At PGW, Abbey Phalen has been promoted to marketing and business development manager.
Katie Gallagher will join Perseus as gift sales manager on March 15, working out of the company’s Berkeley offices. Previously she sold giftware and home décor products for Midwest CBK and was an account executive at Napoleon Appliance.
At Chronicle Books, Mirabelle Korn has been promoted to assistant editor.
Kathy Huck has recently left North Star Way to pursue other opportunities. She is also available freelance writing and editing. She may be reached at khuck@nyc.rr.com
At the Los Angeles Times, arts and entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa is adding the paper’s books coverage to her portfolio, with books editor Carolyn Kellogg reporting to her.
In the UK, Orion is adding a new imprint for commercial fiction and nonfiction, Trapeze. Anna Valentine is publisher of the line, which launches in October and plans to issue 20 books a year, reporting to Jon Wood. Sam Eades is senior commissioning editor and Emma Smith is editor.
An editing error accidentally omitted one of the April LibraryReads selections: Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly (Ballantine).
Distribution
Bookmasters will provide fulfillment in the US and Canada for ecumenical publisher Paraclete Press.
Features
The latest installment of LitHub’s Interview with a Gatekeeper series is a conversation with Grove Atlantic editorial director Elisabeth Schmitz. In a discussion of what might happen if she worked for a bigger house, Schmitz says, “I would love sometimes simply to win a book auction by being the highest bidder!… Truth be told, I can count on one hand the books I have been devastated to lose due to not having the money. I’m more chagrined by the books I lost because I lost my nerve or was talked out of it by someone. Those are the ones that chafe, and no, I can’t tell you which ones they are because it hurts too much!”
The big difference is: “At Grove, we have to reach for projects that others think are long shots. Books from overseas, books about tough disturbing subjects, or promising manuscripts that need hard work. We have to go where others don’t. When people thought I was crazy to fall for a proposal by an unknown Cambridge academic British poet mourning her father’s death by adopting a goshawk, Morgan [Entrekin] said to go for it. Editors around town ask me how I got this risky project through my editorial board, or how I did a P&L for it. I say ‘Editorial board? We don’t have one. P&L? I’ve never done one.’ I’m lucky. I know it.”
Schmitz started as a scout, working for Maria Campbell for 5 years. “When you are scouting you do a little bit of everything. You learn about agenting, subsidiary rights, the movie business, editing, and you’re also reading constantly and quickly. Scouting is like boot camp for publishing.”
Separately, WNYC’s On the Media spends a full hour looking at book publishing with these segments (in order): Carolyn Kellogg on annual stats and trends; Laura Marsh at the New Republic on an earlier coloring book trend in the 60s; a visit to the Amazon store (this year’s version of 2008’s plethora of “I tried an ereader; let me tell you about it” stories); South Korea’s push to make their literature a global commodity and win a Nobel prize; “The man who loved [rare] books too much” and stole them; and how used book enterprise processes 4 million volumes of “raw books” every year.