Cliff Guren is leaving Bluefire, where he was vp, business development, to relaunch his consulting business Syntopical. Bluefire founder and ceo Micah Bowers said in the announcement: “Over the past five years I have had the pleasure of working with Cliff as we’ve successfully grown our software licensing business…. Cliff has done a fabulous job for us and we hope to find opportunities to work together in the years to come.” Coming soon from Bluefire is their Cloudshelf family of EPUB 3 reader applications and distribution services that will enable businesses and institutions to “deploy digital private libraries and subscription services to their constituent groups.”
Jessica Sindler will join Dey Street Books as a senior editor, starting February 23. She was at Spiegel & Grau.
Distribution
Hachette Book Group will provide North American distribution, fulfillment, customer service and billing/collection services to children’s publisher pikids as of May 1. Now also known as Phoenix International Publications — part of China’s big Phoenix group, which already has a joint venture in partnership with Hachette Livre — the unit was formerly the children’s division of Publications International, sold to Phoenix in 2014 for $80 million.