In the marketing and publicity departments at Tor and Forge; Phyllis Azar has bee promoted to executive director of marketing; Patty Garcia has been promoted to director of publicity; Brian Vaughan moves up to the new position of director of publishing operations; Joseph Bendel takes the new position of manager of publishing operations; and Jennifer Kaufler has been promoted to marketing manager. In the UK, Pan Macmillan non-fiction publisher Richard Milner will leave at the end of next week to explore “new opportunities.” In awards, the American Library Association has announced nominees for their new YA debut award for books […]
Free
Random House: Free iPhone Book Promotion
Random House and Ballantine are offering free books to read on the iPhone via Lexcycle’s fast-growing Stanza reader. (The app has been downloaded approximately 500,000 times.) The works come from the backlist of popular authors such as Alan Furst, Julie Garwood, Charlie Huston, David Liss, Laurie Notaro, Arthur Phillips and Simon Rich, and include promotional excerpts for new hardcovers scheduled for 2009. The company says it is also “providing links to retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, Borders.com, Powells.com and IndieBound.org to encourage readers to purchase more books by these authors.”
Penguin 2.0: Groundbreakingly Revolutionary, If They Say So Themselves
Penguin has pulled together a few electronic initiatives under the umbrella of a Penguin 2.0 mini-site, which does sport a fun logo (the zero is depicted by a Penguin, naturally). It gathers up the eSpecials program begun earlier this year, a promotional iPhone app launched recently, and a new program with SharedBook to offer Penguin classics with customized dedication pages (for now, the first and only offering is a paperback of The Christmas Carol–personalized for $17, versus $9 for the regular edition). Most intriguing is a forthcoming feature for next year, Penguin Custom, in which “you will have the ability […]
Firebrand Takes Over NetGalley
After a slow-motion launch earlier this year, Rosetta Solution’s Net Galley–designed as both an electronic galley system as well as a review-workflow product for publishers–is being taken over on an operational basis by Firebrand Technologies. Constructed as a joint venture called NetGalley LLC, Firebrand’s Fran Toolan will serve as ceo of the new entity, though most of the team that launched NetGalley will remain with the company. Toolan indicated in a preliminary bulletin to customers that Firebrand intends to integrate NetGalley with its title management and metadata management products. He says, “From every angle this seems like a natural fit […]
People
PeopleMary McGrath is joining Simon & Schuster as director of DSRM, Children’s Sales, reporting to Mary Marotta. She has been at Random House for 17 years and for the past five was the director of sales, adult mass merchandise. PW has named Amazon ceo Jeff Bezos as their “person of the year.” Primarily a rehash of things you already know, they do elicit a few interesting remarks from Bezos in an interview. Speaking of physical book sales, he notes that despite Amazon’s deep selection, “the vast majority of sales is in the top tens of thousands of titles, not throughout […]
RBI: One Bidder Left
The Independent says that Bain Capital is the only remaining bidder for Reed Elsevier’s magazine unit, as TPG has dropped out. Facing a bid of about $1 billion–half of what they were hoping for, “Reed Elsevier is understood to be unhappy with some of the conditions of Bain’s bid, which includes a complicated earn-out structure – a move that would effectively tie key executives to RBI for a number of years.” They also report that ceo Crispin Davis has “invited” Apollo Group–which dropped out of the bidding earlier in the year (featured in the Sunday’s NYT business section for their […]