At Scholastic’s trade publishing division, editorial director David Levithan has been promoted to publisher and editorial director. In other promotions, Charisse Meloto moves up to executive director of publicity for print and digital publishing; Bess Braswell is now director of marketing; Victoria Tisch is director of marketing operations; Maria Dominguez is executive editor and manager, Scholastic en español; and Paul Banks moves up to executive art director, licensed publishing and school market originals.
Simon & Schuster’s children’s imprints Aladdin and Simon Pulse will co-publish Beyond Words Publishing‘s children’s list. S&S will handle sales, distribution, and fulfillment of their 10 to 12 titles annually worldwide, starting in 2012. The agreement parallels the relationship Beyond Words struck with Atria for their adult titles in 2006. Publisher of Aladdin and Simon Pulse publisher Bethany Buck says in the announcement, “Their unique and inspirational books will be a nice complement to our upcoming and backlist titles, as we are seeing these types of books proving to be a strong category for young readers.”
An understandably NYT-heavy crowd of media notables, along with “as many dog nuts as possible” filled the apartment of Holt publisher (and new restaurateur via Pino Luongo’s recently-opened Morso on Manhattan’s East Side) Steve Rubin to celebrate Times executive editor Jill Abramson‘s new book, THE PUPPY DIARIES, Thursday night. The apartment was too full to allow room for the boisterous two-and-a-half-year-old Scout, who was saluted in her absence, along with Abramson’s first dog Buddy, whom longtime editor John Sterling noted was deaf at the end, “but still a great listener.” The book grew out of an online column Abramson wrote, which she “loved doing because it gave me lots of back and forth with readers.” Rubin said they have “close to 60,000 copies in the marketplace,” and John Grogan calls it “a worthy addition to the crowded so-called dogoir genre” in today’s NYT.
Finally, some further information on why an expanded roster of six books (including, CHIME by Franny Billingsley, to correct Thursday’s error) were nominated in the National Book Awards’ Young People’s category. Apparently, the judges did not intend to nominate Lauren Myracle’s SHINE and the “miscommunication” came during the transmission of the judges’ choices to the National Book Foundation. Director Harold Augenbraum told SLJ that “for security reasons, we do everything by phone, and we don’t write things down when [the judges] transmit the titles to our staff. And someone wrote it down wrong.” Augenbraum declined to confirm which title was the mistake and said “we could have taken one of the books away to keep it five, but we decided that it was better to add a sixth one as an exception, because they’re all good books”–but the BBC indicates the similar-sounding SHINE as the misrecorded title. Young People’s category chair Marc Aronson said the error was noticed “immediately” by two judges who were watching Wednesday’s live stream.