Theresa Thompson has been promoted to president at Sterling Publishing, which she has run since 2012 as executive vice president (following the departure of Marcus Leaver, and B&N’s withdrawn effort to sell the publisher). She is responsible for the management of the company, both creatively and operationally, and will oversee many areas of the business, including operations, finance, book production and manufacturing. Thompson has worked for parent company Barnes & Noble since 2003, when she ran the audiobook business.
At Avery, Anne Kosmoski is promoted to associate director of publicity, while Casey Maloney moves up to assistant publicity director. In addition, Ally Bruschi is promoted to associate publicist.
Group publishing director at Allen & Unwin, Sue Hines will retire at the end of 2016 after twenty years with the company. Ceo Robert Gorman said in the announcement: “We have been privileged to have benefitted from Sue’s immense publishing skills for the past 20 years. She is a publisher par excellence. She has a deep rapport with her authors and has always tirelessly promoted their work. We will greatly miss Sue’s inspiration, her communication and her eye for the right title, the right cover, the right book.”
Colton Long has joined Insight Editions as project coordinator.
UK scouting agency MacLehose, Servadio & Pupo-Thompson has changed its name to London Literary Scouting. Original founder Koukla MacLehose will focus on French literature going forward.
Distribution
Hachette Book Group will handle sales and distribution for Gildan Press, a new imprint for audiobook publisher Gildan Media.
Q&A
Poets & Writers magazine interviews Tin House co-founder Rob Spillman: “All the mergers of big publishers created space for indie presses to take on things that the major presses weren’t, especially literary fiction. We just published Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. Her Collected Stories last year from Knopf did incredibly well and was a finalist for a bunch of awards. But Knopf thought this was too weird of a project for them. It had come out digitally from a company that failed, so it was sort of in the world but not really. It had never been a physical book. It looked like a messy headache to Knopf, but not to us. Same with Charlie D’Ambrosio’s collected essays. He’s under contract at Knopf, but these essays had come out in a weird limited edition in Seattle, and they said no. We benefit from that.”
Further on the same theme: “We’re getting writers who come to us because they’ve had unsatisfying experiences with the conglomerates, where they literally have not been edited. We’re super hands-on. If we have to drive to your readings, we’ll drive you to your readings—get in the van. Because we do twelve to fifteen books a year, we have to be super hands-on, versus the model of publishing eighty titles a season and putting all your chips behind the two books that get any kind of traction. We’ve had writers come to us after basically being dropped mid-publication because they hadn’t gotten huge hype.”