At Hachette Book Group, Dale Wilstermann has been promoted to executive director, Nashville sales; Derek Meehan to senior manager, telephone sales; Laura Fernandez to client sales manager; and Dominique Delmas to publicist at HBG Canada.
Jack Dunnington has been promoted to designer at The Experiment.
Amy Giuffrida and Jolene Haley have been promoted to agent apprentice at the Corvisiero Literary Agency.
Friends and admirers reported online the death of publishing executive Teresa Mlawer on Saturday. Among her many positions in publishing, she became president of Lectorum Publications, the largest distributor of Spanish-language books in the US (later acquired by Scholastic), where she launched a publishing program of Spanish and bilingual books for children.
Awards
Ruchika Tomar‘s A Prayer for Travelers (Riverhead) won the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for a debut novel.
Serialized
Lena Dunham is writing a serialized novel, VERIFIED STRANGERS, that Vogue.com is publishing daily, Monday through Friday. A “modern-day romance novel set in Los Angeles and London” it features Ally, “32, single and nursing the kind of heartbreak that has taken years to mend (and may take a few more.)” who limits her dating to “verified strangers,” friends of friends.
But wait, there’s more. “Every second chapter will end with a cliffhanger: Ally is faced with two options for her next move.” Readers can vote on the Vogue Instagram account “on where the story should go next, a decision that Dunham will abide by.”
Forthcoming
David Byrne will adapt his stage musical “American Utopia” as a book, illustrated by Maira Kalman, to be published September 8 by Bloomsbury. The show is due to return to Broadway that month as well. (Kalman designed and illustrated the curtain for the show.)
Sales
NPD Bookscan said that sales of juvenile non-fiction education, reference, and language print books rose 38 percent in the week ending March 14 (and are up 12 percent for the year to date). NPD analyst Kristen McLean says in their release, “With more schools closing temporarily due to COVID-19, and with many parents now working from home, we are definitely seeing an uptick in kids’ educational and activity book sales this week. Leading topics include math, language arts, puzzles, sticker books, word games, geometry, study aids, and coloring books.”
Other sales spikes included books on canning and preserving food (up 29 percent, week over week); container gardening (up 30 percent w-o-w); and home do-it-yourself (up 8 percent w-o-w). McLean notes, “Book buying presents an interesting window into consumer psychology at moments like this. We will continue to track book trends weekly as the situation continues to evolve.”
