Mitchell Ivers has been promoted to vp, editorial director of Threshold Editions, while continuing in his role as vp, senior editor at Gallery Books.
Reka Simonsen will join Atheneum as executive editor, effective March 10. Previously she was executive editor at HMH Children’s.
Scholastic has hired Heather McIntosh Cassano for the new position of chief experience officer. She will “help redefine and implement Scholastic”s next generation digital experiences for students, teachers, and parents. Leading a company-wide community of user experience designers, prototypers and user researchers, Ms. Cassano will help create a holistic user experience for Scholastic’s customers.”
Most recently, she was Pearson’s chief experience officer , and prior to that, she held senior positions at Yahoo, Google, Symantec and Sun Microsystems.
Janet Rasche will join Macmillan on March 3 in the newly created role of vp, operations planning, reporting to Andrew Weber. Previously she was director of operations at the sales and market intelligence startup MediaRadar, and before then was vp, director of project management and systems at Random House.
Betsy Bloom has joined the S&S Children’s education & library marketing group as marketing coordinator, moving over from the corporate marketing group, where she was an assistant.
Cengage Learning announced a number of strategic hires: Fernando Bleichmar joins as evp, chief strategy officer; previously he was coo at Altisource Technology Services. Torsten Geers has been named svp, Corporate Development and M&A, joining from Kura MD, where he was coo; Susan Aspey has joined as svp, public affairs, moving over from Pearson, where she was vp, media relations for the North American Group. Finally, former svp, corporate communications/corporate affairs at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Josef Blumenfeld has been named svp, corporate affairs.
Carolyn O’Keefe has joined Henry Holt as associate director of publicity. She was formerly associate director of publicity at Little, Brown.
Former managing director of The Book Depository (now owned by Amazon) Kieron Smith will launch a new global online bookseller, the Best Little Bookshop, selling print books only, in multiple languages. It will start as a lean operation, he tells the Bookseller (Smith, with marketing support from his wife). He says, “We believe good bookselling is a craft, that careful selection and exceptional service makes for more delighted book buyers. By being independently minded—not driven by algorithms to create book lists—we believe that we can add a human touch to book buying that is sorely missing online.”