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Executive
Moves, Book Deals and More Industry News
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (SEPTEMBER 2002)
People
After 15 years at Reader’s
Digest, most recently as VP Global Director, Global
Books & Home Entertainment, Alfredo Santana will
be leaving the company. He may be reached via email
at siempre@attglobal.net
or at (212) 781-0632. Santana tells PT that he
will attend Frankfurt this year, his eighteenth.
Gerry
Helferich, who recently left Wiley, and Teresa
Nicholas, who resigned as VP Production at Crown,
are moving to San Miguel de Allende in late September
for a year’s sabbatical, while Helferich writes his
book (see PT,
8/02). Kitt Allan, who had been Marketing
Director and Associate Director of Editorial Development,
is replacing Helferich as Publisher of Wiley General
Books. . . Pat Strachan has been named Senior
Editor at Little, Brown and will be starting
there on Sept 9.
Ted
Hill has been named SVP Business Development for
Vista Computer Services. He had been at several
dot-coms, including About.com, and was Publisher
of Macmillan Digital Reference. . . As reported
earlier, David Allender has gone to Workman
as Senior Editor in charge of Children’s, starting
after Labor Day. He was previously at BOMC. .
. Ballantine’s Nancy Miller has hired
Senior Editor Zack Schisgal, who was most recently
at Warner/ipublish, to focus on a range
of nonfiction. And Claire Tisne has been hired
as Teri Henry’s replacement in the rights department.
She comes via the BBC.
Mary Beth Guimaraes moves from Doubleday to
HarperCollins as Rights Manager, replacing Chris
McKerrow, who went to Reader’s Digest. And Pocket’s
Annie Hughes has been named Senior Rights Associate
at Harper, replacing Riky Stock, who left to
head up the German Book Office (see
PT, 8/02). Jeff Meltzer, Director
of Finance and Business Operations, has left HarperCollins
after four years, in a restructuring. . . Ken Brooks
has added the title of President of Publishing
& Media Group, a magazine and book consultancy
he has taken over. He continues to run Publishing
Dimensions, which digitizes and distributes ebooks
and egalleys.
Deborah Sloan has been appointed by Trafalgar
Square to the new position of Director of Marketing
& Promotion, beginning September 17. She was previously
at Candlewick Press for 11 years, most recently
as Executive Director of Marketing. Prior to that she
was Publicity & Advertising Director at Abbeville.
She will be based in a satellite office in the Boston
area.
Promotions
Peter Clifton,
President of Ingram Periodicals, has taken over
as head of international for Ingram Books. He was previously
at PubEasy and is based in Tennessee.
Susan
Weinberg announced the promotion of Alison Callahan
to editor at HarperCollins and Perennial. She joined
HarperCollins in August of 2000 to work for the late
Robert Jones, who became Harper’s Editor-in-Chief.
She will represent HarperCollins in selecting the annual
winner of the Robert S. Jones Memorial Scholarship,
established with the Columbia Publishing Course for
a UK or Commonwealth student.
Josh Marwell announced that Kathy Smith has
been promoted to VP, Sales Administration and Operations.
She was Director of Sales Administration.
Duly
Noted
New York Is Book
Country gears up at the end of September, with five
days of events that culminate in the 24th annual Fifth
Avenue fair on Sunday, Sept. 29. The first day, Sept.
25, is devoted to cookbooks, followed on Thursday by
“Books Into Movies,” and “What They’re Reading in the
Boroughs,” while the weekend is filled with readings,
the NYT Literary Lunch and Literary Tea and,
of course, the street fair itself. Meanwhile, all available
booths have been taken at the fair, and an estimated
250,000-plus people are expected to attend. For further
information, see NYisbookcountry.com.
•
The second National Book Festival will be
held Saturday, October 12 on the grounds of the US Capitol.
Designed to encourage a lifelong love of reading, the
festival will feature nationally-recognized authors
and storytellers. The first National Book Festival,
held at the Library of Congress on September
8, 2001, was attended by 30,000 “enthusiastic book-lovers.”
