We always wondered who would be first to find a way to say “yes” to the slush pile, and it turns out to be Nelson. Oddly, Nelson is outsourcing the job to self-publishing giant Author Solutions, which will design, publish and distribute the books under the name West Bow Press. Nelson won’t edit the books either. So what will they do? Share revenue, and “monitor sales to identify potential big sellers.”WSJ
New Imprints
New Imprints from Sourcebooks and Rizzoli
Building on their success this year with YA novels and the growth of the children’s imprint Jabberwocky launched three years ago, Sourcebooks is creating a YA imprint called Fire, to launch in spring 2010 with seven titles. Editor Dan Ehrenhaft, who came over to Sourcebooks from Alloy Entertainment this spring, will lead the new line. CEO Dominique Raccah says “we want voices that will ignite, inspire, and surprise teens, regardless of genre.” The company says Fire will acquire fiction “in a variety of media, bringing worlds to life via the web, audio, digital–whatever teens are looking for, wherever they’re looking […]
S&S Creates Gallery Books As Pocket Returns to Mass-Market Only
Simon & Schuster is taking their successful Simon Spotlight Entertainment line and merging it with Pocket Books’ hardcovers and trade paperbacks to create a new imprint, Gallery Books. Pocket itself will return to focusing entirely on mass market publishing, as partner for all of the S&S imprints and continuing with paperback originals for “rising authors” such as Kresley Cole and Thomas Greanias. The new line is expected to launch in spring 2010. CEO Carolyn Reidy writes to employees that “as a company we need to insure that each of our imprints has sufficient strength and support, especially in this difficult […]
Lots of People News; Quartet to Close Before Starting, as Marion Boyars Closes, Too
Erica Silverman, formerly a Senior VP at William Morris and ICM, has joined Trident Media Group as a literary agent. Adam Korn has joined DeFiore and Company as an agent after a short stint at Vigliano Associates. He had been an editor at Harper, Crown and Random House. Zoe Shacham has joined the Nancy Yost Literary Agency as director of foreign rights, and Natanya Wheeler has joined the company as an agent. Myrsini Stephanides joins the Carol Mann Agency, focusing on pop culture, music, humor, popular science, narrative nonfiction, and memoir, as well as offbeat literary, graphic, and YA fiction. […]
People: Bleak House Publishers Start New Company, and More
Bleak House founder Benjamin Leroy and his colleague there Alison Janssen are leaving the crime and literary fiction publisher to start a new house, Tyrus Books. Leroy is the publisher, and Janssen is senior editor (and Donna Bagdasarian’s recent new literary management agency Publication Riot Group is handling rights.) Their launch list for this fall features three titles originally planned for publication at Bleak House: Peter Gadol’s SILVER LAKE, Michael Lister’s DOUBLE EXPOSURE and an anthology of crime short stories edited by Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg. (Bleak House was acquired by Big Earth Publishing in 2005.) Leroy and […]
Geringer Allies with Egmont USA
Children’s publishing start-up Egmont USA has “formed an alliance” with Laura Geringer Books. Geringer ran her imprint for 17 years at Harper Children’s until leaving the company last August. At the time, Susan Katz said in the memo announcing Geringer’s departure that she “looks forward to having more time to pursue her career as a writer, to devote her energies to the development of a new business with the capability of delivering story content on multiple platforms, and to channel more time into First Book.” Geringer will edit “a select group of titles” for Egmont starting with the fall 20l0 […]