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Executive
Moves, Book Deals and More Industry News
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (APRIL 2002)
People
Laurie Brown is
leaving FSG, where she was SVP, Director Sales
& Marketing. Her duties will be assumed by Jeff
Seroy and Linda Rosenberg. . . Gary
Gentel has been named VP Sales, Trade Division at
Scholastic. He was most recently with Dorling
Kindersley. . . John Schline has been made
SVP, Corporate Director of Business Affairs for Penguin
Putnam. . . Dan Weiss was named President
of SparkNotes.com,
following the departure of founder and General Manager,
Sam Yagan. Robert Riger has been hired
as on-site publishing consultant to the company, which
is owned by Barnes & Noble. . . Following
the demise of Talk/Miramax magazine, account
executive Perry Janoski has moved to Harper’s
Magazine where he will cover book publishing as well
as travel and entertainment.
As announced earlier, Chris McInerney is closing
her scouting agency, McInerney International, at the
end of June, after 28 years in business. Barbara
Tolley will lead the agency (with a name change
in the wings) as of July 1. Jayne Pliner plans
to remain with the firm. . . HarperCollins has
appointed Maureen O’Brien as Executive Editor
at Morrow/Avon, where she will acquire commercial
fiction and nonfiction for HarperEntertainment as well
as the entire Morrow/Avon division. She was most recently
at Hyperion. . . Joel Conarroe has been
named the PEN Center’s new President. Conarroe,
who will step down in December from the presidency of
the Guggenheim Foundation after eighteen years
in the post, was formerly Chairman of the National
Book Foundation and served several terms on the
PEN Board.
Greg
Anastas has been named the new Director of National
Field & Online Sales at Simon & Schuster.
(We reported last month that he had left the company
— our apologies.)
Duly
Noted
Despite well-documented troubles in book publishing,
there has been a lot of M & A activity recently,
with deals for Klutz Press, Berlitz, Running
Press, PGW and Bonus Books announced
in the last month. According to one knowledgeable source,
all of them were sold for sums that were “satisfactory
or better than satisfactory” for the sellers. For those
who are still looking to scoop up a publisher, Prentice
Hall Direct is still on the block. Merriam-Webster
and North-South have been taken off the market,
though. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Random House
has signed an agreement to purchase The Harvill
Press. Founded in 1946 and acquired in the ’80s by Christopher
Maclehose, it will remain an independent imprint.
Harvill’s paperback list will be published by Vintage.
• In the industry professionals-turned-writers column
we can now add Toinette Lippe, editor of Bell
Tower books, whose Nothing Left Over has
just been issued by Tarcher. She may be seen
and heard on April 23 at the 82nd and Broadway Barnes
& Noble at 7:30 pm. Then to California for the rest
of her tour. Agent Emma Sweeney’s As Always,
Jack from Little, Brown will be launched
with an appearance on the CBS Early Show on April 10
and followed by numerous autograph sessions in New York
and environs as well as Texas, Maryland, DC, and North
Carolina.
Meanwhile, BOMC’s Victoria Skurnick and
co-writer Cynthia Katz team up for the seventh
Cynthia Victor book, The Three of Us.
“At times funny and other times thoughtful and
poignant,” PW says, “this inspirational story
is the perfect elixir for any middle-aged woman who
has ever battled with weight gain, a particularly difficult
relationship or suffered an identity crisis.”
•
Amazon had 30.1 million unique visitors in January,
compared with Yahoo! Shopping (25.8 million),
and Barnes & Noble, the #3 site, at 8.2 million,
according to Jupiter Media Metrix. BN.com is
the heaviest advertiser in the books, movies, and music
category, followed by Columbia House and Amazon.
Together they represent 71% of all advertising in this
category. Online book shopping expenditures in 2002
are estimated at $2.6 billion. There will be 82 million
people shopping online this year, which represents 52%
of the online population, and an average dollar expenditure
per online buyer of $481.
