Mary Ellen O’Neill is joining Workman Publishing as a senior editor. Most recently she was publisher of Collins Lifestyle and editorial director of cookbooks/executive editor at Morrow.
Cynthia Zigmund is now representing authors exclusively through her own company, Second City Publishing Services.
Tamson Weston has left Disney-Hyperion to found Tamson Weston Books, an editorial consultancy. She will be working with agents and publishers to develop book projects and help new authors fine-tune manuscripts, proposals and picture book dummies.
As of February Susan Sandérus will join Bruna in the Netherlands as commissioning editor. She has been at Fontein Publishers and worked before that at Archipel. Sandérus will focus on crime fiction from the US, UK and the Scandinavian countries.
At Hachette Book Group’s Nashville, TN division Adlai Yeomans has been promoted to assistant editor for Center Street and Jaime Slover has been promoted to junior designer for Faith Words and Center Street.
Mary Anne Thompson Associates has been appointed US literary scout for Schibsted in Norway, Crown Culture Corporation in Taiwan, and Phoenix-Edita Media in mainland China (a new company, which merges Feel/Blue Horse and Yiling Press).
At Hyperion, executive editor and editorial director for ABC Synergy Gretchen Young has been named vice president and is expanding her role as as chief editorial liaison for the publishing unit with ABC.
In distribution news, BookMasters has added Design Media Publishing and Islandport Press as clients, and their AtlasBooks division will service the new Razor Media Group.
In Canada, Sourcebooks has moved their distribution from Canadian Manda Group to Raincoast Books.
The individual Costa Awards were presented to:
Fiction
Maggie O’Farrell for her fifth novel, THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE
First Novel
Kishwar Desai, WITNESS THE NIGHT
Biography
Edmund de Waal, THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES
Poetry
Jo Shapcott, OF MUTABILITY
Children’s
Jason Wallace, OUT OF SHADOWS
Finally, Simon & Schuster’s anonymous January 25 release O: A Presidential Novel is causing a stir in the press. Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire claims the author has “‘vast personal experience’ about what President Obama needs to do to win re-election,” without indicating whom they are quoting, or what the quote even means.