This year’s festival, again organized and sponsored
by the Library of Congress and hosted by Librarian of
Congress James H. Billington and Laura Bush,
will include author readings, book signings, musical
performances by Squeeze Bayou, the Broadcreek
Dixieland Band, Mariachi Los Amigos, and
more. Go to www.loc.gov/bookfest.
•
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival takes
place Sept. 19-22 in the Village of Waterloo, NJ, and
features the last five Poet Laureates, from Rita
Dove to Billy Collins, Grace Paley,
Amiri Baraka, Taha Muhammad Ali, and others.
Go to www.grdodge.org/poetry1.
•
Now that the sale of Abrams’ 50 textbook
titles (including Janson’s History of Art)
to Pearson Education has been confirmed, we thought
an explanation might be in order. “Textbook publishing
today requires tremendous capital outlays and an editorial
and marketing infrastructure on a truly military scale,”
explains Eric Himmel, Abrams VP and Publisher.
The decision had to be made to expand or sell. The books
were actually created by Abrams for P-H under license.
Now they will become P-H’s property and they will take
over the task of editing, designing, and producing —
and Abrams will distribute to the trade and collect
a distribution fee.
•
Meanwhile, in another example of the big gulping
down the small, The Bookseller reports that McGraw-Hill
Education has acquired Open University Press,
the independent social science and general academic
publisher. Open UP publishes about 100 new titles a
year, with a list totalling 800 books.
•
Knowbetter.com and Electronic Book Web partnered
to conduct a survey of ebooks and their readers, which
will be periodically updated. The essentials haven’t
changed much in the last year or two, but it is noteworthy
that this survey found that teens “haven’t yet come
to the ebook party. In fact, the vast majority (74%)
of respondents are between 30 and 59 years of age, while
only 14% are under 30.” Meanwhile, in looking at Barnes
& Noble, Powells.com, the Gemstar
eBookstore, and Palm Digital Media, to see
just what titles were available for the younger audience,
“Barnes & Noble lists over 37,000 paperback titles
in their children’s category (which included young adult
titles). Contrast that with the number of titles we
found available in an electronic format. They ranged
from a low of 129 (Palm Digital Media) to a high of
342 (MS Reader at B&N). In other words, ebooks in
this segment account for less than 1% of the selection
available in paper form.” Go to http://knowbetter.com/ebook/surveys/
2002spring_results.asp.
• Bob Wyatt, legendary editor and publisher of eponymous
imprint A Wyatt Book (which had been housed previously
at St. Martin’s), returns to the fray, this time
with Golden Notebook Press. The publisher tells
us it happened this way: “Among the events of the first
Woodstock Poetry Festival was a reading by Janice
King, who I knew only as an affable bookseller at
The Golden Notebook (a long-lived bookstore in the center
of the village). I was spellbound by Janice’s poetry
about her upbringing in rough-and-tumble Oregon and
her later life here in the Hudson Valley. At a Billy
Collins reading, Ellen Shapiro, who
runs The Golden Notebook along with Barry Samuels,
said, ‘All right, Wyatt, you think she’s so hot? Why
don’t you co-publish a book of her poetry with Golden
Notebook Press?’ Flush with continuing income from The
Red Tent, the very last Wyatt Book in association
with St. Martin’s Press, I instantly said, ‘Sure, why
not?’ ” Taking Wing: Poems from the Oregon Outback
to the Hudson Valley was published in July. The
publisher’s next project: a history of the Coleman
Theater, a landmark vaudeville theater in Miami,
Oklahoma.
Parties
& Events
Newmarket Press
celebrated its 20th anniversary with a garden party
at the Amagansett home of founder and President Esther
Margolis. Among the Hamptonites who attended the
event, which included a house tour of Margolis and husband
(and Newmarket author) Stan Fisher’s newly
renovated weekend lair, were HarperCollins CEO
Jane Friedman, Columbia U’s Bill Strachan,
there with wife and editor Pat Strachan (see People,
above), BOMC’s Mel Parker, Scholastic’s
Barbara Marcus, and author Anne Roiphe.
©2002
Publishing Trends
