At William Morrow, Kate Nintzel has been promoted to executive editor.
At Candlewick, Mary Lee Donovan has been promoted to editorial director.
At becker&mayer!, Dana Youlin has been promoted to editorial manager, Delia Greve has been promoted to senior editor, and Nicole Burns Ascue is now associate editor.
In the UK, Anna Valentine will re-join Orion in May as publishing director, non-fiction, reporting to Amanda Harris, newly promoted to deputy publisher. Valentine was most recently publishing director at HarperCollins UK.
Mavis Gallant, 91, one of Canada’s most distinguished short story writers and literary figures, died Tuesday morning in Paris, where she has resided since 1951. Gallant is the author of two novels, a play, a collection of journalism and essays and nine volumes of short stories, including THE END OF THE WORLD AND OTHER STORIES (1974), PARIS STORIES (2002), and THE COST OF LIVING (2009). Knopf and McClelland & Stewart will publish a volume of Gallant’s personal journals in the fall of 2015.
Time magazine senior reporter Andrea Sachs will retire from the company on February 28 after 29 years there. She has been the magazine’s publishing reporter since 1995.
Lynda La Plante has formed her own literary management company, La Plante Global, that will control all of her future book, TV and film deals, as well as digital content and production. Former S&S UK publicity director Nigel Stoneman, who has worked with La Plante for more than a dozen years, will join the new company as head of business development, handling negotiations for the author’s novels and screen work and developing new content across all media. Gill Coleridge, who previously represented La Plante, will continue to manage backlist domestic and foreign rights.
La Plante said in a statement to the Bookseller: “I wanted to consolidate all areas of my business and have a platform upon which my team and I can strategically plan the growth of the business. Nigel and I have worked together for over a decade and I could think of nobody better to join me in this new venture.” La Plante is currently at work on TENNISON, a prequel to the PRIME SUSPECT television series that S&S will publish next year and that La Plante is adapting to air on television in 2016.
Kobo’s parent company Rakuten reported fourth quarter and full-year results. (They showed a slide that reiterated previously announced growth statistics for Kobo, but they do not break out actual sales for the unit.)
In the investor presentation, Rakuten ceo Hiroshi Mikitani spoke further about the recent appointment of Takahito “Taka” Aiki as ceo of Kobo. “He is very good at operations and he has successfully turned around the Fusion telecom business.” Mikitani noted, “We think we can quickly turn around the operation of Kobo,” adding that, “Kobo is growing nicely topline, but I think we need to make sure that we’ll be able to generate profit in the near future, so that’s why we believe Aiki is the most suitable person to lead Kobo — without sacrificing the new, innovative actions.”
Release
In legal news, attorney Bob Kohn has filed one more — and perhaps his final — amicus brief with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in support of Simon & Schuster and Macmillan‘s appeal of Judge Denise Cote’s injunction against Apple. On the issue of essence to the publishers’ appeal, Kohn writes: “The District Court’s use of its judgment against Apple to modify the terms of a previously settled, publicly-conducted Tunney Act proceeding creates a significant due process concern that towers over the mere violations of civil procedure, undermining of public policy, and disregard of judicial fairness discussed by Defendant-Appellants in their respective briefs. To put it bluntly, hundreds of members of the public who were lead to believe by their Congress that the Tunney Act was intended to welcome their participation in these settlements have been hoodwinked. Next time, why bother?”
Kohn also uses the brief to reassert his argument that Judge Cote “swept away the past thirty-five years of Supreme Court evolution in the realm of antitrust law” by not considering Amazon’s below marginal cost pricing of ebooks, and the “countervailing procompetitive virtue” of the agency model in addressing that imbalance and bringing “efficiency” to the ebook market.