Longtime Tor editor David Hartwell, 74, died on Wednesday from head trauma suffered in a fall. As Tor notes, he was nominated for the Hugo Award 41, winning the awards for Best Professional Editor in 2006 and Best Editor Long Form in 2008 and 2009, as well as editing Nebula and Hugo Award-winning novels. Tor’s Tom Doherty writes: “David Hartwell was a brilliant editor. I met David in the early 70s when he was working for Berkley and got to know him better as he was creating Timescape an imprint at Simon and Schuster. I’ve worked with him closely for the last 33 […]
Archives for January 2016
Buzz Books Spring/Summer Preview: Commercial Fiction
As we noted previously, we are off to our fastest start ever with downloads and social media activity for our two new Buzz Books 2016 free ebook samplers. For the rest of this week we’re running select excerpts from Sarah Weinman’s extensive seasonal preview of adult trade titles set for publication over the spring and summer months, starting with commercial fiction. You can start reading many of the highlighted titles — noted with an asterisk — right now in Buzz Books 2016: Spring/Summer. (Collect the trade editions from NetGalley or Edelweiss, or get the consumers editions from your ebookstore of choice.) And please […]
Pearson to Cut 4,000 Jobs, Reduces Forecasts
After first surprising markets by reducing their sales and profit expectations last October, on Thursday morning Pearson ceo John Fallon admitted “that the cyclical and policy related challenges in our biggest markets have been more pronounced and persisted for longer than anticipated.” Another round of restructuring and reorganization is expected to eliminate 4,000 jobs — or 10 percent of the company’s workforce — and cost “approximately £320 million” in one-time charges this year. While you might expect that such dramatic moves would further sink the stock — which as we noted before fell 42 percent in 2015 and dropped again in early January […]
People, Etc.
Chris Lupo has joined Chernin Entertainment as the company’s book scout, based in New York, reporting to the head of film and television. Previously he was a senior literary scout at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. At Random House Children’s, Jennifer Moreno has been promoted to production manager; Natalia Dextre moves up to associate production manager; Thomas Marshall has joined as production manager, moving over from the Penguin Random House Audio Group; and production associate Alice Rahaeauser will now work with the Licensed team, newly reporting to Patty Collins. Lithub.com announced a new group of contributors to the site, including: Manager […]
PRH Recovers From Systems Outage; ABA Winter Institute Faces Winter Storm
Penguin Random House has been working to overcome widespread systems issues at their Westminster, MD facility since early Tuesday morning that interrupted key internal resources, including order processing, as well as many of the company’s web sites. Ironically, the outages aligned with the UK launch of their new consumer-facing website Wednesday, even as the corporate UK site was down. (That site is live again now.) Penguinrandomhouse.com, the global corporate site and a wide variety of other sites run out of the US — including the company’s intranet — remain offline as we write this Wednesday morning. For better or for worse, […]
People: F+W Hires Beusse, and More
F+W has hired Tom Beusse as ceo, effective immediately, filling the position vacated by David Nussbaum last September (with coo Jim Ogle working as interim ceo since then). Beusse founded and ran as president the USA Today Sports Media Group until leaving in 2013. Prior to that he was ceo of radio content syndication company Westwood One for a brief period; he was also president of Time Warner’s Time4 Media subsidiary, and president of magazine publishing at Rodale. Beusse says in the announcement: “I am excited about the opportunity to lead F+W forward in the ever-changing media landscape. The deep relationship F+W brands have […]