Gene Taft will join Johns Hopkins University Press as publicity manager for the Books division on September 1, succeeding Kathy Alexander, who will retire October 2. Taft was formerly vp, assistant publisher at PublicAffairs and spent the past decade running his own publicity firm, Gene Taft PR. At Scribner, Kyle Radler has been promoted to publicist. Obituary Author, former book publishing executive, and co-founder of Common Sense Media Liz Perle, 59, died on Thursday following a lengthy battle with breast cancer. During her book publishing career, Perle had been publisher at William Morrow/Avon, Addison-Wesley and Prentice Hall Press, and she […]
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At the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, Jennifer Rofe has been promoted to senior agent. Marissa Litak has joined Sourcebooks as an assistant publicist. Previously, she was editorial assistant at Rhetoric Society Quarterly. The new issue of Poets & Writers magazine has Michael Szczerban interviewing at length 37 Ink founder Dawn Davis: “The truth is, we spend so much of our time advocating internally for our books, making sure we have the right cover, the right subtitle, filling out forms and so forth, that we often don’t have time to be entrepreneurial. But when a moment of clarity comes, it’s fun to pursue […]
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Nicole Tourtelot will join DeFiore and Company as an agent. She was most recently an agent at Kuhn Projects. Former Hachette Book Group CIO Ralph Munsen has joined GroupM, the media buying unit of advertising conglomerate WPP, as managing partner and global head of development. HBG is looking for a new CIO.
Corporate: Random House Germany Will Drop DRM in October
Following similar moves from Holtzbrinck, Bonnier Germany, dtv, Hoffman & Campe, Luebbe and others, Random House Germany has joined the trend and announced it will drop hard DRM in favor of digital watermarking (or “soft DRM”) as of October 1. In the announcement, ceo Frank Sambeth explained: “Abandoning harsh DRM facilitates readers and distributors dealing with e-book files, increases customer satisfaction and reduces complexity. At the same time traders and platforms can be supplied, which offer no hard DRM. With the conversion to soft DRM we join also an ever-widening industry consensus.” Germany is the first major ebook market to drop DRM on […]
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The Wylie Agency is launching a new venture, The Wylie Agency España, with Cristóbal Pera overseeing the new unit, starting in September. Pera previously spent more than a decade at Penguin Random House Mexico, where he was most recently editorial director. Quarto will launch a new children’s book imprint, Seagrass Press, in fall 2016, publishing 12-16 titles annually. Overseeing the imprint is Josalyn Moran, who most recently was vp, publishing at Albert Whitman and children’s publishing director at Chronicle Books. Margaret Harrison has joined Ingram Content Group as director of product metadata (she was the ebook global supply chain manager at Oxford University Press) and Ed Spade has […]
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Scholastic has announced a number of new hires and promotions. David Ascher has been promoted to svp, finance and strategic initiatives, while JoAnne Mojica will be vp, publishing operations, Scholastic Trade. Anamika Bhatnagar has been promoted to associate publisher of Pilkey Publishing and Scholastic Inc., and Sheila Marie Everett moves up to publicity director. Rick DeMonico has been promoted to senior art director and Elizabeth Herzog has been promoted to art director, Nonfiction and Branches. Finally, Elizabeth Schaefer has joined Scholastic as editor, licensed publishing. She was most recently an associate editor at Disney Book Group. At Vintage/Anchor, Angie Venezia has […]