At Picador USA, Anna DeVries has been promoted to executive editor.
Susan Hawk will move to Upstart Crow Literary as an agent on February 1. She has been at The Bent Agency.
Christina Jeffries has been promoted to vp, director, national accounts, mass merchandise sales at Random House Children’s.
Former HarperCollins India publisher V.K. Karthika has joined Westland as publisher. Amazon bought control of the company last October. A spokesperson told HuffPost India she will “head a newly-formed division at Westland, focusing on literary and mainstream fiction and non-fiction.”
Oprah Winfrey is returning to network television — as a special contributor to CBS’s 60 Minutes, starting this fall. Winfrey said in a statement: “At a time when people are so divided, my intention is to bring relevant insight and perspective, to look at what separates us, and help facilitate real conversations between people from different backgrounds.”
Forthcoming
Ohio governor John Kasich‘s TWO PATHS: America Divided or United will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on April 27, and the Washington Post was provided an excerpt. For instructive purposes, we note that the release exemplifies the metadata hazards of stealth releases. Amazon has a pretty good ebook record for the title, though About the Author describes Conn Iggulden rather than Kasich. The associated hardcover page still lists as it as Untitled by Anonymous, and that metadata lists a grade level of kindergarten through third grade and connects to a different stealth title’s author ID: “The anonymous author was a young woman at the time of the fall of Berlin. She was a journalist and editor during and after the war.” (The Barnes & Noble listing suffers from similar flaws. By press time Amazon fixed the second author ID, but not the reading level.)
Separately, Scribner announced publication on April 25 of THE OPERATOR, a memoir by former Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill, known as “the soldier who fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden.” This one we identified a few months ago from untitled/anonymous bookseller listings that also still need cleaning and consolidating. (The stump listings had billed it as “one of America’s most elite soldiers discusses his 400-mission career,” though the book was originally scheduled for November publication.)
Also, Knopf has now confirmed that the new Arundhati Roy novel THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS — already announced for publication in June by Hamish Hamilton and PRH India last October — will be published in the US on June 6 as well. Roy will visit the US and read from her book “in several cities” that month.
Scheduled
The American Booksellers Association announced that next year’s Winter Institute will be held in Memphis, TN, from January 22 through January 25.