Five months after firing Linda Zecher following a series of unexpected performance problems, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt board has hired John (Jack) J. Lynch, Jr., 58, as president and chief executive officer. L. Gordon Crovitz will continue to serve as interim CEO until Lynch joins the company. Lynch will take over “as soon as possible, as he finishes up at Renaissance Learning and relocates to Boston in the weeks ahead.” Most recently Lynch was ceo of Renaissance Learning, a K-12 learning analytics company. He was a member of the executive board of Wolters Kluwer for 6 years, prior to which he was […]
Archives for February 2017
New Philip Pullman Book of Dust Trilogy Begins In October
The first installment of Philip Pullman’s THE BOOK OF DUST trilogy was announced for publication on October 19 in the US and UK by Penguin Random House. Knopf Children’s announced a first printing of 500,000 copies, and David Fickling Books and Penguin Random House UK Children’s will publishing in the UK. Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is reported to have sold over 17.5 million copies worldwide. THE BOOK OF DUST is set ten years before The Golden Compass and “centers on the much-beloved Lyra Belacqua. Alethiometers, daemons, and the Magisterium return to play their part, and Pullman also introduces a host of new […]
Amazon Plans Books Store for Bay Area’s Walnut Creek, CA
Amazon confirmed to the East Bay Express that the company will open a Books store in Walnut Creek, CA’s Broadway Plaza and is currently hiring employees for the location. Barnes & Noble closed their store across from Broadway Plaza a little over a year ago, after 21 years in that location, when they were unable to agree on a lease renewal. At the time, the bookseller said, “We expect to have a new store in the area in the future.” The newspaper says rents in the plaza “are between $80 and $140 per square foot.” The new location is the […]
Milo’s DANGEROUS Is Officially Delayed to June 13
On Monday afternoon, controversial author Milo Yiannopoulos announced on Facebook that his book DANGEROUS, originally scheduled for publication on March 14, has been postponed to June 13. He writes, “I asked my publisher for more time to submit the manuscript for DANGEROUS so I could include material about the craziness and rioting at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UW Seattle. It would be absurd for me to publish a book without some discussion of the insanity of the last few weeks.” The tell here is that a month before publication, when the book should be in (or finished with) production, […]
Bookselling: Management Team Quits Kramerbooks; Read With Me to Open in Raleigh; and More
Six members of the management team at Washington, DC’s Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café have quit after disagreements with the new owner. The departures took place over the past three weeks and include the events director, the general manager, and the head buyer. Three anonymous sources “familiar with the situation” tell the Washington Post that the employees quit “in a coordinated effort after clashing with the new owner” Steve Salis over “concerns about the work environment. But Salis, who bought the forty-year old Dupont Circle store last November, told the Washington Post, “We don’t know why they left — no notice and no explanation. […]
People, Etc.
Tara Greico joins Random House Children’s Books as marketing coordinator, licensed & proprietary brands. She was previously marketing assistant at Simon & Schuster. At Dutton, Emily Brock has been promoted to senior publicist. Susan Hershberg and Wes Seeley have both joined Princeton Architectural Press as publicity managers. Previously, Hershberg was associate director of publicity at America’s Test Kitchen. Seeley was publicity and marketing manager at Hal Leonard. JK Rowling was in a new Twitter brawl with Piers Morgan over the weekend after she noted “how much she had enjoyed watching Morgan being attacked by a forthright panel of commentators in an […]