At Harper Children’s, Luana Horry and Clarissa Wong have each been promoted to senior editor and Sara Schonfeld is associate editor. Vaishali Nayak is now senior manager, marketing; Katie Dutton moves up to senior marketing associate, school & library marketing; and Shaelyn McDaniel becomes assistant manager, digital marketing. Lena Reilly is promoted to associate publicist; Caitlin Lonning to senior production editor; and Kat Keating to senior digital production editor. In new hires, Erin Hamling has joined as senior production editor (she was previously a development editor at Oxford University Press).
At Penguin Random House Audio, Ellen Folan has joined as director of publicity, moving over from Crown, where she was associate director of publicity. Julia Tabas has been promoted to senior publicist, reporting to Folan.
Picks
Jenna Bush Hager’s Read With Jenna pick for the month is Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.
The GMA Book Club pick for May is Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann.
The Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick is The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave.
Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian is the May selection for the Barnes & Noble Book Club.
Awards
Barnes & Noble announced the winners for their Children’s and YA Book Awards:
Children: Mel Fell, by Corey R. Tabor
Middle Grade: Amari and the Night Brothers, by B.B. Alston.
YA: Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley
Distribution
The American Library Association will be distributed by the University of Chicago Press starting July 2021.
Bookselling
Further to Monday’s news that Posman Books will open a store in Pittsburgh’s The Terminal, White Whale Bookstore wrote in a Twitter thread that they had also signed a letter of intent with the developer, McCaffrey Interests, to open a store there. However, after months back and forth and sending in financial and sales history, it was “radio silence” from the developer. White Whale says they were “taken advantage of” and used as a bargaining tool: “They courted a small mom-and-pop shop, asked us to scramble during a pandemic year in which we’d already pivoted over and over, and instead put a national indie chain just down the hill from us. This is Big Business doing what it always does: trying to crush the little guy.”
Dan McCaffery, ceo of McCaffery Interests, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “We don’t scheme to do deals” and that Posman was always its first choice for The Terminal. “We had been talking with him a long time,” he said. “Long before White Whale.”
Separately, Barnes & Noble will open a new store in Peoria, AZ, aiming for mid-to-late summer. The approximately 10,000-square-foot store takes the place of a larger BN in the Arrowhead Mall that close a couple of months ago after almost 25 years.
Investments
Entertainment-focused investment firm MEP Capital has “acquired substantially all the assets” of Rosetta Books‘ backlist ebook catalog of over 700 titles. Partner at MEP Capital Andrew Kotliar said in the announcement, “We see Rosetta Books as a trail blazer in rights management in the ebook publishing world and are proud to be in business with Rosetta Books and its founding publisher Arthur Klebanoff.” Klebanoff told us, “I would analogize this to music catalog IP investments in a low interest environment.”
Klebanoff continues to oversee both Rosetta’s frontlist trade program, which the company continues to own and operate, as well as the ebook program, which moves to a separate URL at rosettaebooks.com. Klebanoff says the deal “will help our backlist ebook catalog expand its marketing and selectively target ebook acquisitions.”
Controversies
From this article we learned that Amazon has an executive who serves as director of book content risk and quality, Sarah Castle. It was her job to assess internal complaints from “dozens of Amazon employees” asking the company to stop selling Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by journalist Abigail Shrier, arguing that the book violates Amazon’s recently stated policy against selling books “that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” The Seattle Times reports that Castle told employees on an internal message board, “After examining the content of the book in detail and calibrating with senior leadership, we have confirmed that it does not violate our content policy.”