Alive Literary Agency founder and CEO Rick Christian will step down March 1 after 30 years, and the agency has been sold internally to president Bryan Norman and evp Lisa Jackson. “I am grateful I could spend the bulk of my working years doing what I love with people I adore, realize my dreams, and accomplish the tasks with which I was entrusted,” said Christian. “There is no greater joy than to now pass the baton to such qualified successors.” Christian will work with novelist Karen Kingsbury and her son Tyler Russell and consult with the agency for three years “to ensure continuity of all things within the author and publishing communities, and enable us to fully replicate everything he”s been doing in the film and TV space.” Christian’s daughter Andrea Heinecke continues with the company as an agent. Jackson notes the succession plan has been three years in the making.
DK has hired Gayley Avery for the new role of vp, marketing & publicity, reporting to Mary Marotta. She was marketing & publicity director at Bonnier Publishing.
At Abrams, Mary Marolla has joined the children’s marketing and publicity department as publicist (she was running her own freelance PR company, Mare Public Relations), and Borana Greku joined in November as marketing manager (she was at Macmillan, most recently in their audio marketing group).
Emma Gordon has been promoted to publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and moves over to general interest from children’s.
At Aitken Alexander Associates, Chris Wellbelove will join the board of directors in January, “in recognition of his swift and significant contribution to the growth of our business.”
Bookselling
In the UK, a new Waterstones is opening in Wokingham on December 8. Waterstones managing director James Daunt said, “We consider ourselves very fortunate to have found in Wokingham such a large and attractive shop, and greatly look forward to turning it into a really good bookshop.”
Forthcoming
Author of The Tiger’s Wife (our consensus Best Book of 2011) Tea Obreht‘s second novel, INLAND, was announced for publication on August 13, 2019 by Random House. It’s “set in the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, about “an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of her husband who has gone in search of water, and also the story of a former outlaw haunted by his past.” That book was acquired back in 2011, but Random House is said to have acquired two more novels from Obreht as well.