•
The Daily News reports that the New York
Times has online revenues of $700,000 from its 35,000
subscribers to Premium Crosswords, and that fees for
archive material now amount to a seven-figure business.
Topic-specific content is also being assembled and sold,
including Thomas Friedman’s columns.
•
PubEasy introduced Central Services at the London
Book Fair, and US rep John Phillips tells
PT it will launch first in the UK. The service
allows booksellers around the world to check any participating
publisher’s stock, the status of an order, or to place
an order, by going to the site and entering the title’s
ISBN. There are currently 9,000 booksellers in 112 countries
using PubEasy, with 40% of those in the US, and 35%
in the UK.
April
Dates
The National Book Foundation sponsors an
evening of poetry for National Poetry Month on April
9 at 6:30 pm at the Blue Heron Arts Center. Tickets
will be sold at the door. Go to www.nationalbook.org.
(Separately, NBF said it had received a $100,000 gift
from Microsoft to support the organization’s
“continued recognition of books in electronic formats.”)
•
The Koret Foundation’s Jewish Book Awards
are presented 5:30-7:30 pm on April 15 at the Harvard
Club. Call (212) 629-0500 for information.
• Small Press Center and PW host a “Publishing
Predictions” Roundtable at the Algonquin at 6:00 - 8:00
pm on April 17. Panelists include Bob Miller,
Dominique Raccah, Peter Mayer, and PT’s
own Lorraine Shanley. For information go to smallpress.org
or call (212) 764-7021.
•
University of Virginia & Library of Congress
host “Publishing in the 21st Century: Blue Sky to Black
Ink,” a seminar on the “alliance of electronic and print
publishing.” Larry Kirshbaum is the keynote speaker,
with “Blue Sky to Red Ink: Painful Lessons Learned on
the Digital Publishing Highway.” It’s on April 18 -
20 in Washington, DC. Contact Beverly Jane Loo at (434)
982-5345 or go to: www.uvace.virginia.edu/cup.
•
The LA Times Festival of Books
will be held April 27-28 on the UCLA campus. The LA
Times Book Awards will be held on April 27 at UCLA’s
Royce Hall. Go to: www.latimes.com/festivalofbooks.
Parties
Big parties in March, warming publishers up for
the BEA onslaught (see PT, p. 3). First there
was the elegant Poets & Writers gala at the
Tribeca Rooftop, then there was the National Book
Critics Circle awards and reception at NYU, and
then, on to London. HarperCollins and Fourth Estate
threw a cocktail party at Home House on Portman Square,
where a multinational crowd drank champagne. The same
night Duncan Baird celebrated his 10th anniversary
as an independent publisher at the Groucho Club in Soho.
•
Back in the US, Roundtable’s Marsha Melnick
and Julie Merberg hosted a farewell retirement
party for Susan Meyer, who is launching a new
career: studying NYC history at NYU and planning to
write full time. Attending were VNU North American
Chairman Jerry Hobbs and Georgina Challis,
Corporate Communications and HR, Penguin Putnam’s Rick
Kot, HarperCollins’ Susan Friedland, Disney’s
Wendy Lefkon, and packager Paul Fargis,
among others.
•
Publishing Trends celebrated its 8th
anniversary and the 12th anniversary of its owner, Market
Partners International, on March 25 at the
Mercantile Library.
Mazel
Tov
To Barbara Marcus, who was honored by the
NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund at a luncheon
on March 21 at the Waldorf. She was one of five women
to receive the 2002 Aiming High Award.
To the Library of America, which turns 20 in
April (the year of its first publication — it was founded
in 1979 by Jason Epstein, who was just presented
with the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award). And to another
spring baby, HarperSan Francisco, which turned
25 in March.
To Reader’s Digest’s Alfredo Santana,
and Lisa Tatsuuma, proud parents of Camilla Sayuri Santana,
born Feb 4.
In
Memoriam
Gwenda David, legendary UK scout for Viking
and Book-of-the-Month Club for more than five
decades, has died in London. She will be remembered
for bringing Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark
to US readers.
©2002
Publishing Trends
