Greg Stadnyk has joined Little, Brown Children’s as associate art director. He was at Penguin Children’s.
Iris Blasi has been named marketing director, senior editor at Pegasus Books, effective August 12. She was formerly marketing manager at Open Road Integrated Media.
Longtime Amazon employee Sarah Jane Gunter, who has worked most recently in the company’s Luxembourg and Paris offices, will become publisher of the Amazon Crossing imprint on September 1. As the company explains in a job listing, they are starting a branch of Crossing in Germany (Amazon Crossing DE), “to establish new foreign authors in Germany.”
The Book Industry Study Group confirmed that board chairman Ken Michaels will serve his full two-year term, through September 2014, even as he spends more time in London for his new job as global coo for Macmillan Science and Education.
Walker Books’ new group export product and sales manager is correctly spelled David McMillan.
The NYT tips the late A.S.A. Harrison‘s debut novel THE SILENT WIFE as a sleeper hit as the trade paperback original makes the paper’s bestseller list. (FWIW, it was noted early in the year in our Spring/Summer Buzz Books commercial fiction preview.)
Harrison, 65, died of cancer in April, and the book was published by Penguin. Former Penguin editor Tara Singh acquired the book in spring 2012 — before Gillian Flynn’s breakout success with GONE GIRL — but the book is being touted as in the same vein. (Amusingly, the paper actually suggests, “It also may have helped that Ms. Harrison’s book bears the word ‘wife’ in the title, an element that appears to send a signal to female readers.”)
Nielsen Bookscan reports sales of close to 12,000 trade paperbacks since publication June 25 — with sales for the week ending July 28 spiking to roughly 4,500 copies. That same week, Penguin says they sold over 20,000 ebooks. Penguin editor-in-chief Patrick Nolan observes that “It’s a word-of-mouth book. This is one of those things that started more slowly but now is growing and growing.”
New York Magazine profiles Marisha Pessl in advance of the publication of her second novel NIGHT FILM on August 20 from Random House — after she made headlines for switching publishers (from Viking) and agents (from Susan Golomb to Binky Urban.) Of that period Pessl now says it was only after she made the switch that “she realized it was considered, within the culture of the publishing industry, ‘wild and rogue.'”
But Pessl apparently doesn’t think much of New York-based book culture: “Every industry has that little microcosm where everything is so important. Even in the assisted living where my grandmother spent the end of her life, there were the popular people—everything was about activity hour and who was going to sit where. Everyone finds those hierarchies so important. But I’m outside of the literary world. I see myself as a storyteller, not necessarily a ‘literary’ novelist—I don’t even know what that definition is, and I don’t think anyone does.”