At Macmillan, Dan Schwartz has been promoted to chief financial officer, US trade & shared services, reporting jointly to ceo Don Weisberg and global coo Andrew Weber. Clare O’Rourke has been promoted to evp, finance & accounting. Cameron Ackroyd will join on January 4 as svp, trade finance, overseeing the trade finance and data science teams. He previously directed the business management and finance group for Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Former ceo of Macmillan John Sargent left the company earlier this week.
Removed as president and publisher of Ecco in September, Daniel Halpern will leave the company on December 31, after a brief tenure as editor-at-large. “After consideration, Dan has decided to move on,” Jonathan Burnham wrote. “Over the twenty-one years he has worked at HarperCollins his contribution has been enormous, and he leaves Ecco, the imprint he founded fifty years ago, in robust health.”
Jordan Smith, current deputy director of the National Book Foundation, will become interim executive director starting December 18, when Lisa Lucas steps down to become svp, publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books. Lucas will join the foundation’s board of directors.
Lindsey Bragg has been promoted to senior marketing manager at Amazon Publishing.
Assallah Tahir will join Simon & Schuster UK as commissioning editor for adult nonfiction in the new year. Tahir was previously as Penguin General.
Karen Geary, publicity director at Hodder & Stoughton, is retiring at the end of the year, after over 20 years with the company.
Another executive leaving the Frankfurt Book Fair as part of “some painful and far-reaching staff cuts” is vp of business development Holger Volland. Director Juergen Boos said of Volland and Thomas Minkus they “have both been instrumental in shaping the direction of Frankfurter Buchmesse…. I would like to thank them both for their relentless energy, creativity and leadership. I will miss both as valued colleagues and as friends.”
In author news, James Patterson announced that this month’s NYPD RED 6 will be the last book in the series that he will co-author. Marshall Karp will publish future titles in the series on his own going forward.
Awards
Earlier this week, publisher and editor-in-chief of One World Chris Jackson accepted The Center for Fiction’s re-named Medal for Editorial Excellence. In his speech, he reflected on the mixed legacy of Maxwell Perkins — for whom the award was previously named — and the industry as a whole: “I’m very pleased to be the first recipient of this new award, not named for Perkins. The thrilling thing about the past is we can abandon the parts of it that don’t serve us and imagine something new in their place. Book publishing is the ideal place for that kind of imagining….
“And additionally, suddenly, it is an industry full of new blood and perhaps exorcised of some old ghosts. The publishing industry that serves us all, that helps us better imagine ourselves into each other’s lives, better see and understand each other, and create a better world is ours to make.”