Gary Jansen will join Loyola Press on August 1 as executive editor, acquisitions. Most recently, he was executive editor and director of Image Books.
At Berkley, Jin Yu has been promoted to deputy director, marketing.
Allison Hellegers will join Stimola Literary Studio on August 12 as literary agent and subrights director, representing
middle-grade, young adult, and select adult fiction and nonfiction. Previously, she was foreign rights director and US co-agent for Rights People for 10 years.
Vintage Anchor publisher Anne Messitte wrote a longer remembrance of vice president, executive director of publicity and social media Russell Perreault, who died on July 27 at 52. She writes, “Russell was a beloved colleague – exuberant, funny, precocious, smart, and in possession of an infectious enthusiasm for books and authors. He was a well-rounded, discerning, and passionate reader, and these attributes made him one of the very best at his job.” Sloane Crosley, who worked with Perreault for nine years, added, “He was the most generous, warm, curious, quick, and darkly funny person I’ve ever met. He was exacting in his tastes — his delight over a book or film was as contagious as his exasperation. He also had a horror of compliments and refused to acknowledge the impact he had on so many writers, both the ones he worked for and the ones he worked with. I felt spoiled to be his friend. He was, in short, my favorite person.”
Acquisitions
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial acquired Catalan publisher La Campana Llibres. La Campana will continue publishing Catalan-language originals and translations of fiction and nonfiction in hardcover and trade paperback, and expand to mass-market paperback and digital editions. Director of La Campana Isabel Martí will stay on as a publishing consultant, working with Núria Tey, who is responsible for PRHGE’s Catalan-language division.
Higher Ed
Student leaders from 50 schools have signed a letter urging the Department of Justice to block the planned merger of McGraw-Hill and Cengage. While the companies say the merger is all about increasing affordability and accessibility, the signatories see it differently: “By reducing the need to compete, and then using access codes, subscription services, and ‘inclusive access’ to strong-arm students into buying materials, Cengage and McGraw-Hill will be able to continue their decades-long pattern of raising prices.”
Bookselling
Waterstones has announced that all staff will receive a four percent bonus, due to a “pretty good” financial year “driven above all by better book sales”, according to manager director James Daunt. Daunt, who will split his time between helming Waterstones and Barnes and Noble once the sale of the latter to Elliot Advisors is complete, called out the success of Michelle Obama’s Becoming, but added, “I believe [the improvement] was mainly because enough of our shops were simply a little bit better than a year earlier. It is this steady improvement, above all to our bookselling friendliness, upon which we depend to advance. Related products (R/P) was a disappointment but was balanced by the great strides forward made by W.com and Café W. All our functions, notably in the Hub and in Olton, improved and overall we kept a sensible control on costs. A steady, good year then, with the achievement also that we worked through the successful sale of the company.”
Three months ago, more than 9,000 Waterstones employees had petitioned for a living wage at the company. One anonymous employee told the Bookseller, “I honestly believe that the bonus is a token gesture, meant to shut everyone up and keep them quiet for raising the wage issue again.”