Ryan Doherty will be join Celadon Books, Macmillan’s new trade book division, as executive editor starting September 12. He has been vice president of literary development at Sony Pictures Entertainment (after a number of years as an editor at Ballantine). Celadon Books co-publishers Jamie Raab and Deb Futter say: “Ryan’s ability to identify high quality works of fiction and nonfiction that have strong commercial potential and his deep knowledge of the overall literary market are perfectly aligned with the mission of Celadon Books.”
At William Morrow, Shelby Meizlik has been promoted to the new role of vp, special events and creative strategies; Kelly Rudolph has been promoted to senior group publicity director.
Rosie Mahorter has been promoted to publicist for Scribner.
Representation
Novelist Donna Tartt is now represented in the US and Canada by Nicole Aragi at Aragi Inc. (moving from Amanda Urban at ICM).
Bookselling
Politics & Prose in Washington D.C. will open a second branch location in a mixed-used development in Southwest DC called the Wharf. The 2,300-square-foot store will open in October. In May they announced their first branch, which will open in the Union Market district in Northeast in the fall.
Open Source
Rice University says in a press release that their OpenStax initiative providing free, peer-reviewed college textbooks in core areas is expected to be used by 1.5 million college students in the coming academic year. They estimate it will save those students $145 million during that period. Managing director Daniel Williamson says, “Free, peer-reviewed and openly licensed textbooks used at scale are only the first step. Quality, openly licensed content enables further innovation in ways that we’ve already seen: faculty are localizing it to meet their needs and building communities of practice, and partner companies are using it to build the next generation of adaptive learning tools.”