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.
