Debbie Engel, vp of subsidiary rights at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will retire as of August 16. Candace Finn has been promoted to director of subsidiary rights.
Rosanna Forte will move from Viking UK to Sphere as an editor on August 27, and Callum Kenny will join Sphere from Bloomsbury UK on September 10, with both working on fiction and reporting to fiction publisher Lucy Malagoni,
Author N.K. Jemisin will serve as this year’s spokesperson for the ABA’s Indies First campaign (which takes place on American Express Small Business Saturday).
Distribution
Lonely Planet will move sales, customer service and distribution in the US and Latin America to Hachette Book Group as of March 2020. The travel publisher has distributed its titles directly from their Oakland, CA warehouse. Lonely Planet chief operating officer Theo Sathanantha says in the announcement, “The move mirrors the same successful third-party distribution approach we have in the UK, Australia and NZ, and will allow us to focus on our core business. We feel that HBG will best serve not only our current but also our future business requirements.”
Macmillan is providing independent bookstores in the continental US with expedited shipping, using two-day air for locations that have standard ground shipping times of three business days or greater from the company’s Gordonsville, VA warehouse.
Bookselling
Reader’s Loft Bookstore in Green Bay, WI will close at the end of August after 26 years as owner Virginia Kress retires. Buyer and events coordinator Amy Mazzariello, plans to open a smaller store, Lion’s Mouth, in downtown Green Bay.
Picks
Barack Obama announced his summer reads:
The collected works of Toni Morrison
The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami
American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson
The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren
Inland, by Tea Obreht
How to Read the Air, by Dinaw Mengestu
Maid, by Stephanie Land