Melina Gerosa Bellows has been promoted to publisher of National Geographic Books, adding responsibility for sales, marketing and distribution to her current role as National Geographic’s chief creative officer for Books, Kids and Family.
Ken Rhodes has been promoted to managing director, NBN International.
Will Lach is joining the American Museum of Natural History as director, licensing and publishing. Previously he was manager of product development, Department of Printed Product, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, Ross Harris has been promoted to literary agent.
At Harper Children’s, Melissa Miller has been promoted to editor at Katherine Tegen Books, concentrating on book development.
At Chronicle Books, Shona Burns has been promoted to executive director, production & content management.
In distribution news, Hachette Book Group and Hachette UK have partnered on a new digital distribution agreement in which authors who granted HBG authors world or world English language rights of their books will have ebooks in English available for sale immediately in the UK, Europe, Australia, India and Africa (through HUK’s ebook retail partners) and in South America, the Caribbean, and Asia in the coming weeks (through HBG’s ebook retail partners).
Chronicle Books will continue to distribute Moleskine America products after a four-year renewal of their agreement. Starting in 2014, Moleskine will “directly engage and manage merchandising and sales interactions with a few select retailers in the marketplace,” however.
In awards news, the Giller Prize announced its shortlist of five authors, of which Dennis Bock’s GOING HOME AGAIN and Dan Vyleta’s THE CROOKED MAID are published in the US by Knopf and Bloomsbury respectively, with Craig Davidson’s CATARACT CITY set for publication next year by Graywolf and Lisa Moore’s CAUGHT due out in January from Grove/Atlantic. Only HELLGOING by Lynn Coady is without a US publisher for now.
Terezia Mora won the German Book Prize for her novel DAS UNGEHEUER (Luchterhand).
Melville House will donate proceeds of Jakob Arjouni’s posthumous crime novel BROTHER KEMAL to the newly announced Jakob Arjouni Fund to Fight Pancreatic Cancer (Arjouni died of the disease in 2012 at the age of 48.) The fund will be administered by the Lustgarten Foundation, the world’s largest private foundation dedicated to pancreatic cancer research, with 100% of donations going directly to research.
UK literary agent Dot Lumley died October 5 of cancer. Her clients at the Dorian Literary Agency, established in 1986, included horror novelist (and former husband) Brian Lumley, Stephen Graham Jones, and many other science fiction, fantasy, and horror novelists.
By now many of you will have seen or linked to the latest version of the Andrew Wylie Quotable Interview, this courtesy the New Republic (as part of their books issue.) Wylie’s interviewer, Laura Bennett, has been posting outtakes all morning on her Twitter feed. On looking for new writers on Twitter, Wylie said: “I’d sooner go to a discotheque looking for a writer.” And some more on last year’s report that CAA was looking to buy Wylie out (which he confirmed, more or less, in the interview): “I don’t aspire to stand in a room with a bunch of film stars. It’d make me so anxious I’d faint.”
On poaching: “I was the guy with the scalpel. I didn’t think it was rude to say to the patient, ‘you’d do better in surgery with me with my scalpel than with this other person with the shovel.’ Because after all, the patient is dying.” And on Spain: “No one has gone to work in 100 years. Revolting country. You have to sleep with people if you want to achieve anything.”