At Chronicle, Laura Lee Mattingly has been promoted to senior editor, while Sarah Billingsley moves up to senior editor, food & drink.
Brendan Coyne has joined the Pennsylvania State University Press as director of sales and marketing. He was formerly associate sales director at Johns Hopkins University Press.
Penguin Random House UK group UK sales director Garry Prior is retiring at the end of the year, after 35 years with associated companies.
Co-founder and former chief technology officer of The Book Depository Emad Eldeen Elakehal will launch ibiidi.com, a global international bookselling website selling titles in multiple language and focusing initially on Middle East and North African territories where other global sellers “have no or little presence.” The site will sell through third-party retailers at first and launch direct-to-consumer later in 2015.
After a successful first year, Publishing Scotland‘s editorial fellowship timed to coincide with the summer’s Edinburgh International Book will become an annual program. Eight editors from Italy, Germany, Mexico, Norway, the US (Peter Borland, Claire Wachtel) and Canada (Sarah MacLachlan) participated this year.
Forthcoming
Absent from yesterday’s news about Don DeLillo‘s lifetime achievement National Book Award but found in online catalogs is news that Scribner will publish his next novel, Zero K, on May 10, 2016. They say the 288-page book “weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, ‘the intimate touch of earth and sun.'” It’s about a billionaire in failing health who is the primary investor in a secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise — and his son, who is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”
Opening Sales
Knopf Doubleday spokesperson Paul Bogaards indicated on Twitter that opening day US sales, including pre-orders, for David Lagercrantz‘s The Girl in the Spider’s Web were 100,000 units in print and ebook combined. He tells us those sales were “above forecast and of a magnitude that we have gone back to press for a second and third printing, bringing our in print number up 360,000 copies.” Lagercrantz will visit the US the week of September 14 to support the publication.