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Executive Moves, Book
Deals and More Industry News
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (FEBRUARY 2003)
People
Lots happening in the
sales and distribution world: The big — though not unexpected
— news is that, following Kristina Peterson’s
departure from Simon & Schuster, Rick
Richter has been named President of the S&S
Children’s Publishing Division, a position he held prior
to Peterson’s arrival. He is currently President of
the S&S Sales & Distribution Division, a role
that Larry Norton will take over. Norton was
previously SVP of Sales & Distribution.
Other
sales moves: Dana Baylor, VP Marketing and Distribution
at Globe Pequot, says it’s time for a sabbatical
and has resigned to do just that for the next six months
(at least). . . Mary Albi, VP Sales & Marketing
at Phaidon, has left the company in a restructuring
which will have much of the company reporting to the
UK home office. Meanwhile, Martha Reddington,
VP Special Markets at HarperCollins, along with
two other members of her department, is leaving the
company in a reorganization. Email mp_reddington@msn.com.
After a brief stint at Harmony Books, Jake
Morrissey has become the Managing Editor of comics
at United Feature Syndicate in New York. He’ll
be editing cartoons, including Peanuts, Dilbert,
For Better or For Worse, Get Fuzzy, and
“about 70 others.” He also plans to do some writing.
. . Katie Hall has joined Harcourt as
a Senior Editor. She was most recently at Random
House. . . Lindley Boegehold has left Carlton
Books New York and is joining Black Dog &
Leventhal with the charge of developing their proprietary
publishing business. Keith Allen Jones of Carlton
in London has also left the company.
Anne
Kostick joins STC as Senior Editor. She had
been consulting with STC and previously was at VitaminShoppe.
com and Workman. . . Andrea Spooner is
joining Little, Brown Children’s publishing as
Executive Editor. She was Editor-in-Chief of North-South
Books’ SeaStar division, which she helped to
launch. . . Penguin has lots of new hires, other
than the newest and most talked about, Ann Godoff,
and her Senior Editor, Scott Moyers. Susan
Lehman was appointed Editor, Riverhead Books.
She had been Senior Editor at Talk and Salon.com.
Last month PT reported Sean McDonald’s
departure from Nan Talese books to be a Senior
Editor at Riverhead. Dave Zimmer has joined The
Penguin Group as Manager of Corporate Communications,
reporting to Marilyn Ducksworth. Most recently,
he worked for Vivendi Universal in New York and
Paris.
HarperCollins
UK announced the appointment of Caroline Michel
as MD and Publisher of the newly-created division
of HarperPress, which is the name for the combined editorial,
marketing, design, publicity, and rights teams for
Flamingo, HarperCollins nonfiction, and Fourth
Estate. Michel, who was Publisher of Vintage,
and Deputy MD and Deputy Publisher of the CCV division
of Random House, will report to Amanda Ridout.
Christopher Potter has been promoted to the new
position of Associate Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
of HarperPress. He remains as Co-Publisher of Fourth
Estate New York (with Dan Halpern at HC US),
while buying for HarperPress across all imprints. Clive
Priddle remains Publishing Director for the US.
Hanna
Oterio has joined SparkNotes as Executive
Editor, to spearhead its expansion into the K–8 Market.
She was previously at Macmillan/McGraw-Hill,
were she was Supervising Editor, and at Frank Schaffer,
as Editorial Director.
Nancy
Trypuc has moved from Penguin to St. Martin’s
Press, where she is Director of Advertising &
Promotion. She was handling advertising and promotion
for Berkley/NAL.
Promotions
Tim Bakke has
been promoted to VP Editorial Director of Creative
Homeowner. He has been with the company for six
years and was previously Editorial Director. . . Carol
Morgan has been promoted to Publicity Director at
Harry N. Abrams. She was Publicity Manager. She
is the founder of Boston Literary Hour. . . Ben Morgan
has been promoted to Marketing & Sales Associate
at SparkNotes, reporting to Associate Publisher Robert
Riger.
February
Dates
The Small Press Center sponsors an Inside
Publishing evening, wherein Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
interviews Peter Mayer. The event, which begins
at 6, with a reception following at 7:30, takes place
at the Small Press Center on 20 W. 44th. For further
information go to www.smallpress.org.
•
At the Feb. 11 Books for a Better Life awards,
retiring HarperCollins editor Larry Ashmead will
be the first non-author to be inducted into the Hall
of Fame, along with Suze Orman and Dr. Andrew
Weil.
•
AAP hosts its two-day conference, at which Oprah
Winfrey will be honored, taking place February 26–28
at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in DC. The 2003 Annual
Meeting for Smaller and Independent Publishers takes
place immediately preceding the opening reception for
the general meeting. Meanwhile, on February 3 – 5 the
Professional / Scholarly Publishing Division’s Annual
Conference takes place, also in DC. Go to www.publishers.org.
From
the Floor. . .
Our correspondent writes to PT that “Some
10,000 librarians made it to the new and improved Philadelphia
for the Mid-Winter ALA (January 24 – 29). Traffic
at booths on Sunday seemed light until the various ALA
council meetings and lunches let out and then the floor
was flooded with librarians eager for the many handouts.
Most notable among them was Barnes & Noble.com’s
mega tote bag which included an 8 oz. bar of chocolate
— not to mention an extra 5% special show discount to
launch ‘The Library Bookstore’ from BN.com. Using it,
librarians can create a custom-built bookstore, buy
online, and get bulk discounts. In preparation for the
ALA’s main conference this summer in Toronto, one booth
was taking free passport photos to prepare attendees
for the border crossing. Penguin was very visible with
their immense children’s offerings, but Dan Lundy
manfully manned a booth dedicated to the relaunched
Penguin Classics titles. Generally the show was short
on books and long on furniture, fixtures, and databases.
(Certainly the book-folk had spent nothing on display,
while the tech types were positively resplendent.)”
Duly
Noted
Taking exception to a recent Marty Arnold
column, Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director
of CLMP, wrote the following in rebuttal, which
hasn’t made it into the NYT as of PT’s
closing, but which we thought we’d share with our readers.
“To
the Editor: In “No Purebreds in Publishing” (Making
Books, January 23) Martin Arnold states that “the reality
is that there is no longer any such a thing as a purely
literary publishing house.” In fact, America boasts
a thriving community of independent publishers devoted
to mission-driven literary publishing. A mere glance
at the Council of Literary Magazines’ on-line directory
(http://www.clmp.org/directory/)
will reveal over a hundred exclusively literary publishers.
Often non-profit, generally run by devoted volunteer
staff, sometimes producing but one title a year, these
publishers have made literature their only business
— and their titles have won National Book Awards
and Pulitzer Prizes as a result.”
Parties
& Events
Basic Civitas Books
gave an “early celebration” of Black History Month at
their offices on Park Avenue, on a frigid January 27th.
Spotted in the crowd were authors Henry Louis Gates
Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, and Martha Southgate,
as well as literary agents Manie Baron, Malaika
Adero, and Marie Brown, and Patrik Henry
Bass of Essence (and a Running Press author),
Henry Finder of the New Yorker, and
Max Rodriguez, editor of QBR: The Black
Book Review.
•
Atlas Books, James Atlas’s reinvented Lipper Books
line, now ensconced at HarperCollins, and funded by
Roger Altman and other investors, chose The Lotos
Club to celebrate its launch on January 30th.
Mazel
Tov
McGraw-Hill’s Chitra
Bopardikar and HarperCollins’ Josh Marwell are
delighted to announce the early arrival of Tobias Julian
Marwell on January 27th.
©2003
Publishing Trends
