President and owner of Verso Advertising Denise Berthiaume will give up day-to-day management responsibilities for the agency to become chairman and owner as of October 1. Longtime Hachette Book Group svp, advertising Martha Otis will join Verso as president on October 1. (Hachette hired an outside firm late last year for the first time in over 20 years to handle media buying and some creative development.) Another Verso veteran, vp and managing director Michael Kazan will be retiring after 10 years with the agency. Berthiaume says in the announcement, “Martha possesses the perfect match of experience and drive to lead the agency […]
Archives for September 2014
People, Etc.
Former ceo of Atlantic Books Toby Mundy has established his own literary agency, Toby Mundy Associates. He will use Ed Victor Ltd.’s service operation Bedford Square Literary Management for “turn-key back-office service.” TMA is the first client for the new service. Amazon cfo since 2002 Thomas Szkutak will retire from the company in June 2015. Brian Olsavsky, vp of finance for the company’s global consumer business, will take over. Olga Massov has joined Phaidon in New York as project editor, food, reporting to Emily Takoudes. Melanie DeNardo has joined Little, Brown Children’s as publicity director. Previously she was deputy director of publicity at Henry Holt. In addition, […]
Remembering RH’s Fairchild; Memorials for Foster and Schiffrin
Former Random House vp, field director for adult sales Betty Fairchild, 67, died last week in Roanoke, VA. After starting her career as a bookseller, Fairchild worked in sales for Random House from 1975 until her retirement in 2002. PRH executive Jaci Updike writes: “During an era when many were predicting the imminent demise of independent bookstores, Betty was a fierce and fearless advocate for the indies, and for the reps who called on them. After Random House was united with Bantam Doubleday Dell to form the new, greater Random House, she led a variety of initiatives to transform the […]
NYT Book Review to Feature Mantel Serial
The title story from two-time Booker winner Hilary Mantel‘s forthcoming story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher will run in the September 28 edition of the NYT Book Review as a first serial, available online as of September 21. (A UK first serial of the same story will run in The Telegraph on September 20.) The book of 10 stories publishes on September 30, issued in the US from Holt as a John Macrae Book. Editor of the NYTBR Pamela Paul told us by email, “We would love to do more first serials and excerpts, albeit selectively. Hilary Mantel is one […]
A Big Boost for Dealmakers
We have gone live at Publishers Marketplace with a significant improvement to individual Dealmakers pages that has been planned for a long time: Whenever we have matching Contact data for agents and editors (or matching Member Pages, or — for agents — matching Who Represents records), that information is automatically displayed on the upper right-hand side of the Dealmaker page, right underneath the Dealmaker rankings. Simple in display (but complicated to execute) it makes our most frequently visited set of pages more comprehensive and more powerful than ever. Built in part on the indexing we created for our big Super […]
People, Etc.
Alessandra Bastagli has joined Nation Books as editorial director, filling the position vacated earlier this year when Carl Bromley moved to The New Press. Most recently she has been digital features editor at Al Jazeera America, after working at Free Press until it was merged into the Simon & Schuster Publishing Group in fall 2012. Meg Cassidy has left Simon & Schuster, where she was a publicity manager, to pursue freelance work in publicity, culinary pr, and event planning from Portland, OR. She can be reached at mcassidy9@gmail.com. At their annual meeting later this month, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will honor […]