Alicia Kroell has been promoted to assistant editor at Catapult.
At Sourcebooks, Christy Droege has been promoted to director of data. Adam Lara becomes web developer and administrator.
Emily Forney and Umaima Saleem have joined BookEnds Literary Agency. Forney was most recently a publishing and editorial fellow for the LA Review of Books; Saleem was an intern at BookEnds and recipient of a We Need Diverse Books grant. James McGowan has been promoted to associate agent.
Finally Forthcoming
Blake Bailey‘s long-awaited biography of the late Philip Roth, written based on a collaboration agreement with Roth, will be published by Norton on April 6, 2021. Philip Roth: The Biography is an 880-page hardcover that has a list price of $45. “Our association was sometimes complicated, but rarely unhappy and never dull,” Bailey told the AP, which has a lengthy feature on the book. Among the private papers Bailey had access to was Roth’s “295-page rebuttal to an unflattering memoir written by ex-wife Claire Bloom, that will otherwise be destroyed or sealed until 2050.”
Awards
Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola‘s Look Up! won the 2020 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.
Bookselling
The ABA‘s board was given a delayed update on the organization’s finances: “Despite cuts in association expenses, significant losses due to the pandemic were expected to result in a net loss projected to be $1.15 million, compared to a budgeted loss of $586,000.”
San Francisco children’s bookstore Charlie’s Corner has closed permanently. Owner Charlotte Nagy said that the pandemic made it impossible to sustain the store’s $10,000 monthly rent, plus utilities and inventory. Nagy said, “It’s been almost five months. We don’t really know when this is going to end.”
UnFair
The Association of Authors Representatives (AAR) has gone public with their “disapproval” of the London Book Fair‘s treatment of Rights Center exhibitors who wisely and responsibly cancelled before Fair officials were forced by their constituents and public officials to scrub the event. They “have tried to work out a fair solution” but “sadly our efforts have been rebuffed.” The statement was co-signed by a number of members from the Professional Association of Canadian Literary Agents.
In the letter they note, “We feel it is tone deaf for LBF to inflict a financial penalty on North American agents who responsibly notified LBF as soon as they realized that it would be impossible to attend the fair owing to the global pandemic.” Since there has been “no movement whatsoever on Reed’s part,” they write, “we now need to make it clear publicly that we strongly disapprove of their silence and what we see as overly punitive actions.”
By their report, after LBF finally cancelled, Rights Center table-holders were allowed to roll over their 2020 fee to the 2021 event. But if you cancelled any earlier, because you understood gathering people from around the world during a budding pandemic was a bad idea, you can only apply 60 percent of the fee to next year’s fair, “provided you pay the remainder of your 2020 contract fee and keep the same level of attendance/table designation.” LBF was scheduled to start on March 10, and Reed did not cancel until March 4. Their limited-refund offer was reported by the Bookseller in April, and UK agents also objected at the time.
Note that while Reed Exhibitions did lose a considerable amount of money in the first half of 2020, the parent company Reed Elsevier reported operating profit of £747 million for the period.
