The other day we noticed that Simon & Schuster imprint Free Press had advertised an opening for a senior editor on Publishers Marketplace — did this mean an expansion? Well, maybe not: today Ecco books, the imprint founded by Dan Halpern and owned by HarperCollins, announced the hire of Free Press senior editor Hilary Redmon. Ms. Redmon will serve as executive editor at Ecco with a focus on acquiring non-fiction titles. Read More
Over the past year, Amazon Publishing has developed most of the mass market and trade imprints that comprise a full-service publishing house, but they were lacking in one key area: children! The latest jewel in the Amazon Publishing crown is Marshall Cavendish, a children’s book imprint which supplies Amazon with a backlist of 450 children’s titles. As Amazon puts it in its press release, “The acquisition creates the foundation for Amazon Publishing to further expand into picture books, chapter books and Young Adult novels.” Read More
Promotion Monday at Little, Brown! Geoff Shandler, the most recent editor in chief at the publishing house, has been named to the new position of editorial director, where he will head an expansion in Little, Brown’s nonfiction program. Mr. Shandler’s replacement in the role of editor in chief will be Judy Clain, who has edited such mega-bestsellers as Julie and Julia by Julie Powell and Room by Emma Donaghue. According to a statement by publisher Michael Pietsch, Ms. Clain will now serve as Little, Brown’s “primary ambassador to agents” and oversee editorial hiring. And everybody gets to be a vice president! Read More
Grove/Atlantic Books has named Corinna Barsan as a new senior editor, reports Publishers Marketplace. She will be filling the vacancy left by Lauren Wein, who departed the publisher earlier this year for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Read More
With tears of joy and lots of liquor, New York publishing gathered at Cipriani Wall Street last night for the National Book Awards. This year’s host was actor John Lithgow, who recently published a memoir (Drama: An Actor’s Education) and performed his role with just the right amount of self-deprecation.
It was not as bad as 1999, when attendees of the PEN American Gala had to cross a picket line to get into Cipriani Midtown, but there were a few jokes about the celebration’s short distance from Zuccotti Park. Read More
The scene at a union rally today in front of book publisher HarperCollins was sodden but cheerful, as HarperCollins employees donned blue ponchos with the gold UAW logo and gathered to protest stalled contract negotiations with their employer. Carrying signs that read “Thousands of Children’s Books Can’t Be Wrong: Learn to Share” and “What Stinks Worse, Dirty Diapers or Reducing Maternity Leave?” HarperCollins employees expressed love for their jobs but dismay at the prospect of no more guaranteed raises, reduced seniority protections, restrictions on vacation time, higher health care costs and shortened maternity leave. These concerns have resulted in a standoff between HarperCollins’s management and UAW Local 2110 that is now almost a year old. Read More
Yesterday Mat Honan wrote a blog post for Gizmodo asking if Amazon was “letting publishers ruin the Kindle.” The blogger had trouble reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 across his array of mobile devices, and decided it was probably because the publisher of the book, Knopf, had decided to ruin the Kindle and restrict books to a single device. He failed to place a phone call to Knopf to see if the synching problem wasn’t due to some lightning storm in the humid Amazonian data cloud. Read More
The news has been floating around all week but new details have emerged: after 26 years in the business, Ira Silverberg will be leaving his job as a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic in November to take a job as the literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Publishers Marketplace Read More
HarperCollins has purchased most of the titles and the name of Newmarket Press, the 29-year-old independent publisher that brought you the What’s Happening to my Body? series, The Dorm Room Diet and other self-help and entertainment titles. Esther Margolis, the founder and publisher of Newmarket Press, will join the HarperCollins imprint It Books as an Read More
Amazon Publishing has been pushing its image as an author-friendly publisher, with one of the advertised perks being the ability for authors to access sales data for individual markets from Nielsen BookScan — at least for sales of physical books.
For most publishers, however, authors have gauged their sales on a day-to-day basis by either Read More
