At Simon & Schuster Children’s, Devin MacDonald has joined as marketing manager. She was most recently brand manager for Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Dog Man at Scholastic. Audrey Gibbons has been promoted to publicity manager; Jill Hacking moves up to marketing operations and events associate; Amy Hendricks becomes marketing associate; Samantha Benson has been promoted to associate publicist; and Emily Hutton becomes associate director of sales.
Kjersti Egerdahl has been promoted to senior editor at Amazon Original Stories.
Patrick Crotty joins Random House Graphic as designer. He was previously publisher and co-founder of Peow.
Morgan Vogt has joined Sourcebooks as marketing associate. Tina Wilson has been promoted to print buyer at Sourcebooks.
Former Howard Books publisher Jonathan Merkh has launched Forefront Books, providing both consulting and publishing services, with a distribution relationship with Simon & Schuster.
French Minister of Culture Françoise Nyssen, former ceo at Actes Sud, has been replaced by Franck Riester. Nyssen “had been facing accusations of conflict of interest, in addition to a simmering scandal concerning building permits for which she’s under investigation.”
Novelist Robert Bausch, 73, died on October 9 in Fredericksburg, VA. He was the author of nine novels, most recently In the Fall They Come Back (2017), and a professor at Northern Virginia Community College.
Profiled
ICM agent Binky Urban was interviewed for NY Magazine’s Women and Power issue. She says: “You know, power is such a male word. Being dominant is not anything I care about. What I care about is being effective, being respected. The only way that could mean power is that I’ve got a lot of great authors. And publishers are maybe less apt to screw around with me than someone starting out. They need to get along with me because I’ve got the talent.”
She discusses signing Cormac McCarthy, her first six-figure deal, and the “female nurturing quality attributed to agenting.” She also notes: “My big rule is, Don’t lie. I mean, not only do I not lie, but everyone knows I’m pretty, well, what’s the word?…. Straightforward is the nice word for it. I just think there are not enough people telling the truth, delivering bad news fast — not prevaricating or procrastinating.”
Bookselling
In the UK, Waterstones is opening two new small bookshops — a 4,895-square-foot space in Westfield London and a 1,580-square-foot store in Wokingham, bringing their total stores to 285.