Putnam Adds Conaway and Kahan, Plus More Personnel News New Putnam president Ivan Held has moved quickly to bolster the imprint’s editorial staff, hiring Dan Conaway away from Harper as executive editor, and adding Rachel Kahan, who was at Crown since 1997, as a senior editor. Both will start at Putnam on June 1. Separately, Kris Puopolo has been given the new position of senior editor for Doubleday Broadway (she was at just Broadway), reporting to Bill Thomas and taking on additional responsibility for acquiring serious nonfiction for the Doubleday list. Puopolo already edits Pulitzer winner Anne Applebaum, along with […]

Huffington Posts Book News The new celeblog the Huffington Post launches today with an uncredited lead story highlighting Gerald Posner’s forthcoming SECRETS OF THE KINGDOM: The Inside Story of the Saudi-US Connection, scheduled for publication next week. They say the book cites NSA reports that Saudi Arabia has “a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs” installed throughout their oil industry infrastructure, dubbed “petroleum scorched earth.” The idea is to protect the House of Saud from attack, from outside the country but also from within, ensuring that any such incursion would “leave the country a contaminated […]

Book Sense June Picks The June picks and notables have been posted online. My wife can certainly vouch for this month’s number one pick — she devoured THE HISTORIAN over spring break and happily declared it one of the most enjoyable books she’s read in a long time. 1. THE HISTORIAN: A Novel, by Elizabeth Kostova DARK HARBOR, by David Hosp ZORRO: A Novel, by Isabel Allende THE THIRD SECRET: A Novel of Suspense, by Steve Berry IF YOU LIVED HERE, I’D KNOW YOUR NAME: News From Small-Town Alaska, by Heather Lende FREAKONOMICS: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side […]

Soft Quarter for Harper As part of News Corp.’s just-released third quarter results, sales at HarperCollins fell 6.5 percent compared to the same period last year, registering $300 million. Profits fell 17 percent, to $30 million for the quarter. The new results come in comparison to a particularly strong quarterly report for Harper a year ago, driven by THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE. News Corp. release Oprah Boosts You A Tuesday feature on the Oprah Winfrey show for Michael Roizen and Memhet Oz’s health reference YOU: The Owners Manual has lifted the book to the top position at both Amazon and BN.com. […]

Sales Down At: Harlequin, Waterstone’s Sales at Harlequin continue to slide, down $7.9 million for the first quarter to $129 million (Canadian), with most of the weakness in North American revenues. Same-store sales at UK bookseller Waterstone’s fell 2.8 percent in the first quarter. The slide comes after what had been a strong pre-Christmas period for the chain. Torstar/Harlequin release Guardian on Waterstone’s/HMV Agency Moves On the heels of Steve Wasserman’s departure from the LA Times comes the announcement that he will move back to New York, to run the city’s office of Boston-based agency Kneerim & Williams, alongside agents […]

Server Limbo The good news is that our fast new dedicated server is working wonderfully. The less good news is that, of this morning’s serving, the “DNS records” that tell computers all over the world how to find our new server have not been updated yet. That process is supposed to start imminently — unless it doesn’t. In the meantime, we’ve had to disable the interactive/posting features at the old version of the site, which is also working wonderfully. Otherwise, changes to member pages, account records, posted pages, and so on would look like they were going through, but they […]