At Workman Publishing, Cindy Lee has been promoted to senior manager, marketing & visual content for the Workman imprint; Neil Hiremath to senior manager, digital operations; and SarahMay Harel to associate manager, web operations & ecommerce. Rina Mody joins the company as manager, digital operations, working across all imprints. She was previously with Thieme, in the editorial and marketing departments.
In promotions at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s, Lisa DiSarro is now executive director, marketing and Amanda Acevedo moves up to marketing manager, school & library; plus Taylor McBroom has been hired as marketing specialist, school & library (she was at Harper Children’s).
Keely Platte joins BookSparks as publicity director. She was previously principal for Keely Platte Public Relations.
Opening Sales
EL James’s THE MISTER sold almost 53,000 copies in the first week on sale in the UK — which was close to the book’s opening sale in the much larger US market, selling 68,500 paperbacks as tracked by NPD Bookscan. That made it the second bestselling book of the week here, well behind Jeff Kinney’s Diary of An Awesome Friendly Kid (in its second week on sale) and modestly ahead of David Baldacci’s new hardcover Redemption. (Authors and agents can follow Bookscan sales through our amazingly-priced new monthly data packages, as well as through unlimited annual subscription.) Though paid versions of The Mueller Report were much in the news last week, only untracked ebook editions are on the market so far from traditional publishers, with print editions publishing April 30.
Legal
Nora Roberts filed suit in Brazil against self-published author Cristiane Serruya for multiple instances of plagiarism on “a rare and scandalous” scale, alleging she copied or paraphrased material from 10 of her books, sometimes word-for-word. Roberts is seeking at least $25,000 in damages, with plans to donate the money to literacy organizations in Brazil. (Alas, a lawyer tells the AP a case like this can take 5 to 10 years to be resolved in Brazilian courts.) In an email to Roberts’ publicist, Serruya said that she “never intentionally plagiarized anyone” but had hired ghostwriters through the website Fiverr who must have lifted the material.
But on her blog, Roberts says that Serruya has infringed on multiple writers: “41 authors and 93 of their books infringed by Serruya. She’s a blood leech sucking on the body of the writing profession. Arranging for a truckload of salt to dispense with her has been taking up a lot of my time, energies, sanity. Hopefully, once that’s in place the frustrating and infuriating distraction of her will fade, at least a bit.”
The real object of Roberts’ ire is Amazon’s lightly-monitored self-publishing market: “I’m getting one hell of an education on the sick, greedy, opportunistic culture that games Amazon’s absurdly weak system.” She tells the AP that “Amazon didn’t find any of this [the plagiarized books]…and that strikes me as a problem.”
Readers discovered the similarities between Roberts’ book The Liar and Serruya’s book A Royal Affair two months ago, along with similarities between Serruya’s work and the work of many other authors. The plagiarism accusations were compiled on Twitter under the hashtag #CopyPasteCris.