At the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, Jennifer Rofe has been promoted to senior agent.
Marissa Litak has joined Sourcebooks as an assistant publicist. Previously, she was editorial assistant at Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
The new issue of Poets & Writers magazine has Michael Szczerban interviewing at length 37 Ink founder Dawn Davis: “The truth is, we spend so much of our time advocating internally for our books, making sure we have the right cover, the right subtitle, filling out forms and so forth, that we often don’t have time to be entrepreneurial. But when a moment of clarity comes, it’s fun to pursue it or to brainstorm with an agent about a client whose writing you really like.”
Davis notes: “You can feel caught in the weeds when you have to let people know you can read and advocate outside of your own background. To have people only think of you for African American projects—or, if you’re Latino, to only be thought of for Latino culture–based projects—that can be disappointing and exhausting. I feel that’s something I’ll always have to navigate.”
Ultimately, the fundamentals still matter the most: “I’ve learned that despite all the new bells and whistles, there’s no substitute for giving the bookselling community time enough to read a book and get behind it.” Plus, “Despite all the things that we tell authors to do, there has to be a book that you want to recommend to five other people after you put it down. It starts with the book no matter what. Without that it doesn’t matter how much you tweet. You’ll get one wave of publicity and then it’s over.”
Acquired
After sending members an email last week indicating that crowdfunding book platform Pubslush was “closing it’s [sic] doors” this Friday, the site has announced that instead it has been acquired by Colborne Communications, an editing and publishing services company in Toronto, effective August 24. “Pubslush will remain open and taking submissions for all book crowdfunding and pre-order campaigns.” Colborne founder Greg Ioannou will become president of Pubslush.