Director of publicity for Bloomsbury Children’s and Walker Children’s Katy Hershberger is leaving. She will start next week as an associate director of publicity for Simon & Schuster Children’s, as well as the Atheneum, and Margaret McElderry Books imprint. Following the sale of AP Watt to United Agents late last year, Derek Johns will retire at the end of November. He has been at AP Watt since 1992. At Harlequin’s Mira, Tara Parsons has been promoted to editorial director. Casey Maloney joined Picador as senior publicist. She was most recently a publicist at Penguin, working on the Gotham, Avery, Viking […]
Archives for August 2013
People
Valentina Kalk will leave her position as chief of UN Publications in late September to become director of the Brookings Institution Press in Washington DC. Jonathan Hevenstone has joined Atypon as svp business development. The company, which provides a software-as-a-service content delivery platform that has focused on STM publishers, will be expanding to “adjacent publishing areas.” Hevenstone was vp business development at SourceHOV and prior that he worked at Jouve. The recently-formed League of Assistant Editors — focused on helping young editors and agents connect with each other to advance the next generation of publishing professionals and authors — has […]
Now In E: A Borgia, Garner, More Cartland
Showtime cancelled their series The Borgias (starring Jeremy Irons), but creator Neil Jordan is providing fans some closure via an ebook. THE BORGIA APOCALYPSE is based on Jordan’s script for a two-hour series finale that he never got to shoot (though apparently he says in the book that he had planned an entire fourth season). The 16,000-word ebook is published through literary agency Inkwell Management (which represents Jordan’s fiction). Harper UK is issuing the nine-title backlist of British fantasy writer Alan Garner in ebook editions for the first time on August 15. The house controls world English rights to Garner, […]
Rainbow Rowell Tops First Monthly LibraryReads List
LibraryReads, the new promotional program in public libraries inspired by the Indie Next List and designed to share recommendations for newly published books that librarians love and recommend, has announced their inaugural September list. FANGIRL leads the list, which also includes Publishers Lunch 2013 Fall/Winter Buzz Book title BURIAL RITES. No 1.: Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell How The Light Gets In, by Louise Penny Night Film, by Marisha Pessl Help for the Haunted, by John Searles The Returned, by Jason Mott Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent Margot, by Jillian Cantor Songs of Willow Frost, by Jamie Ford Five Days at […]
Even with Big Hits, Mondadori Slides In First Half
Earlier in August, Italy’s Mondadori Group reported results for the first half of the year. “There was a slowdown in the trade books market” that pushed Mondadori’s total book sales down 7.3 percent to €134 million, with EBITDA of €10.3 million (down almost 20 percent). Among their publishing lines, however, sales rose 2.6 percent at Edizioni Mondadori (thanks to 700,000 copies in print of Dan Brown’s INFERNO), and 8.2 percent at Piemme (thanks to Khaled Hosseini’s AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED.) The company says it maintained its market share, still leading the trade with 26 percent of all trade revenues. (They […]
People, Etc.
David Inman will return to Quarto in September as managing director of their UK publishing group, Aurum. He is currently sales and marketing director at Templar, prior to which he was sales and marketing director Quarto. Former senior editor at Ballantine and literary agent Pamela Dean Strickler, 53, died July 18 from cancer. Strickler spent sixteen years at Ballantine before leaving to start her own agency, specializing in romance, women’s fiction, and historical fiction. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s lifetime achievement award has gone to Wendell Berry. He tells the AP: “As a poet and fiction writer, my goal was to write […]