Former editor and literary agent Tim Seldes, 88, died at home in Washington, DC on Saturday. Seldes bought the agency Russell & Volkening agency in 1972, and retired after selling the agency to Lippincott Massie McQuilkin in 2012.
Stacia Decker will join Dunow, Carlson and Lerner on January 2. She has been with the Donald Maass Agency since 2009.
Michael Jon Jensen has joined Westchester Publishing Services, a composition and editorial services company, as director of technology. He was part of the startup group at Project MUSE, and for many years was director of publishing technologies for the National Academies Press.
Lauren Kretzschmar has been promoted to publicist at Insight Editions.
Boris Vulikh has joined Copyright Clearance Center as director, data engineering. He was senior data architect at ITA Software, a travel industry software division of Google. He will lead a global team responsible for master data management, data warehousing and data marts, and business intelligence and analytics.
Kent Hendricks has joined Zondervan’s academic division as marketing director of online learning. He was at Logos Bible Software for the past seven years.
Announcements
Wally Lamb will publish his next work, I’ll Take You There, with start-up Metabook as the first original title in their multimedia app platform in spring 2016, available on iOS only. (A teaser video from Lamb is here.) Metabook also announced a “strategic partnership” with Inkwell Management, which will represent the company’s titles overseas.
Springer will work with BitLit to make “most of their full ebook catalogue” — over 100,000 titles — available for bundling with the matching print books.
Awards
The PEN Literary Awards longlists are being announced this week on LitHub.