Lemonada Media is teaming up with one of publishing’s heavyweights as it expands from the spoken word to the printed page with a new book division. Lemonada Books is a new imprint that has been developed through a partnership with Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
The first titles to come from Lemonada Books will have ties to its podcasts. Actor and author David Duchovny will leverage his podcast Fail Better into a book. The show features Duchovny in conversations with notable guests about failure, and he questions the façade of success and fame to reveal how setbacks and disappointments can enlighten the human experience.
Lemonada co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Stephanie Wittels Wachs will also translate the company’s flagship podcast Last Day into a book. The podcast was created in 2019 by Wittels Wachs and co-founder Jessica Cordova Kramer, who shared experience of losing their brothers to opioid overdoses. It served as a launchpad for Lemonada and is now in its fourth season. The book will focus on Last Day’s first season and the opioids crisis then and now.
“Our mission has been to make life suck less at scale, focusing on podcasts but leveraging the work in audio into other formats,” Kramer said. “We are so thrilled to be able to expand our mission and reach with Simon & Schuster and the Gallery team in this new way. Lemonada Books certainly will improve readers’ lives in a variety of ways.”
The debut of Lemonada Books is the second podcast-related move by Simon & Schuster in recent weeks. Last month, it announced it would work with Pave Studios, the media company founded by podcast veteran Max Cutler, which launched Pave Publishing House. The two companies have formed a co-publishing partnership where the two companies will collaborate closely to discover, develop, and publish new book and audiobook titles. Under the agreement, Pave-branded titles will be jointly published under the Simon & Schuster trade imprint.
“Podcasting is a vibrant source for storytelling, enlightening conversation, entertainment and helpful information – and Lemonada is a proven leader in producing the podcasts that listeners most want to hear,” Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp said in the joint announcement. “We look forward to working with them to create books that will expand their highly popular podcasts into the time-tested medium of books, bringing them to readers everywhere.”
Books are not new for Lemoanda. Two years ago, Lemoanda joined with Penguin Random House to launch a book club that showcases storytelling from the worlds of podcasting and literature.
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