ICM Partners has expanded their partnership to encompass 11 more agents. They join the 27 partners who took control of the firm in 2012 after completing a buyout of previous controlling owner Rizvi Traverse Management. Two book publishing agents — Kris Dahl and Jennifer Joel — are among the new partners. (Sloan Harris, Esther Newberg and Amanda Urban were all part of the initial group of partners from last year.) The partners noted in a group statement: “The culture of professionalism, collegiality and teamwork that we enjoy at the agency will continue to grow with the addition of our new partners and all of us together.”
Managing director of The Book Depository Kieron Smith is expected to leave his position in the middle of November, The Bookseller “understands” — just about two years after the close of the unit’s sale to Amazon.
Bestselling author of A Return to Love Marianne Williamson is running for Congress as an independent, seeking to unseat 74-year-old Henry Waxman in representing California’s 33rd district. Williamson notes that at her conference last year, “I urged almost two thousand women to consider running for office using the principles of non-violence to birth a new American politics.” She says on her site: “Our biggest threat is a pattern of a thousand cuts – the slow but now constant chipping away at our democratic freedoms—one capitulation to moneyed interests at a time, one new gerrymandered district at a time, one government surveillance program at a time, one limiting of our voting rights at a time, one intimidation of journalists at a time, one Patriot Act at a time, one National Defense Authorization Act at a time, one Trans Pacific Partnership so-called trade deal limiting our sovereignty at a time.”
The New Republic has put online their article on Gallery editor Jeremie Rubie-Strauss, dubbed “the new king of trash publishing” and “the man who revolutionized dreck.” His boss Jennifer Bergstrom says, “It shouldn’t be about the book but the money you can make from the book.”
Cristina Krumsick will join Artisan as senior publicity and marketing manager. The author of No Bake Makery, she was previously a publicist at Atria.
Katie Fleming has been promoted to director of publicity for Penguin Random House Audio, Fodor’s and Living Language, reporting to Amanda D’Acierno.
At Open Road, Nina Lassam has been promoted to senior marketing manager.
Lucy Sharp is joining codeMantra as senior sales manager for UK, Ireland and Western Europe, based in the UK. She was formerly senior strategic key accounts sales manager for Ingram, based at Lightning Source UK. Sharp will report to executive director of the publishing services division Walter Walker in Boston.
Fiction writers Amanda Coplin, Jennifer Dubois, C.E. Morgan, and Stephanie Powell Watts, as well as nonfiction writers Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams and Morgan Meis are among the recipients of the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Awards.
Reporter Graeme Smith won Canada’s $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction for The Dogs Are Eating Them, a memoir about his time in Afghanistan covering the war there.
Consortium will distribute Auzou, a France-based children’s book publisher, and erotica publisher Sweetmeats Press as of January 1, 2014. They will start digital distribution immediatley for Stark Raving Group, an ebook publisher specializing in mysteries and thrillers.