St. Martin’s Press is reorganizing its marketing and publicity departments into four core groups as part of a move from “format-driven orientation to an audience-and-category-focused orientation.” The groups will be made up of SMP’s current marketers, publicists and digital marketers, each working on a specific set of genre groups.
Anne Marie Tallberg has been named vp, marketing, communications & audience development leading a group focusing on women’s fiction/romance/young adult/parenting/self-help/health-fitness-diet/crafts. Dori Weintraub will serve in the same executive capacity, leading a group focusing on women’s fiction/literary fiction/biography-memoir. Lisa Senz will has been named vp, marketing and partnerships, and will continue as lead marketer of the publisher’s women’s fiction and literary fiction authors.
Meanwhile, Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Paul Hochman, and Laura Clark have each been named director, marketing, communications & audience development. Hochman will focus on mystery, thriller and suspense titles; Clark will lead a group working on the business/politics/history/military/religion/sports/cooking/travel categories.
Finally, three executives will work across all titles, including director of publicity John Murphy and senior director, creative services & advertising Nancy Tryptuc. Matt Baldacci has been promoted to vp, marketing and sales operations, leading a group focusing on operations and analysis. Joe Goldschein has been named director, marketing and sales operations working with Baldacci to build out the capabilities for this group. All executives continue to report to evp, marketing & digital media strategy Jeff Dodes.
Maria Ribas has been promoted to assistant editor at Harlequin Nonfiction and Harlequin Kimani.
At Chronicle Books, Kristen Hewitt has been promoted to design director.
James Herbert, 69, international bestseller of horror novels, died at his home in Sussex, UK on March 20. He was the author of 23 novels, most recently ASH, published last week by Pan Macmillan, as well as RATS (1974), THE FOG, and THE DARK. He was also awarded an OBE in 2010. Macmillan publisher Jeremy Trevathan, who was Herbert’s editor for the past ten years, said in a statement: “Herbert was one of the keystone authors in a genre that had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a true testament to his writing and his enduring creativity that his books continued to be huge bestsellers right up until his death. He has the rare distinction that his novels were considered classics of the genre within his lifetime. His death marks the passing of one of the giants of popular fiction in the 20th century.”
Simon & Schuster will add information about tracking online piracy to its Author Portal that it receives from Attributor, which the publisher has been working with since 2011. In a letter to authors and illustrators ceo Carolyn Reidy says these reports will “provide information about the number of infringements identified and takedown notices sent to infringing sites, success rates in removing infringements, the types of sites where infringement is occurring, the specific urls and geographic distribution of sites where unauthorized copies are offered and more.”