HarperCollins celebrated their 200th anniversary one more time with drinks on the floor of the Frankfurt Book Fair towards the end of the business day, with ceo Brian Murray honoring “how resilient HarperCollins has been, and how resilient the publishing industry has been.” In a nod to yesterday’s remark by Andrew Wylie, Murray remarked, “Even though we may be bewildering to some people, I think at HarperCollins, we know that we know what we are doing.”
Canada’s The Cooke Agency and The McDermid Agency have emerged to form CookeMcDermid. The new company will be owned in equal parts by McDermid owners Chris Bucci and Martha Webb, as well as Dean Cooke and Sally Harding. McDermid founder Anne McDermid will remain with the new company as an agent, continuing to represent her authors. There will be no change to authors’ representation.
Farrar Straus and Giroux is moving, and as of Monday, October 16 will be located at 175 Varick Street, 9th floor. (It’s a short-term relocation, since they are expected to move in with the rest of Macmillan consolidates into new space at 120 Broadway in 2019.) Their 18th Street offices will close on Wednesday, October 11.
NetGalley‘s Japanese site will officially come out of beta and launch on October 17. Later this month, their long-established service in the UK will to a dedicated, UK-focused site and URL. Stuart Evers has been promoted to assistant director,
NetGalley UK.
Still another stain on Weinstein Books, Tina Brown writes in a piece posted by the NYT about her two years running the Weinstein’s “fledgling book company with Jonathan Burnham as editor in chief” starting in 1998. She suggests that book deals were used to win influence, and perhaps even payoff victims: “Strange contracts pre-dating us would suddenly surface, book deals with no deadline attached authored by attractive or nearly famous women, one I recall was by the stewardess on a private plane. It was startling — and professionally mortifying — to discover how many hacks writing gossip columns or entertainment coverage were on the Miramax payroll with a ‘consultancy’ or a ‘development deal’ (one even at The New York Times).”