Kate Elton will join HarperCollins UK as publisher of Harper Fiction, replacing Lynne Drew, who is giving up the position for personal reasons (though she will continue to edit select authors.) Elton spent the past 15 years at Random House UK, where she was publisher of Cornerstone’s Arrow and Century imprints.
Larry Bennett has joined Bookmasters as president of its international sales division, focusing on growing the company’s foreign-language book development and distribution efforts in the US and abroad. Previously he managed Baker & Taylor’s digital print media program.
PEN American Center has announced a new award for picture book writers, the PEN/Steven Kroll Award, starting in 2012. The prize will award $5,000 to an American(or US-based) writer for an exceptional story illustrated in a picture book. Kroll, who died in March, was the longtime chair of PEN’s Children’s YA Book Authors Committee.
The winners of the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards were announced in 11 categories yesterday.
IPPY list
Cartier has ended its sponsorship of the CWA Diamond Dagger Award after 26 years. The final award was given to Lindsey Davis in an awards presentation on May 16.
Nielsen Bookscan tracked sales of Oprah’s Book Club selections over the past 10 years, and Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH topped the list with more than 3.37 million copies sold, followed by James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES (2.7 million) Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT (2.01 million) and Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD (1.385 million.) And Oprah’s final choice, a new Penguin Classics edition of Charles Dickens’ A TALE OF TWO CITIES and GREAT EXPECTATIONS, sold just 95,000 copies according to BookScan, which Penguin Group President Susan Petersen Kennedy attributed to wide availability of free ebook editions of both titles. “I would have preferred that people bought the books,” she told the AP. “On the other hand, at least people were reading and that’s wonderful.”