At Tin House, Nanci McCloskey has been promoted to associate publisher, director of marketing and sales. Masie Cochran becomes editorial director. At Little, Brown Jessica Chun has been promoted to marketing director; Shannon Hennessey to associate publicist; Alyssa Persons to senior publicist; Juliana Horbachevsky to assistant director of publicity for the Spark and Voracious imprints; Tracy Shaw to executive art director / Jimmy Patterson Books; and Kirin Diemont to junior designer, Little Brown trade art department. Lisa Quach has joined Simon & Schuster Children’s as marketing manager. She was most recently senior marketing coordinator at Big Honcho Media. At Random House Children’s […]
Book Fairs
Briefs: Bologna Book Fair Postponed
Bologna Children’s Book Fair, due to open on March 30, has been postponed to May 4 – May 7 due to the spread of coronavirus/COVID-19 to Italy, where five people have died of the virus so far. A note on the fair’s website says, “We will be releasing further organizational details in a few hours.” Hallmark is launching a line of mass market paperbacks in partnership with Walmart on February 25. One Hallmark romance novel will be highlighted each week, beginning with Country Hearts by Cindi Madsen. Stacey Donovan, director, Hallmark Publishing, said in the release, “We believe Walmart shoppers […]
People, Etc.
Quarto has hired Polly Powell, owner of what now operates as Pavilion Books, as chief executive officer of the company’s UK operations, and executive director of the company. Powell had been working as an advisor to lead owner CK Lau since this past October. Andrea Giunti Lombardo, whose family bought 6.2 million shares in Quarto in its recent capital raise, has also joined the board, as non-executive director of the company. He replaces Michael Mousley. Powell said, “I am excited to be joining the Board of Quarto. I have enormous respect for CK, and I think that having Italian publisher and […]
Winter Institute: What Booksellers Need the Most
The ABA convened yet another vibrant and successful Winter Institute, which featured ever-expanded programming and attendance, all substantially underwritten by supporting publishers, as was acknowledged at Thursday afternoon’s Town Hall meeting. If you were listening carefully, however, there is really one issue that matters the most to independent booksellers: Turning this “higher calling” into a truly viable, profitable profession. You heard it in incoming ABA ceo Allison Hill’s brief remarks at the beginning of WI: “Running our businesses is increasingly a challenge, and I believe this moment in time is a critical one for our industry…. The measure of our […]
Cummins Addresses AMERICAN DIRT Controversy at Winter Institute
A small, heavily overflowing room greeted AMERICAN DIRT author Jeanine Cummins at Winter Institute 15 in Baltimore on Wednesday for a charged, emotional and timely session originally envisioned as Creating Conversations Around American Dirt. Booksellers in the audience brought both palpable support but also raw and candid questions to the session, and Cummins responded in kind with thoughtful and emotional responses. As bookseller Javier Ramirez from Madison Street Books in Chicago noted in introducing Cummins, long before the Oprah pick and other attention — and controversy — AMERICAN DIRT had received “more Indie Next recommendations than any book in recent […]
The Deal on Pre-Frankfurt Deals: Flat Volume, with Continued Investment in Nonfiction
Following last week’s preview, we’re back with the final stats and trends on the selling season leading into the Frankfurt Book Fair (measured as five weeks plus a day through Tuesday, for consistency across the years). In line with the early view, total domestic US deal volume was flat for the fifth year in a row. As we reported last week, the FBF selling season is about 7.5 percent busier than the springtime selling season ahead of the London Book Fair. That means the FBF stretch averages 140 deals a week and the London season averages 130 deals a week […]