Barnes & Noble chief digital officer Fred Argir will retire from the company on August 3. Chief information officer Bill Wood will move up to chief digital officer, working “side by side” with chief merchandising officer Tim Mantel “to market and merchandise the website.” (Before joining BN in 2015, Argir was at Toys R Us and Sports Authority.) Cristopher Garrido has joined Harper Christian as vice president and publisher for its Spanish publishing program. Previously he developed and directed a Spanish publishing program at Lifeway Christian Resources. Melinda Merino has been promoted to editorial director and associate publisher of Harvard Business […]
People, Etc.
At the Penguin Random House US Finance Group, Justine LeCates has been appointed vice president, director of US finance. In the newly created position, she’ll be responsible for overseeing the US division’s financial planning & reporting, analysis and financial Systems. Yvonne Ricciuti has been promoted to senior director of financial systems. In the Random House Publishing Group publicity department, Jennifer Garza has been promoted to director of publicity, Ballantine Bantam Dell; Greg Kubie becomes associate director of publicity; and Dhara Parikh moves up to senior publicist. Emily Ritter has joined Simon & Schuster Children’s as digital & social marketing manager. She was most recently marketing manager at […]
Agent Danielle Smith Accused of Fraud, Lupine Grove Creative Closes
Children’s book literary agent and packager Danielle Smith, founder of Lupine Grove Creative, has reportedly been accused of fraudulent deals with her clients and she has closed her agency. In a post to a private Facebook group (also then shared on Twitter) author Heidi Heilig wrote that “it was discovered a couple of days ago that [Smith] forged offer letters to her clients (and counselled her clients not to take them) (i do not know what the end goal was).” Helig says that Smith “has resigned as an agent, and in addition she was fired from Walden Pond Press where she […]
A Romance Publishing Preview, Part One
We asked sisters Bea and Leah Koch, who own The Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles, the only exclusively romance bookstore in the country, to write the seasonal preview for our recently-published sampler, Buzz Books 2018: Romance (free downloads are available for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBooks, and Google Play). In addition to the 14 featured pre-publication excerpts in the sampler (noted in boldface below), the Kochs picked a wealth of noteworthy forthcoming romance titles to look for. These posts will present abbreviated versions of their full preview, which you can read in the free sampler. Today’s post focuses contemporary romance; tomorrow we will […]
People, Etc.
Kristin Fassler is joining Atria Publishing Group in the newly created position of vice president, director of integrated marketing on August 1. She was most recently vice president, director of marketing at Random House, overseeing the Ballantine Bantam Dell imprint. Dana Trocker, director of marketing, will move to Atria from the Simon & Schuster trade imprint, reporting to Fassler. Also reporting to Fassler will be Atria’s two deputy directors of publicity, David Brown and Lisa Sciambra; associate director of publicity Yona Deshommes; and assistant director of publicity Ariele Fredman. Paul Olsewski, vice president, director of publicity, will be leaving Atria, and the role […]
Ondaatje, Kushner, Powers Among the Booker Longlisted
The Guardian posted the Man Booker Prize longlist early, in advance of Wednesday’s scheduled announcement, and then promptly took it down. But the list survived in the Google cache and across social media (and now is public). Titles from US authors include Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (Jonathan Cape/Scribner), Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta/Drawn and Quarterly) — the first graphic novel to grace a Booker list — and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (William Heinemann/Norton). The only previous Booker winner on the longlist is Michael Ondaatje for Warlight (Jonathan Cape/Knopf), while the other Canadian listed is Giller Prize winner Esi Edugyan for Washington Black (Serpent’s Tail/Knopf). Two debut novels are […]