Andrea Barzvi recently left ICM Partners after 13 years to start her own agency, Empire literary, where she will continue to represent commercial non-fiction as well as women’s fiction. At Sourcebooks, Nicole Villeneuve has been promoted to assistant publicity manager. Poet Billy Collins, 72, has sold his papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, The finalists have been named for the Costa Short Story Award. In bookstore news, Main Street Books in St. Charles, MO — which was set to close on January 31 as the owners retire — is negotiating with a potential buyer. (A separate […]
Archives for January 2014
Winter Institute Buzz Books and Beyond: Fiction to Watch
For the second year in a row we are helping to amplify the ABA’s Winter Institute, starting today in Seattle, with a new free ebook Buzz Books 2014: Spring/Summer, featuring 10 authors appearing at WI9 and another 30 anticipated “discovery” titles from the season ahead. (Download the trade edition — with detailed marketing, rights and publicity information, and click-throughs after each excerpt if you’re interested in the full galley — from this page, in an an EPUB or Kindle file or from NetGalley for any reader. Or share the regular edition, which readers everywhere have come to rely on for sampling the season […]
Family of Stella Gibbons Has Two Unseen Manuscripts to Submit
The family of the late novelist Stella Gibbons is ready to share two unpublished (and previously unknown to the public) manuscripts with publishers. Best known as the author of Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbons finshed the two works late in life, prior to her death in 1989. One manuscript, AN ALPHA, is about a young woman from the East who moves to Britain and becomes a successful writer. The other, THE YELLOW HOUSES, “is a bit of a ghost story,” her daughter Laura Richardson tells the Camden New Journal. Gibbons’ grandson Ben Richardson indicates to the paper that with “the renewed […]
Two More Nook Executives to Depart Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble employees were told on Friday of two more departures from the Nook executive ranks. VP for digital products hardware engineering in their Palo Alto office Bill Saperstein “is no longer with the company.” Some time in February, vp and general manager for global ebooks as well as managing director of the international Barnes & Noble unit based in Luxembourg Jim Hilt will be leaving as well. (Employees were told he will be working for clothing retailer Express.) Confirming the departures to Publishers Lunch, company spokesperson Mary Ellen Keating wrote that Apple veteran Saperstein “was instrumental in helping […]
People, Etc.
At Crown Archetype, Mary Choteborsky has been promoted to senior editor. At Touchstone, Lauren Spiegel has been promoted to senior editor. At Holt, Allison Adler has been promoted to associate editor and Leslie Brandon has moved up to publicity manager. Elsewhere at Macmillan, Kelsey Albertson has been promoted to sales coordinator, and Hannah Braaten is now assistant editor. At The Lisa Ekus Group, Sally Ekus has been promoted to agency manager. Penguin Random House chairman John Makinson speaks to The Times of India about the merged company. Asked, “What does that scale allow you to do?,” he answers: “It puts us […]
F+W Acquires Crafts Specialist New Track Media
F+W Media has taken another step forwards as an art and crafts powerhouse with the acquisition announced on Friday of New Track Media, which has 30 consumer enthusiast brands in select craft categories, woodworking, and astronomy. New Track’s assets include “three robust direct-to-consumer catalog businesses with more than 12 million members and revenues in the tens of millions.” As F+W ceo David Nussbaum said at the Digital Book World conference recently, the company already has “more than 20 million individual consumer ecommerce orders annually.” With their previous acquisitions of Interweave, Martha Pullen Company, and Love Sewing, over 60 percent of […]