Wendy Levinson (formerly Silbert) is re-joining Harvey Klinger on November 30 in the newly created position of director of development. In her new role, Levinson will seek new clients for the agency focusing on adult fiction and non-fiction with the occasional YA or middle grade. The clients will then be distributed among the agency’s agents. She will also work in an editorial capacity on existing agency projects.
Maggie Southard has joined Little, Brown as publicist. Previously she was an associate publicist at Knopf.
Janea Brachfeld will join Storey Publishing and Timber Press as trade sales coordinator. Previously she was the national accounts coordinator for Macmillan.
Retailing
It’s time for the release of the annual Barnes & Noble holiday television commercial. Starbucks dropped holiday ornamentation from their cups and BN has dropped the Nook from their ad after featuring it prominently over the past few years. The most interesting thing about this year’s spot — which features Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga singing their way down spine-out aisles — is that it was created by chairman Len Riggio. “He conceived and wrote the spot himself, and recruited the talent,” the WSJ reports.
Sales
BuzzFeed mistakenly used the forthcoming NYT bestseller list to suggest that Ben Carson‘s A More Perfect Union outsold Donald Trump‘s Crippled America in print sales the first week of Trump’s release, and other media quickly fell for the story. Like many things presidential candidates have said recently, it isn’t true. According to Nielsen Bookscan, Trump sold 27,860 print copies through last Sunday, and Carson sold 27,251 copies. (Both were outsold by two other new nonfiction releases for the week, Leah Remini’s Troublemaker and Brian Kilmeade’s Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates.)
Best of 2015
UK retailer Waterstones has named a “shortlist” for their “book of the year” award. They will name a winner on December 1, and then plan to sell a lot of copies of the book they select:
SPQR, by Mary Beard
The Fox and the Star, by Coralie Bickford-Smith
My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante
Reasons to Stay Alive, by Matt Haig
Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins
Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee
The Shepherd’s Life, by James Rebanks
A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara
Coming Attractions
For crime writing fans, NYC’s Film Forum is programming an unusual tie-in festival to the recently-released two-volume WOMEN CRIME WRITERS anthologies from Library of America (edited by PL news editor Sarah Weinman). From December 11 through December 17, they will screen 11 movies based on the novels of six authors:
In a Lovely Place, and Ride the Pink Horse (novels by Dorothy Hughes); Laura, and Bedelia (novels by Vera Caspary); Strangers On A Train, Purple Noon, and The American Friend (novels by Patricia Highsmith); The Reckless Moment (novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding); La Rupture, and Don’t Bother to Knock (novels by Charlotte Armstrong); and Band of Outsiders (novel Dolores Hitchens).