeful."

UK literary agent David Miller of Rogers, Coleridge and White suffered a heart attack on Christmas Eve and is in intensive care, still in "very serious" condition, Gil Coleridge tells the Bookseller.

Obituaries

Co-owner of Blue Marble Children's Bookstore in Fort Thomas, KY Tina Moore died Wednesday. She had served on the board of the Association of Children's Booksellers and was a founding member of the organization.

Actress, screenwriter, and author Carrie Fisher, 60, died December 27 from complications of a heart attack suffered four days earlier on a flight from London to Los Angeles. Fisher was most recently promoting her new book, The Princess Diarist, published in November by Blue Rider Press, and also published two other books of nonfiction, Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic, as well as four novels.

Richard Adams, 96, author of the classic children's novel Watership Down (1972) and many other books, died December 24. An animated adaptation of the book is set to air on the BBC in 2017.