Molly Barton will move up to global digital director at Penguin as of December 1. She takes over from Dan Ruffino, who is returning home to Australia.
At HarperCollins, Beth Silfin has been promoted to the newly created position of vp, deputy general counsel, responsible for overseeing the contracts department in working directly with literary agents on contracts and rights negotiations. As a result of the change in how the legal and contracts department is organized, vp, associate general counsel Tom Ward will leave the company after more than 15 years. In addition, Cindy DiTiberio has been promoted to senior editor at Harper.
At Simon & Schuster Children's imprints Simon Spotlight & Simon Scribbles, Siobhan Ciminera has been promoted to executive editor; Lisa Rao moves up to editor; and Beth Barton has been promoted to associate editor.
Nicolas Cheetham will follow his father Anthony to start-up Head of Zeus in the UK. He has been at Atlantic Books, which he joined in 2009 as founding publishing director of their genre imprint Corvus.
Courier evp and coo Bob Story will retire in December after 25 years at the company. Rajeev Balakrishna has been promoted to svp and general counsel, and will have overall responsibility for publishing operations, as vp, publishing Eric Zimmerman leaves the company. SVP and cfo Peter Folger is adding responsibility as head of book manufacturing operations.
Courier reported fourth quarter sales yesterday, with the book publishing division declining 15 percent, to $10.1 million. Among their publishing lines, REA was profitable, but Dover and Creative Homeowner showed operating losses, with the publishing unit losing $872,000 for the quarter.
Oriana Leckert has joined Gotham Ghostwriters as an associate.
Social reading start-up ReThink Books, backed in part by John Ingram, has raised another $2 million in Series A financing, led by Ambassador Technologies of Fort Wayne, IN. ReThink says "the funds will be used to continue to expand their multi-faceted vision for social discovery and eBook interaction and to deepen their relationships with publishing partners." CEO Jason Illian says in the announcement, "We are not ready to discuss our full plans for social reading yet, but I can say that along with the applications that make digital reading more accessible and social, we'll be focusing on the Christian and evangelical book market."
We missed the announcement in late October that Callaway Digital Arts has recruited a real ceo, Rex Ishibashi. He was CEO at social gaming company Ohai after serving as president of Electronic Arts Japan. Co-founder of EA Bing Gordon joined Callaway as strategic and creative advisor.
The release says Nicholas Callaway is now chief creative officer and calls him the former ceo--which is a little confusing, since when the company launched a year ago, cco was already Callaway's title, along with chairman, while John Lee was supposed to be president and ceo. (The company's site says Lee is still president.) At the time Callaway said they would be producing 150 apps a year by the end of 2012; so far, the company has released 10.
In the UK, the Costa Awards announced their shortlists across five categories, awkwardly in a series of five PDFs on their site. The candidates include Booker winner Julian Barnes:
Novel
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
A Summer of Drowning by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)
Pure by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)
My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young (HarperCollins)
First Novel
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (Jonathan Cape)
The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness (Seren)
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson (Quercus)
Pao by Kerry Young (Bloomsbury)
Andy Mulligan won the 2011 Guardian Children's Fiction prize for RETURN TO RIBBLESTROP.
