Sarah Pelz will join Atria as executive editor on April 24, reporting to editor-in-chief Peter Borland. She is currently executive editor at Grand Central Life & Style.
At Ingram Content Group, Lisa Tomasello has joined as director of mass merchandisers sales. She previously served as senior national accounts manager for Macmillan. Elenita Chmilowski was promoted to library marketing manager, and came to Ingram with the Perseus distribution team.
Noah Schwartzberg has joined McGraw-Hill Professional as senior acquisitions editor in the business group. Previously, he was acquisitions editor at Fairchild Books.
At Chronicle Books, Amelia Mack has been promoted to lead designer of children’s books. Ellise Yu has been promoted to subsidiary rights and custom publishing coordinator, while Iris Mori move up to distribution department coordinator.
Scholastic has announced a number of promotions. Elizabeth Whiting has been promoted to senior director of national accounts, while Sue Flynn has been promoted to director of field sales. Nikki Mutch has been promoted to senior manager of field brand marketing. Meaghan Hilton moves up to special markets sales manager of retail and premium. Tracy Bozentka has been promoted to special markets manager of education. Nicholas Thomas has been promoted to editor at Arthur A. Levine Books, moving over from Chicken House and David Fickling Books. Kait Feldman has been promoted to associate editor at Arthur A. Levine Books.
Erinn Pascal has been promoted to assistant editor at Simon Spotlight.
Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic for The Washington Post and former editor of their Book World section and author William McPherson, 84, died on Tuesday. (His long career also included working as an editor at William Morrow.)
Distribution
In recent months, Bookmasters has taken on distribution for Bitmap Books in the US and Canada, and KiCam Projects and Dalton Windsor worldwide.
Profiles
In Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz looks at Nan Talese’s “career and roller-coaster marriage–just as her husband plans to write about it.” Calling her “one of a small handful of living publishing pioneers,” Peretz notes that, “like many remarkable women of that generation, Nan has no interest in being celebrated, and can’t even see her accomplishments.”
Working with writers such as Pat Conroy, “her stamina for streamlining byzantine plotlines into a clear narrative was epic. His 1,500-page manuscript for The Prince of Tides was something of a hot mess when he first handed it over to Nan. She graphed the story onto six pages of taped-together legal paper, mapping out the book’s dozens of characters, sorting time lines with forward arrows, backward arrows, and double backward arrows. He told her, ‘No one has ever read my books this carefully.'”
As for husband Gay Talese’s forthcoming book about marriage, “her line on the book” is:
“He doesn’t know anything about marriage, so I’m not concerned.”