Alison Callahan will join Gallery Books on December 2 as executive editor. Previously she was executive editor at Doubleday.
Shara Zaval has joined The Book Report Network as Editorial Manager of Kidsreads.com and Teenreads.com. Prior to moving to New York in September, Shara was a publicist with the Independent Publishers Group in Chicago.
At Chronicle Books, Victoria Thomas has been promoted to associate sales manager.
In the UK, David Higham Associates is taking over representation of the Anthony Burgess estate around the world.
In awards news, the winners of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards included:
Fiction: Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (Little, Brown)
Non-Fiction: Sandra Dwa, Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page (McGill-Queens University Press)
Hudson Booksellers named their best books of 2013 in fiction, nonfiction, young readers and business interest, with Neil Gaiman‘s THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE as their book of the year.
In other picks, the Target Book Club selection for for December is Kimberly McCreight’s novel Reconstructing Amelia.
Entertainment Weekly features the stars of the forthcoming movie version of Fifty Shades Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson on their cover — at the same time that they report the movie’s release has officially been moved from summer 2014 to Valentine’s Day 2015. Production was delayed by the casting change for the male lead, but Universal Pictures “says the casting change is not the primary reason for the new release date.” Studio chair Donna Langley says, “The strength of this book is really worldwide, so we want to be able to take advantage of women who are invariably on vacation with their families during the month of August in Europe.” Apparently the movie version of Nicholas Sparks’s The Longest Ride is also scheduled for Valentine’s Day 2015.
A federal jury in Chicago found infomercial pitchman Kevin Trudeau guilty of criminal contempt for exaggerating the contents of his weight loss books in infomercials, Reuters reported. The guilty verdict stemmed from a 2004 federal court settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred Trudeau from misrepresenting the contents of his books in advertisements and fined him $2 million. But prosecutors successfully argued Trudeau had knowingly violated the settlement in promoting his 2006 book The Weight Loss Treatment ‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About in subsequent infomercials. Trudeau was recently jailed twice on separate contempt of court charges.