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People, Etc.

December 11, 2020
By Erin Somers

Samantha Zukergood has been promoted to assistant marketing manager at Flatiron Books.

Daniel Berkowitz has joined Open Road Integrated Media as director of audience monetization.

Obituaries
Anthony Veasna So, whose debut book Afterparties is forthcoming from Ecco in August 2021, died unexpectedly on December 8. Friends have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help support his partner.

Karl Killian, 77, founder of Houston’s Brazos Bookstore and literary nonprofit Inprint, died on December 9.

Studies
The New York Times published the results of a study aiming to determine how many Black authors were published by major publishing houses between 1950 and 2018. Of the set of 7,124 works of fiction for which they identified the author’s race or ethnicity, they found that 95 percent were written by white people. The article’s authors Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek write, “Non-Hispanic white people account for 60 percent of the U.S. population; in 2018, they wrote 89 percent of the books in our sample.”

The study also looks at the effect of Black editors on the proportion of Black authors published. When Toni Morrisom was an editor at Random House, 3.3 percent of the 806 books analyzed were written by Black authors. After she departed, of the 512 works of fiction published by the house, only two were written by Black authors, one of which was Morrison’s Beloved.

In the National Book Awards for fiction, on the other hand, more than half of the 10 most recent winners were written by people of color. Looking at the New York Times’s fiction bestsellers for the year, “only 22 of the 220 books on the list this year were written by people of color.”

Corporate
Penguin Random House UK has completed the £67 million sale of their offices at 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road (under which the publisher will lease back the building for another 11 years).

Filed Under: Free, Obits, Personnel

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