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Executive Moves, Book
Deals and More Industry News
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (JUNE 2002)
People
Harcourt
reports that Laurie Brown has been hired
as SVP, Director of Trade Sales and Marketing for Adult
and Juvenile Publishing. She formerly held that position
at FSG. Lori Benton rejoins Harcourt
as VP Publisher of Children’s Books, replacing Louise
Pelan, who has taken early retirement.
She comes from Holt, where she was Associate
Publisher and Director of Marketing for Children’s Books.
She will work out of the New York office. Robin
Cruise, formerly Executive Managing Editor in
San Diego, has also been named Deputy Publisher. Dave
Nelson, Director of Trade Sales, will be leaving
the company.
As reported elsewhere, an interim triumvirate of Janet
Silver, VP, Associate Pub. and EIC of Adult Trade;
Children’s Publisher Andrea Davis Pinkey; and
Marge Berube, VP Dir. of Dictionary Publishing,
will divide the duties handled by Wendy Strothman,
who is stepping down as Houghton Mifflin’s EVP
of the Trade and Reference Division. Though HM Pres.
and CEO Nader Darehshori had been slated to retire
in June, and his name is no longer listed on Hoover’s,
his presence is still very apparent. Meanwhile, Exec.
Editor Pat Strachan is leaving Houghton. She
is reachable at (212) 924-4885.
While Picador celebrates its thirtieth
anniversary in the UK, Peter
Straus has suddenly decamped after twelve years
to join the literary agency Rogers, Coleridge &
White as a director of the firm. . . . Karen
Krieger has been named VP Custom Publishing at
Creative Publishing. She was formerly Marketing
Director for the Thorsons and Elements
imprint of HarperCollins UK (which is distributed in
the US by NBN). She will be involved in strategy
for the custom publishing division, as well as having
P&L responsibility for the group and for sales,
marketing, and business development.
Sales people are on the move: Susan Naythons
has been named EVP Director of Sales, PGW reporting
to Kevan Lyon; she was most recently at HarperSan
Francisco. (She is the third leg of the new EVP
triumvirate that will run PGW in a post-Charlie
Winton world that includes Mark Ouimet
for Marketing and Chris McKenney for Operations.)
. . . Linda Stormes has been named Sales Manager
at Joost Elfers Publishing, which launches this
fall
. . . . Rob Shaeffer, VP Sales, is leaving DAP
to rejoin Chronicle Books, as its New York rep.
Bill
Boedeker has been named VP, Director of Marketing
for the Children’s group at Little, Brown, reporting
to David Ford. LB Children’s has recently moved
its offices to New York. In other children’s book news,
Allison Devlin has left HarperCollins Children’s,
where she was Executive Director of Publicity.
Adrian
Webster has been named MD of Rodale Books
International. He was previously consulting for the
company. . . . Jonathan Nowell was promoted to
Group Managing director VNU Entertainment Media,
overseeing among other properties Nielsen BookScan,
the new name of the firm that tracks retail book sales.
It continues to be managed in the US by Jim King,
VP of Sales and Service, and globally as a single unit
under the control of UK-based Richard Knight,
Executive Director. Nielsen BookScan reports
it has access to retail data from between 65% and 70%
of the US market, 85% of the UK market, and 75% of the
Australian market.
Rob McMahon joined Putnam as a Senior Editor.
He was at Warner for seven years. And Ryan
Harbage, who left Little, Brown, joins Plume as
an Associate Editor. . . . Christopher Sweet
has gone to Abrams as a Senior Editor. He was
most recently at Viking Studio.
A major minuet is under way at university presses, with
one position recently filled (Peter Webber has
been named Syracuse U.P.’s Director), and several
more in the process of searching for new Directors.
Yale U. Press, MIT Press, U. California
Press, Nebraska, and Wayne State are some
of the university presses with openings at the top.
After
coming on as a consultant two months ago, Robert
Riger has been named Associate Publisher of SparkNotes
in charge of marketing and sales for print and online,
and reporting to Dan Weiss, Publisher. SparkNotes
was sold to Barnes & Noble last year. . .
