None of the “best of September” lists we have covered recently includes the highly-likely next Oprah’s Book Club pick landing September 6, Glennon Doyle Melton’s Love Warrior from Flatiron Books. Most online US bookselling outlets eliminated their placeholder Oprah Book Club September 2016 entries after stories from the WSJ and us on August 5. (The remaining metadata for international sites does seem to have updated the unusual trim size to match Melton’s specs, though some sites do have the Oprah pick tagged as fiction.) Perhaps most telling as confirmation, however, is that the metadata scrub was so thorough as to remove […]
People
Abby Saul has left Browne & Miller to launch The Lark Group, a literary agency seeking adult commercial and literary fiction. Joe D’Onofrio will take over as director of the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Distribution Center, filling the spot vacated by Don Linn earlier this year. Most recently D’Onofrio has been director of supply chain for Henry Schein, after leaving Simon & Schuster in 2011, where he had been svp supply chain operations for 8 years. Mary Anne Thompson Associates has been appointed US scout for CommonWeath Magazine in Taiwan. Viking UK editorial director Eleo Gordon has retired after almost 50 years with […]
More September Picks
The iBookstore best books of September list overlaps with the field in highlighting novels from Jonathan Safran Foer and Ann Patchett, while also adding The Wonder by Emma Donoghue, The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies, and Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch. Their nonfiction picks start with Bruce Springsteen’s book and include: Shirley Jackson, by Ruth Franklin The Pigeon Tunnel, by John le Carre Blood at the Root, by Patrick Phillips The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben And in YA they select: Kids of Appetite, David Arnold The Fever Code, James Dashner Ghosts, Raina Telgemeier A Shadow Bright […]
Bookselling: BN Small-Format Concept Store in Plano, TX; New Stores Coming to Belmont, MA & Bend, OR; And More
Bcrnes & Noble announced plans to open a new concept store in Plano, TX’s Legacy West development, the Dallas Morning News reports (based on the developer’s press release). Notably the store, set to open in March and including a restaurant and bar like BN’s other new concept stores, will be measure just 9,000 square feet in size. BN vp, development David Deason explained in a statement: “We are excited to be opening a smaller format store, as part of a number of different concept stores that we’re testing nationwide.” Belmont, MA will see a new independent bookstore, Belmont Books, open next March as well, […]
Counterpoint Sold to Catapult
Recent start-up Catapult announced an agreement to acquire and merge with Counterpoint Press, which comprises the Counterpoint and Soft Skull imprints. Jack Shoemaker and Dan Smetanka will continue to run editorial for the acquired lines and Megan Fishmann will remain in place as director of marketing and publicity, with Catapult’s publisher Andy Hunter taking over as Counterpoint’s publisher. The sale caps the long career of Counterpoint ceo Charlie Winton, who will retire from daily operations while serving as an editor at large. Soft Skull Press will return to New York, led editorially by Yuka Igarashi. Susan Reich and David Lamb of Book Advisors represented Counterpoint in the deal. […]
People, Awards, Etc.
Allison Adler has joined Andrews McMeel as editor. Previously she had been an editor at Henry Holt, and has been working as a freelance editor. Mike Levine has left Northwestern University Press, where he was an acquisitions editor since 2007, to work as an independent provider of editorial services. At House of Anansi Press in Canada, Douglas Richmond joins the company as editor, focusing on acquiring for Spiderline (crime/mystery/thriller imprint) and Ambrosia (their new lifestyle imprint). He was associate editor at Harper Canada, where he was Associate Editor. Cindy Ma has been promoted to senior publicist, as Lindsay Holung joins the company as publicist (she was […]