Wes Miller will move over to Grand Central as senior editor on March 14, focusing on thrillers. He spent the past five years as an editor at Mulholland.
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association marketing director for the past 10 years Brian Juenemann will take over as executive director of the organization on March 1, after Tom Chambliss retires. He worked at the University of Oregon Bookstore for over a decade before joining the PNBA.
Sarah Janet has joined Open Road Integrated Media as a marketing manager. Most recently she was a copywriter at Scholastic, and a marketing manager at Penguin.
We missed it at inception earlier this year, but Kobo president and ceo Michael Tamblyn is sharing some President’s Picks. He just added Frances Dinkelspiel’s Tangled Vines — an account of a giant warehouse fire that destroyed millions of bottles of wine and the wine-loving scam artist who set it, as well a history of winemaking in California — alongside Anders de la Motte’s MemoRandom and Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.
Separately, Kobo provided us with some additional comment after publication of Tuesday’s story on parent company Rakuten’s writedown against Kobo’s assets: “Slower than expected growth in English language ebook markets has resulted in an adjustment in Kobo’s long-term value. Rakuten’s commitment to the ebook market and its confidence in the mid-term outlook is evident in the purchase of OverDrive and continuing investments in Kobo’s global growth.” They added: “Kobo is poised for a strong year this year both in terms of growth and continuing profitability improvement. In fact, in January we saw the strongest single-month content sales in our history while our device business is more profitable than ever. We are very confident in Kobo’s place in the future of ebooks.”