. Exley is closing its doors — literally — and
all US operations will be consolidated in its warehouse
outside Boston. Randy Kaye, its VP Sales, will
continue with the company. He is based in New York and
is the only remaining NYC employee.
June
Dates
Two big shows at the Javits Center this
month: The Licensing Show takes over the convention
center June 11-13. The Licensing Letter’s Martin
Brochstein tells us to “watch for an accent on entertainment
franchises, as Hollywood tries to keep leveraging familiar
characters and story lines, as well as a continued expansion
of licensing based on corporate brands.” Meanwhile,
according to the Letter, publishing’s sales of
licensed product declined last year over 2000’s sales,
to $850 million, but virtually every category showed
a similar or greater decline. Direct Marketing Days
arrives June 17-19, a month later than usual, but with
a full roster of speakers, from Rudy Giuliani
(touted as “America’s Mayor”) to the Postmaster General,
as well as speakers from Bookspan, AOL,
Yahoo! etc. For those looking to market direct
to customers, this provides a useful overview.
Parties
May started off with a burst of BEA activity,
and continued unabated until Memorial Day.
•
Esquire hosted a post-BEA party on May 5 to celebrate
the publication of Esquire’s Big Book of Fiction,
edited by Adrienne Miller. Joe and
Liz Bianco, “longtime supporters of independent
publishing,” co-hosted the event with Context Books’
Beau Friedlander, in what our correspondent tells
us was an art-filled apartment in the Village. On May
7 Esther Margolis hosted her annual party for
Jerusalem Book Fair editorial fellow alumni and
friends, and honored Zev Birger, the Chair and
MD of the Fair. Supporters included Jane Friedman,
Peter Mayer, and numerous editors, agents, and
scouts. Applications for the 10th class of JBIF Editorial
Fellows — and the second class of “JBIF Agent Fellows”
— will be solicited in September.
• The following week was Barney Rosset’s
80th bday and on hand were Sue Mingus (widow
of Charlie), Kent Carroll (formerly Carroll and
Graf), Edward de Grazia, who fought all Rosset’s
censorship cases, Matt Dillon, Marty Garbus,
and Rosset’s children including the aptly named Beckett
and several former wives. Meanwhile Rosset declined
to sign the Random House boilerplate for his
autobiography, so the contract with Broadway was
never signed and the book will now be published by Algonquin.
Gene Brissie put the deal together working with
lawyer Robert Solomon.
•
On May 21, there were parties of all sizes around
town. Miranda and George deKay hosted
a farewell party for Linda Pennell, departing
Director of Sub Rights at Random House. Every rights
person worth his or her salt — including Penguin’s Hal
Fessenden, who co-hosted the party, Houghton’s Debbie
Engel, and Little, Brown’s Jean Griffin
— attended the party, though some did so briefly and
in their fancy dress, en route to the UJA dinner
for Jane Friedman. The gala attracted over 800 ticket
buyers, and raised a record $1.3 million.
Mazel
Tov
To Lucinda Karter, Director of the French
Publishers’ Agency, and her husband Tim Bent,
a Senior Editor at St. Martin’s by day and a
translator in his off hours, who were both made Chevalier
des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture
at BookExpo. Bent’s most recent published translation
is Amélie Nothomb’s The Character of Rain.
To Kimberly Witherspoon and Paul Pasquantonio,
proud parents of Summer Marie Pasquantonio, born May
24, 2002.
In
Memoriam
Publishing guru Len Shatzkin died on Saturday,
May 11, at the age of 82. As Bookselling This Week’s
David Grogan wrote, “Shatzkin’s life was one of many
remarkable achievements, throughout which his original,
innovative, and oftentimes controversial ideas spurred
many to think about the business of book publishing
in new and better ways.” Amen.
A memorial for Gwenda David, longtime scout for
Viking and Book-of-the-Month Club, and
who died in March of this year, is being organized by
Kathryn Court. It will take place on June 19th
at Penguin Books, 80 Strand, London WC2 from
6-8 pm.
©2002
Publishing Trends
