Borders announced the winners of their annual awards: FictionSteven Galloway’s debut novel, THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO The awards committee called it “a haunting story of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people trying to find and retain their humanity in the midst of war and siege.” Non-fictionEric Weiner, THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World Young Adult/Independent ReaderTanya Landman, I AM APACHE Picture BookAdam Rubin and illustrator Daniel Salmieri, THOSE DARN SQUIRRELS!
SFWA to Honor Victoria Strauss
Co-founder of the Writer Beware website (along with Ann Crispin) Victoria Strauss will be honored by Science Fiction Writers Association at their Nebula Awards with a special Service Award. Organization president Russell Davis comments, “Her work with Writer Beware has been invaluable to our members and the writing community at large, so I’m very pleased to offer her this recognition of her outstanding service.” Strauss says, “Ten years ago, when WB was just getting started, I could never have imagined how much we would accomplish and how far we’d come. Beginning as a two-person committee and a modest subsection of […]
Briefs
At the Jeff Herman Agency, Tom Willkens has been promoted to literary agent. At the Free Press, Andrew Dodds has been promoted to publicist. Book Soup is holding a “celebration of the life of Glenn Goldman” this Friday evening. In other store news, Toronto’s Pages bookstore has had their lease renewed after fearing that they would need to close or move at the end of February. And a SF Chronicle article reminds readers that even with recently closures, independent bookstores comprise a significant and vital part of the market in the Bay Area, highlighting smaller neighborhood stores like Booksmith and […]
Crown Announces Staff Adjustments as Palgon Rises
In a separate memo from Crown Group president and publisher Jenny Frost, she promises that “the new imprints joining our group each have their own distinct publishing identities and will continue to function with their own editorial, marketing, and publicity staffs.” Michael Palgon takes the new position of evp, deputy publisher of the Crown Publishing Group, reporting to Frost, overseeing what was Doubleday Business and is now called Broadway Business, still run by executive editor Roger Scholl, along with retaining oversight of Doubleday Religion and Waterbrook Multnomah. (Doubleday Religion editor-in-chief and associate publisher Trace Murphy and Waterbrook Multnomah president and […]
Knopf Group Completes Reorg; Announces New Titles and Reports
In two memos this morning, Knopf’s leaders outline a series of management realignments for the expanded Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Group spokesperson Paul Bogaards tells us “we are not making public the specifics of personnel issues, other than to say that there have been staff reductions as a result of our recent realignment, and that integration of our publishing group, which began late last year, is now complete.” Despite those reductions, Bogaards says that the planned annual “title count will remain the same at all of the imprints within our group.” On the editorial side of Doubleday, svp, publisher and […]
A Higher Estimate of Job Cuts at HMH
The WSJ, citing “a person familiar with the situation,” now puts December job reductions throughout Harcourt Houghton Mifflin parent company Education Media & Publishing Group at “some 700 people.” The company has “firing staff, outsourcing functions, buying fewer new books, and phasing out some textbooks for the past year” to keep up with its enormous debt load. Recent articles on questions raised by credit ratings agencies have questioned whether the company is anywhere near compliance with a required leverage ratio (a comparison of debt to ebitda) of nine–but now the Journal adds that the company’s loans stipulate that ratio “must […]