Agnes Ahlander Turner has been promoted to executive vice president at Maria B. Campbell Associates, and Beniamino Ambrosi and Johanna Gustavsson both been named vice president.
In the UK, Noel Murphy will join Granta Books and Granta Magazine as commercial director starting September 23. He was previously sales and marketing director at Yale University Press.
Imprints
Orion will launch Dash, a digital fiction imprint, this fall, run by commissioning editor Victoria Oundjian.
Bookselling
April Newton (£8.37 an hour), Kimi Wright (£8.71 an hour), Stefan Pace (£8.70 an hour) and two other Waterstones booksellers who delivered a petition signed by 9,300 people calling for better pay fpr the chain’s staff have left the company, the Guardian reports. Newton started the petition drive, and notes: “An internal Q&A in response to the petition and the meeting seemed to dismiss all the concerns we’d raised…. The acquisition of Barnes & Noble by Elliott Advisors felt like a particularly hard blow, as it suggests that the money is there, the company just doesn’t want to spend it on its staff.”
Awards
Barnes & Noble announced its Discover Great New Writers picks for fall.
Public Domain
A project from the New York Public Library to make parsed XML versions of the Library of Congress‘s records of book copyrights and renewals from 1924 to 1963 shows that an estimated 73 percent of those works were never renewed. That would make them public domain, and eligible for free release by the Hathi Trust and others.
Selling
The WSJ Magazine touted Casey McQuiston’s RED, WHITE AND ROYAL BLUE as “the unlikely book of the summer,” calling it a “juggernaut novel [that] spread to every beach blanket.” That might be an overstatement, with a single week’s appearance at No. 15 on the NYT’s paperback fiction list for its opening week in May and NPD Bookscan-tracked sales of approximately copies 27,500 copies in 12 weeks. But Anne Marie Tallberg at St. Martin’s “characterized the book’s success as massive against expectations.” Acquiring editor Vicki Lame says, “Everyone else was as obsessed as I was. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, frankly. I was getting Gchats from colleagues throughout the day who couldn’t manage to put the book down to do their work.”