Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nelle Harper Lee has died at age 89, the Alabama Media Group reported Friday morning, citing confirmation from “multiple sources in her hometown of Monroeville.” HarperCollins confirmed her passing to the NYT, which has a lengthy obituary by William Grimes. Yale University Press editor-at-large and former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman will join Heyday Books as publisher and executive director on July 1, relocating to Berkeley, CA. He succeeds founder Malcolm Margolin, who retired at the end of last year. In the intervening period Heyday’s editorial director, Gayle Wattawa, will act as interim publisher, and director […]
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New Options for Opening Day
As we have been reviewing, the main Digital Book World agenda (March 8 and 9) is packed with straight-from-the-headlines keynoters and strategic panels, but we also have our biggest introductory “Day Zero” programming on March 7 as well. And now there are registration options for the time-challenged to buy tickets to Day Zero alone (or Day Zero plus DBW Day One packages). When we first started Launch Kids five years ago it wasn’t only the first digital show focused on children’s publishing, it was the first US show devoted to children’s publishing professionals of any kind. Just like the main […]
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Cliff Guren is leaving Bluefire, where he was vp, business development, to relaunch his consulting business Syntopical. Bluefire founder and ceo Micah Bowers said in the announcement: “Over the past five years I have had the pleasure of working with Cliff as we’ve successfully grown our software licensing business…. Cliff has done a fabulous job for us and we hope to find opportunities to work together in the years to come.” Coming soon from Bluefire is their Cloudshelf family of EPUB 3 reader applications and distribution services that will enable businesses and institutions to “deploy digital private libraries and subscription services to their constituent […]
Headlines and Headliners
Next month’s Digital Book World — March 8 and 9 — will feature many current headline-making stories on the main stage. As the tech world wrestles with “The Elephant in the Valley” survey on bias against women (an issue that will carryover to SXSW later in March), we’ll have a panel on Women at the Intersection of Publishing, Finance and Tech with Sourcebooks ceo Dominique Raccah, NetGalley president Susan Ruszala, entrepreneur and banker Joanna Herman, Penguin digital product manager Katherine McCahill, and consultant and journalist Charlotte Abbott. Plus we have Mary Ann Naples — just hired as Disney Book Group publisher — giving one of the Transformation […]
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Wes Miller will move over to Grand Central as senior editor on March 14, focusing on thrillers. He spent the past five years as an editor at Mulholland. Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association marketing director for the past 10 years Brian Juenemann will take over as executive director of the organization on March 1, after Tom Chambliss retires. He worked at the University of Oregon Bookstore for over a decade before joining the PNBA. Sarah Janet has joined Open Road Integrated Media as a marketing manager. Most recently she was a copywriter at Scholastic, and a marketing manager at Penguin. We missed […]
Coming Soon: New Data at DBW, and More
Our big seventh-annual Digital Book World is just three weeks away, with the main conference on March 8 and 9 — after our biggest-yet “Day Zero” roster on March 7 featuring the all-day Launch Kids, the brand-new four Mostly Marketing Masterclasses (with Pete McCarthy, Kelly Gallagher, Annie Cushing, and Tom Thompson), the also-new Nielsen half-day conference, and the return of some DBW Workshop favorites. Data is in the spotlight even more than usual this year, as we feature the first-known stage appearance of “Data Guy,” the controversial analyst behind the ongoing Author Earnings reports. To be clear, Data Guy’s DBW presentation […]