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Amazon provides Thanksgiving cheer

3 December 2001

To counter the gloom which has overtaken the American economy, there's good news from online bookseller Amazon. On the day after Thanksgiving the online retailer sold 12,000 more items per hour than it did on the same day last year. This news cheered Wall Street so much that Amazon's share price rose by a third.

Clancy non-transfer fee

Following on from the recent departure of Phyllis Grann, until recently President and Publisher of Penguin-Putnam, there's been a lot of speculation in New York publishing circles about possible transfers for her stable of bestselling authors. This has intensified now it's has been announced that she will join Random House, US.

According to the New York Post, one author at least will not be moving with Ms Grann. Tom Clancy had a big two-book contract with PenguinPutnam, and was clearly one author the publishing house did not want to lose. Just in the last two weeks the key person clause (which lets the author out of the contract if their editor moves) has been taken out. The suggestion is that Penguin Putnam paid over a substantial sum of money to get this provision removed - so they could hang on to the author.