Nancy Brennan will join Candlewick as executive art director, starting January 16. She has worked at Viking Children’s for 18 years. Katherine Wessbecher has joined the Bradford Literary Agency as literary agent. Previously, she was associate editor at Putnam Children’s. At Severn House, owned by Canongate, publisher Kate Lyall Grant has joined the company’s board. Ten Speed Press executive editor Lisa Westmoreland has “embarked on a new adventure” and is no longer at the company. Jason Reynolds will succeed Jacqueline Woodson as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for the next two years, announced jointly by The Library of Congress, […]
Archives for January 2020
NBCC Finalists, With Honors for Broom, Waldman, Nye
The National Book Critics Circle announced finalists across five categories, with the winners to be announced on March 12. Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House will receive the John Leonard Prize for an outstanding first book, while the New Yorker’s Katy Waldman won the 2019 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Naomi Shihab Nye won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. The finalists for the other prizes: Fiction Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside (Knopf) Myla Goldberg, Feast Your Eyes (Scribner) Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (Farrar, Straus) Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (Knopf) Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday) Nonfiction […]
People, Etc.
At Crown, Libby Burton will join as executive editor, starting January 27, reporting to Gillian Blake. She most recently worked at Holt (as did Blake). Matt Inman is promoted to executive editor. Zach Phillips, Aubrey Martinson, and Lydia Morgan have each been promoted to assistant editor. Longtime St. Martin’s executive editor Hope Dellon announced that she is officially retiring. Peter Kispert has joined Dey Street Books as an assistant editor. At Abrams Children’s, Megan Carlson has joined as associate managing editor. Megan Kelchner has joined the design team as a junior designer. Most recently, she worked at Carrot New York, […]
Now It’s Official: Print Sales Were Steady in 2019 (with An Asterisk)
With NPD Bookscan reporting their tracked print sales for the week ending January 4 — their 52nd sales week of the year — we now have final counts for the year’s sales, and the bestselling titles of the year. Total print sales declined 1.1 percent following a weak holiday sales period, at 689 million units, down 7.8 million units, or 1.1 percent, from 2018. But those numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. 2018 was one of the periodic 53-week years, so the 696 million units recorded a year ago do not make for a direct comparison. Given that yields […]
People, Etc.
Zareen Jaffery will join Kokila as executive editor on January 13. She was previously executive editor at Simon & Schuster Children’s. Rachel Beck has joined Liza Dawson Associates as agent. She was previously an agent with Holloway Literary. Emily Duval has been promoted to manager, library marketing at Random House Children’s. Natalie Capogrossi has joined Random House Children’s as assistant manager, school marketing. She was previously a teacher and intern at Writer’s House. At, Princeton Architectural Press, Jessica Tackett has been promoted to marketing manager; Parker Menzimer has been promoted to production editor; Stephanie Holstein has been promoted to associate […]
Cummins’ American Dirt Tops February Indie Next List
The ABA named American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins as their No. 1 Indie Next pick for February. The Cummins, as well as Indie Next picks Eoin Colfer’s Highfire and Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl, are excerpted and available for download now in our Buzz Books 2019 Fall/Winter sampler. The rest of the list: Weather, by Jenny Offill Author in Chief, by Craig Fehrman A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende When We Were Vikings, by Andrew David MacDonald Homie, by Danez Smith Things in Jars, by Jess Kidd Verge, by Lidia Yuknavitch The Mercies, by Kiran […]