Eoin Purcell's Blog

Random House have bought BBC books.

You can read the story in Publishing News Here or on Guardian Unlimited Here.

I have to say I have always been jealous of BBC books and their ability to create an instant author platform by leveraging Televion success into the book world. from BBC Worldwide’s site:

BBC Books
BBC Books is a significant publisher of hardback non-fiction and is the UK leader in the food and drink book market. Disappointing trading in 2003/04 was tackled with a major restructure and the business expects to be back in profit in 2005/06.

A number of BBC TV-tie-in titles hit the best-seller lists and sold outstandingly well at Christmas. These included Alan Titchmarsh’s A Natural History of Britain; Venice, based on the BBC 2 series; the family history title, Who Do You Think You Are?; and Grumpy Old Men. The hardback book Auschwitz, by Laurence Rees, immediately became a UK best-seller on publication in January 2005 and is also achieving international success. Editions are published or planned in 13 territories so far including USA, Poland, Holland, France, Spain, Denmark, Hungary and Germany. In France, Auschwitz hit the top ten best-seller list after only ten days on sale.

Overall a good deal for both sides seems to have been struck but I cannot help but feel that Random House have had the best of it, indeed any publisher with the scale of Random House would have been an excellent partner to BBC Books and hence my jealousy!