Susan Ruszala has resigned from her position as president of NetGalley after 10 years with the company developing the business, and is exploring both consulting and full-time positions. She can be reached via sruszala@gmail.com. Fran Toolan has taken over day-to-day operations of NetGalley and “will continue to indefinitely.” VP, director of publicity at Simon & Schuster Children’s Jennifer Romanello is leaving on September 15, and will join Emi Battaglia Public Relations as a partner on October 1. (Romanello and Battaglia worked together for 20 years at Warner Books and Grand Central.) S&S Children’s president Jon Anderson writes, “In the two years she has been […]
Archives for September 2016
Briefs: Oprah Officially Picks Love Warrior; Simone Biles Memoir from Zondervan; and More
Zondervan will publish Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles‘ memoir COURAGE TO SOAR on November 15. The book will be co-written with Michelle Buford and includes a foreword by Mary Lou Retton. “I want people to reach for their dreams,” Biles said in the announcement. “If you’re willing to put in a lot of work, and if you’re focused and determined, you can go really far. That doesn’t mean everything will happen overnight; for me, it took years of training and perseverance to reach my goals. But looking back on it now, I’m glad I didn’t give up. There so many […]
Barnes Away
The financial weekly Barron’s has had a soft spot for Barnes & Noble’s stock for years, but unfortunately they have been pretty consistently — and significantly — wrong. Publishers are cranky about the company’s underperformance in the marketplace, as sales keep ebbing even as print book sales rise, and with the abrupt departure of ceo Ronald Boire many people are expecting yet another disappointing set of results when the company reports fiscal first quarter earnings on Thursday morning. Lightly followed by analysts, the consensus expectations for the quarter still estimate sales of $958 million (down about $20.5 million from a year ago), […]
People, Etc.
Dr. Adam Black will join Macmillan Learning as chief learning officer, to help “bolster the expertise and vision of Macmillan’s research and digital development teams.” Black began his career at Cambridge University Press before moving to Pearson to lead higher-education science, global digital innovation, technology for language learning and, most recently, efficacy and research. Macmillan Learning CEO Ken Michaels notes, “Exploring big data isn’t enough. We need to understand how our products work with each student, each instructor, and within each institution. Adam has been a pioneer in efficacy and product development and he will be instrumental to the future of […]
And the Next Oprah Pick, Plus Some Notable TKs
None of the “best of September” lists we have covered recently includes the highly-likely next Oprah’s Book Club pick landing September 6, Glennon Doyle Melton’s Love Warrior from Flatiron Books. Most online US bookselling outlets eliminated their placeholder Oprah Book Club September 2016 entries after stories from the WSJ and us on August 5. (The remaining metadata for international sites does seem to have updated the unusual trim size to match Melton’s specs, though some sites do have the Oprah pick tagged as fiction.) Perhaps most telling as confirmation, however, is that the metadata scrub was so thorough as to remove […]
People
Abby Saul has left Browne & Miller to launch The Lark Group, a literary agency seeking adult commercial and literary fiction. Joe D’Onofrio will take over as director of the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Distribution Center, filling the spot vacated by Don Linn earlier this year. Most recently D’Onofrio has been director of supply chain for Henry Schein, after leaving Simon & Schuster in 2011, where he had been svp supply chain operations for 8 years. Mary Anne Thompson Associates has been appointed US scout for CommonWeath Magazine in Taiwan. Viking UK editorial director Eleo Gordon has retired after almost 50 years with […]