Elizabeth Schaefer will join Del Rey as senior editor on December 14. Previously she was an editor at Scholastic.
Lindsay Walter-Greaney has joined Little, Brown Children’s as associate managing editor. She was most recently senior production editor at Scholastic.
In Sweden, publisher Lind & Co. and literary agent Carina Brandt at Brandt New Agency have partnered on Stockholm Noir Agency, a new international literary agency focusing on Nordic crime and suspense novels, headed by Jenni Brunn (previously a project coordinator at Lind & Co.) As part of the joint venture, Stockholm Noir will represent Lind & Co.’s list.
KF Literary Scouting is now working on behalf of Malpaso Editorial in Spain (adult books only.)
Salman Rushdie was presented with this year’s Mailer Prize for lifetime achievement on Thursday night.
Announcements
NetGalley is adding a Social DRM option, which embeds member information into the ebook file for tracking. It is up to publishers whether or not to enable the new feature, and the cost of those downloads is included in the NetGalley subscription price. The service is driven by NetGalley parent Firebrand, through their cloud services group. Firebrand president Doug Lessing says in the announcement, “Internationally, we’re seeing a growing trend away from traditional DRM. Our goal was to support this emerging market through NetGalley as well as our direct-to-consumer projects.”
In a poorly handled embargo, Playster has come out of beta and formally announced the launch of the US version of their subscription entertainment service — which bundles together books, audio books, video games, music, movies and TV shows. The self-proclaimed “Netflix of everything” has a 30-day free trial offer. Their FAQ for authors and publishers is here. As previously reported, their book partners include HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, and their audiobook catalog comes from Findaway World.