At Macmillan, Jennifer Edwards was promoted to vp, children’s sales reporting to Jenn Gonzalez.
At Putnam, Danielle Dieterich has been promoted to associate editor.
Longtime CAA book-to-film agent Sally Willcox, has joined Paradigm, overseeing media rights, based in Beverly Hills. Mostly recently, Willcox worked at at Tobey Maguire’s Material overseeing acquisition and development. She was at CAA for 27 years before leaving in 2014.
Harper UK is launching the nonfiction Mudlark imprint, promising “every book will showcase an interesting, original writer with a distinctive voice.” Jack Fogg leads the boutique line.
Onetime Fourth Estate publisher Christopher Potter, who left in 2005, returns to publishing to lead Europa Editions in the UK.
The German press accounts we read were in error, and publisher Fischer did indeed convene their usual party on Tuesday night in Frankfurt.
Forthcoming
Colson Whitehead‘s next book THE NICKEL BOYS will be published by Doubleday on July 30, 2019, with an announced first printing of 350,000 copies. The novel is set in Jim Crow-era Florida in the early 1960s, when “one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future,” based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and “warped the lives of thousands of children.” Whitehead says, “It was a story I hadn’t seen told before — another one of our country’s secret tragedies. I wanted to speak for them, in whatever small way I could.”
Bookselling
McNally Jackson founder Sarah McNally updated yesterday’s news about the store’s impending move, saying they will relocate at the end of June 2019. “I will be able to make a formal announcement on our new location soon, but I can promise that it will be nearby. I wish our current landlord had waited just another few weeks before pasting up that sign! He didn’t ask me, it just appeared. He’s very excited to get it to market.”
McNally says the store’s spirit is more important than their space, and that will persist: “What about McNally Jackson is irreducible? It’s certainly not the current space, which is in a shoddy building that was thrown up over a former chicken abattoir. The soul of McNally Jackson is the books and the booksellers. We have remained devoted to an old fashioned idea of bookselling, in which bookstores are edifying spaces.”
Corporate
Because of a capital raise, German book chain Thalia will become a 50 percent owner of the ebook subscription service Skoobe, in continuing partnership with Random House Germany and Holtzbrinck.
Legal
For the record, on October 5 Demos Parneros filed an amended version of his lawsuit against Barnes & Noble. Originally suing for breach of contract and defamation, the revised complaint turns of the contentions into a third cause of action, “violation of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.” The suit says he was fired “without cause just prior to the date defendant would have awarded him an additional $3.6 million in equity.”