Lisa Donovan, vice president and executive managing editor at Simon & Schuster Children’s will retire on March 20, after 20 years with the company. Jon Anderson, president and publishers of S&S Children’s said in the announcement, “It is no exaggeration to say that for twenty years, Lisa has been the nexus of the entire Children’s Publishing Division. Her flawless supervision of a massively talented staff of managing editors, production editors, copyeditors and proofreaders has shepherded from manuscript to finished book at least 15,000 titles in every one of our huge variety of publishing formats.”
At Harper Children’s, Audrey Steuerwald has joined as art director for the ad/promo design group. She was most recently assistant art director marketing at Random House Children’s. Xander Hollenbeck has been promoted to senior designer.
Mark Weinstein has joined ghostwriting and publishing services firm Kevin Anderson & Associates as senior vice president and editorial director. He was senior editor at Diversion Books.
Barnes & Noble ceo James Daunt will give the closing keynote at the Book Industry Study Group‘s annual meeting on April 24.
In the UK, Francesca Main is leaving Picador after eight years to serve as publisher of a new imprint focused on “fiction and memoir with literary merit and commercial potential” at Orion. Main will join Orion in mid-April, reporting to Katie Espiner, and the imprint will launch in early 2021.
Also, DK publishing director Mary-Clare Jerram will retire at the end of April after 30 years with the company. Jerram joined as a project editor in 1989.
In France at Editis, Clément Pelletier moves over from the general management of parent company Vivendi to serve as development director, and he joins the executive committee as well. He will help “to enable authors, publishers of Editis and partner publishers to benefit from all of the Vivendi group’s know-how.”
Bookselling
Executive director of marketing at HMH Hannah Harlow and her brother Sam Pfeifle are buying the Book Shop of Beverly Farms in Beverly, MA, from Pamela Price and Lee Simonds Brown, who have owned the store for 23 years. Harlow will leave HMH on January 24 to run the store and Pfeifle will oversee marketing and digital initiatives. The store will be closed for a week while the new owners update some of the systems, with a soft opening planned for February 3, and a grand opening celebration to follow in March.
Of all the pages in Amazon‘s book monopoly playbook, publishing late career bestsellers such as Dean Koontz and Patricia Cornwell is about the last thing that makes big publishers truly “fret” but it makes for good copy, as noted prominently in today’s WSJ. (Their contract with Sylvia Day isn’t mentioned.) The company forsakes sales numbers and instead says Cornwell’s poorly reviewed QUANTUM “reached approximately 600,000 readers.” Since Amazon’s competitors choose not to give over shelf space to the monopolist, Cornwell laments, “It’s depressing when you don’t see your book anywhere. It’s not fair, and it’s not right.” (Also note that Amazon started the “exclusivity” game by not allowing others to sell their ebook editions — or their digital audios. They also deny both to libraries on any basis.)