Founder and longtime managing director of Janklow & Nesbit UK Tif Loehnis will join Canongate as senior editor on September 5. In her decade at the agency, Loehnis represented authors including Tilly Bagshawe, Charles Cumming, Jasper Fforde, Julie Kavanagh, and Henry Porter, before leaving in 2010 and taking a short break from the industry. Canongate publishing director Nick Davies said in a statement: “Tif is a perfect fit for Canongate. She has great taste in books, a genuine and straightforward connection with her writers, and a restless curiosity about the future of the industry. I have no doubt Tif will […]
Agency News
People: McCullough to Start Imprint at RH Canada, Conville & Walsh Launch Speakers’ Bureau; And More
Publisher of Whitecap Books since 2001, Robert McCullough will join Random House Canada on July 11 as publisher of a new imprint. The line will focus on “the type of lifestyle and food titles for Canada and the North American marketplace that he has published” in the past. The unit will draw on all of RH Canada’s shared services. It’s designed to grow to publish 15 to 20 titles a year. McCullough will remain based in Vancouver, and reports to president Brad Martin. UK literary agents Patrick Walsh and Clare Conville of Conville & Walsh are launching a speakers’ agency […]
People: Another Borders Executive Quits
On Friday, Borders announced via an SEC filing that evp and chief merchandising officer Michele Cloutier resigned on Thursday, June 2. In other Borders news, federal bankruptcy court approved its motion to reject its Seattle’s Best Coffee contract as of July 31. SBC can stop shipping goods and providing services on June 30. Court filing Literary agent Weronika Janczuk has joined Lynn C. Franklin Associates, where she will represent a range of adult literary and commercial fiction, non-fiction, and YA. Janczuk has been at D4EO Literary Agency.
People: Grann to Retire; Hannigan Salky Getzler Agency Opens; and More
After more than 40 years in publishing, and more than 10 years with Doubleday, editor-at-large Phyllis Grann will retire from the company on June 9. “Phyllis is among the towering figures who have shaped book publishing,” said Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta in a statement. “We know her as a brilliant editor and savvy businesswoman, but more important, in my view, is the role she has played as a confidant and mentor to many in our industry. I certainly have learned a great deal from her.” Grann says, “as much as I have enjoyed the work, I now feel it is time […]
People, Etc.
Karen Ball is joining the Steve Laube Agency. For nearly 30 years she has worked on successful fiction lines at Tyndale, Multnomah, Zondervan, and, most recently, the B&H Publishing Group, where she was an executive editor. She will work from her office in Oregon. Publishing veteran Elizabeth Van Doren joined Highlights for Children and Boyds Mills Press as executive editor, book publishing. At Vintage UK, Victoria Murray-Browne has been named editor and Kate Watson joins as press officer. Previously Murray-Browne was an editor at John Murray and Watson was acting press officer at Dorling Kindersley.
Neal Pollack On Self-Publishing His Next Novel–And Keeping His Agent
Neal Pollack is the latest traditionally-published author to give self e-publishing a try this September, for his next novel JEWBALL, “a funny, gritty noir about a barnstorming Philadelphia Jewish basketball team in the late 1930s who battle for supremacy on and off the court under the growing shadow of anti-Semitism. He writes about it in the Sunday Times Book Review, with less fire and brimstone than some authors who have gone the same route: “For a writer like me, which is to say, most working writers — midcareer, midlist, middle-aged, more or less middlebrow, and somewhat Internet savvy — self-publishing […]