Ken Brooks is leaving his position as chief content officer at Wiley and will resume his consulting practice at Treadwell Media focused on content and operations in trade, reference and education publishing. Jessica Sindler has joined the ghostwriting and publishing services firm Kevin Anderson & Associates as executive editor. Previously she was senior editor at Dey Street books. US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo has been appointed to a third term, only the second person in 77 years to do so. The International Publishers Association (IPA) confirmed Bodour Al Qasimi, founder of the Kalimat Group in the UAE, as president-elect. Owner […]
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Ibrahim Ahmad will join Viking as executive editor starting January 11, reporting to Andrea Schulz. He was previously editorial director at Akashic Books, where he worked for two decades. Selena James has joined Amazon Publishing as senior editor for Little A and Amazon Original Stories. She was previously at Kensington. Stephanie Purcell will join Bloomsbury UK as group rights director, reporting to Kathleen Farrar. She has been rights director at Simon & Schuster UK. Clark Christian has been hired as marketing director for the Thomas Nelson Bible group. Most recently he worked in product marketing for healthcare education company, PESI. Layoffs […]
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In advance of the sale of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade division, senior executive editor Rick Wolff recently accepted a voluntary buyout package, and he will leave HMH in mid-December. Wolff, “who has no plans to retire, was a minor league baseball player in the Detroit Tigers organization before entering book publishing.” At Harper Christian and Harper Focu, Jerri Helm was promoted to vp of digital marketing and analytics, continuing to lead the marketing operations team while also assuming responsibility for the corporate analytics team. Bookselling Politics and Prose is looking to change the paradigm around author events, from free promotion […]
National Book Awards: Yu Wins Fiction, Along With Les Payne and Tamara Payne, and More
At the 71st National Book Awards on Wednesday evening, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (Pantheon) won the fiction prize. Roxane Gay presented the award, noting, “This has been an impossible year in almost every way. We are dealing with both a pandemic and a political climate that is terrifying and absurd.” Yu, who said he had not prepared a speech because he was so sure he would not win, spoke briefly, saying “I can’t feel anything in my body right now” and “I’m going to go melt into a puddle.” (Afterwards on Twitter, Yu remarked: “That feeling when you win a […]
Obama’s A Promised Land Sets PRH Opening Day Sales Record
Penguin Random House announced Wednesday that Barack Obama’s A PROMISED LAND sold over than 887,000 units (including pre-orders_ in all formats and editions in the US and Canada on the first day of publication. That comprises “the largest first-day sales total for any book ever published” by the company. Two years ago, Michelle Obama’s book BECOMING sold over 725,000 units in its first day on sale, moving 1.4 million units in the first week on sale. In July, Simon & Schuster said they had set their own “company record” for opening day sales in the US when Mary Trump’s Too […]
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Annysa Polanco has been promoted to director, diversity, equity & inclusion at Penguin Random House. In the coming year, the company will add “more fully-dedicated positions” in diversity, equity & inclusions roles across the divisions, including a new “board-level DE&I leadership position” that will report directly to PRH US ceo Madeline McIntosh. Polanco will report to that new executive once the role is filled. Michael DeFazio had been promoted to vice president & executive director, production planning, analytics, and paper purchasing, Penguin Random House. Film/TV Production outfit The Mazur Kaplan Company — run by bookseller Mitchell Kaplan and producer Paula […]