HBG Big News This Week: July 29-August 2, 2019

Following is a recap of major news at Hachette Book Group for the week of July 29-August 2, 2019:

#1 Bestseller!: One Good Deed by David Baldacci (GCP) debuts at #1 on both the New York Times Print Hardcover Fiction and Combined Print & Ebook Bestsellers list. Baldacci is also #1 on the USA Today Bestsellers list. HBG has 14 titles on the New York Times list this week, and our distribution clients have nine books on the list.

RITA Award: Kelly Bowen won the 2019 RITA Award for A Duke in the Night (Forever), Kelly’s third consecutive RITA win. The RITA promotes excellence in the romance genre by recognizing outstanding published romance novels and novellas.  The full list of this year’s winners is available on RWA’s website.

PW Star Watch: GCP Editor Maddie Caldwell was selected as one of the candidates for Publishers Weekly’s Star Watch. “Fifty honorees from the U.S. and Canada were chosen for their trailblazing spirit, innovative problem-solving, and leadership qualities by a jury composed of editors and managers from Publishers Weekly, Frankfurter Buchmesse, and the American Booksellers Association,” writes PW. Read more about the Star Watch program here.

Industry news: Authors Guild President and GCP author Douglas Preston wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times this week that details the issues with counterfeiting, author “doppelganging,” title cloning, ebook piracy, cut-and-paste plagiarism, and other rip-offs on digital platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Google.

CWA Dagger Award:  Luke Jennings, author of Killing Eve: No Tomorrow (Mulholland) and Megan Abbott, author of Give Me Your Hand (LB) have been shortlisted for the prestigious CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, sponsored by the Crime Writers Association.  CJ Samson author of Tombland (Mulholland) is nominated for the CWA Sapere Books Historical Dagger Award.

Rachel Carson Award: Lauren Oakes’s In Search of the Canary Tree (Basic Books) is the second-place winner of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. Read the announcement here.

Library of Virginia Literary Award: Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (LB) is a finalist for the 2019 Library of Virginia Literary Award in the Nonfiction category.
TV news: HBO Max has given an 8-episode straight-to-series order to Circe by Madeline Miller (LB). “The project hails from top feature writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Jurassic World),” writes Deadline.

The Expanse: a fifth season of The Expanse has been confirmed for Amazon Prime. Based on the bestselling series by James S.A. Corey published by Orbit, the show has been called “television’s best sci-fi show in years” (Ars Technica) and “the show Game of Thrones used to be and Westworld wishes it was” (GQ). Season four of The Expanse will be available as a Prime Original in December – watch the trailer here. Corey’s Expanse series was also just included in Forbes’s “Best Science Fiction Books of All Time,” along with N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (Orbit).