Having overseen McGraw-Hill Education during its spinoff from McGraw-Hill to its standalone status as a private company owned by Apollo Global Management, ceo Lloyd G. “Buzz” Waterhouse, 61, will retire by the end of the year. He’s been in the post only since June 2012. Spokesman Daniel Sieger told the WSJ Waterhouse is stepping down for “a combination of personal and professional reasons,” but will remain on the board. A search is underway for a replacement. On Monday Crown “inadvertently” fed out catalog data indicating a May 6, 2014 pub date for former Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner‘s memoir and a working title […]
International News
People, Etc.: Elmore Leonard Dies, and More
Elmore Leonard, 87, author of more than 40 novels who helped redefine the crime genre over the past four decades, died Tuesday morning at his home outside of Detroit from complications of a stroke he suffered earlier this month. His novels, many of which were the basis of successful film and television adaptations, included GET SHORTY, RUM PUNCH, 3:10 to YUMA, OUT OF SIGHT and, most recently, RAYLAN, and the Library of America had recently announced plans to publish the first of a three-volume collection of his books beginning in fall 2014. As part of S&S Children’s reorganization of its […]
People, Etc.
Director of publicity for Bloomsbury Children’s and Walker Children’s Katy Hershberger is leaving. She will start next week as an associate director of publicity for Simon & Schuster Children’s, as well as the Atheneum, and Margaret McElderry Books imprint. Following the sale of AP Watt to United Agents late last year, Derek Johns will retire at the end of November. He has been at AP Watt since 1992. At Harlequin’s Mira, Tara Parsons has been promoted to editorial director. Casey Maloney joined Picador as senior publicist. She was most recently a publicist at Penguin, working on the Gotham, Avery, Viking […]
Even with Big Hits, Mondadori Slides In First Half
Earlier in August, Italy’s Mondadori Group reported results for the first half of the year. “There was a slowdown in the trade books market” that pushed Mondadori’s total book sales down 7.3 percent to €134 million, with EBITDA of €10.3 million (down almost 20 percent). Among their publishing lines, however, sales rose 2.6 percent at Edizioni Mondadori (thanks to 700,000 copies in print of Dan Brown’s INFERNO), and 8.2 percent at Piemme (thanks to Khaled Hosseini’s AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED.) The company says it maintained its market share, still leading the trade with 26 percent of all trade revenues. (They […]
Random Rights Stats
The Random House sub-rights team agrees that Brazil has been the new “hot zone” for licensing books (though that may change soon as the country’s economic fortunes swing again). In a blog post that was shared with agents in a newsletter, the publisher offers some interesting rights statistics and infographics. The “top-earning genres around the world” from 2010 through 2012 were: 1. Juvenile fiction 2. Mystery/Thriller 3. General fiction 4. Biography 5. Romance Language-markets by income are: 1. German 2. French 3. Italian 4. Portugese 5. Spanish But by title volume it is: 1. Chinese (simplified characters) 2. Russian 3. […]
People and More
Greg Stadnyk has joined Little, Brown Children’s as associate art director. He was at Penguin Children’s. Iris Blasi has been named marketing director, senior editor at Pegasus Books, effective August 12. She was formerly marketing manager at Open Road Integrated Media. Longtime Amazon employee Sarah Jane Gunter, who has worked most recently in the company’s Luxembourg and Paris offices, will become publisher of the Amazon Crossing imprint on September 1. As the company explains in a job listing, they are starting a branch of Crossing in Germany (Amazon Crossing DE), “to establish new foreign authors in Germany.” The Book Industry […]