David Goehring has joined Wiley as director of digital publishing for the professional/trade group. He was most recently director of Harvard Business Press, and before that held executive positions at Perseus and Pearson. Susan Fensten is leaving Oxford University Press, where she was a senior publicist, to launch Fensten PR, a small, independent book publicity firm with a focus on political titles. Director of Belge Publishing House and advocate for free expression Ragip Zarakolu was detained on October 28 by the Turkish government under the country’s anti-terrorism laws. He has run afoul of the government on several occasions since founding […]
Awards
People, Etc.
Consultant and former Bowker ceo Michael Cairns has taken a full-time position at SharedBook after working with them to launch their AcademicPub product. Cairns is chief revenue officer for the company, and will continue to focus on the development of AcademicPub–an online platform that lets educators create fully-licensed custom coursepacks, pulling together licensable publisher content, personal materials from their own computers and information from the web through an online interface. Angus Killick is joining Macmillan Children’s in the new position of vp, associate publisher, reporting to president Jon Yaged. Killick will coordinate publishing programs across the group’s imprints, lead the children’s […]
Announcements: Michelle Obama’s Book, Gaiman’s Audiobook Launch List,and Preparing for World Book Night
Crown said yesterday that their previously-announced April 2012 book with First Lady Michelle Obama will be called AMERICAN GROWN: How the White House Kitchen Garden Inspires Families, Schools, and Communities. The $30 illustrated book will go on sale April 10. The publisher released the jacket design as well. Neil Gaiman’s previously announced audiobook imprint for Audible Neil Gaiman Presents is live today with five launch titles from Jonathan Carroll, Alina Simone, M. John Harrison, Keith Roberts, and Steven Sherrill. An additional eleven titles, all produced through Audible’s ACX service and which include introductions by Gaiman, will be released soon, with […]
Favorite Julian Barnes Wins Booker After All
Breaking the pattern we so carefully documented earlier on Tuesday, the favorite has won the Booker Prize for just the second time in the past nine years. Julian Barnes, nominated three times before for the award, won on his fourth try for THE SENSE OF AN ENDING. And Knopf, which had moved up the book’s publication date from January 2012 to October 5, announced it will go back to press for an additional 40,000 copies, on top of the initial 36,000 first printing. (Among outlets monitored by Nielsen BookScan, Barnes’ hardcover edition has approximately 2,500 copies through last Saturday in […]
Looking to Tonight’s Booker
Julian Barnes is in the running for the Booker Prize for the fourth time, this year for THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, and he heads into tonight’s awards ceremony as the odds-on favorite. Which is often not a good thing. As our handy chart below shows, over the past eight years the bettor’s choice has only won once. (We stopped at 2004, since 2003 was the year that the Booker web site at least appeared to post Yann Martel’s victory a week ahead of the ceremony.) The announcement is due at 4:48 Eastern (US) time today. Year Favorite Winner 2010 […]
Lauren Myracle’s Book Is Withdrawn From the National Book Awards
After it became clear last week–in less than straight-forward fashion–that Lauren Myracle’s young adult book SHINE was erroneously named as a National Book Award finalist, the title has now been withdrawn from the competition and no longer appears on the National Book Foundation’s website. Myracle says in a release from publisher Amulet that she “was asked to withdraw by the National Book Foundation to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work” on Friday and agreed to do so. In recognition of the error and, we imagine, the sloppy process of dealing with that mistake, the NBF “has […]