PEOPLE At Macmillan, CFO Dan Schwartz will leave the company on October 14. Holt VP and Executive Director of Publicity Pat Eisemann is retiring on December 2. Arriel Vinson joins Holt as Marketing Manager, having worked previously as Marketing Coordinator for Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. Jazz Key joins Macmillan as Associate Sales Manager, Special Markets, and…Continue Reading
PEOPLE As a consequence of October’s merger of Crown Publishing Group and Random House, Molly Stern, SVP and Publisher, is departing her position. EVP and Deputy Publisher David Drake will replace her. Gillian Blake, previously Editor-in-Chief at Henry Holt, will join as SVP and Editor-in-Chief of Crown Trade. Elsewhere in the company…Katie Ziga will move…Continue Reading
You could call them secret shoppers. Like the plainclothes informants who check out department stores for a lapse in customer service, publishers who slip on authors’ shoes return from their writing experience armed with anecdotes and tips that market research can’t devine. What many intelligencers see shocks them. Even thirty-year publishing veterans see their industry…Continue Reading
PEOPLE The Book Industry Study Group has a new Executive Director in the person of Michael Healy, Editorial Director of Nielsen Book Services. He will be the keynote speaker at BISG’s September 8 annual meeting and may be reached at michael@bisg.org. BISG’s previous Director, Jeff Abraham, left at the beginning of the year to become…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Rich Freese has been named President of Publishers Group West, reporting to Kevan Lyon, EVP for Distribution and Publishing Services at AMS. Freese, who will relocate to the San Francisco area, succeeds Charlie Winton, founder and former President and CEO of PGW, and now Group Chairman and CEO of Avalon Publishing. Another publisher on…Continue Reading
Amid Booming Book Biz Coverage, Critics See ‘Gaping’ News Holes First there was Keith Kelly at the New York Post. Then there were the hot-shots at Inside.com, and thus dawned a new era of frenzied jockeying among daily media scribes to fling arrows into the side of the homely book publishing business. While stalwarts such…Continue Reading
Your Guide to Cost-Cutting Without Lopping Off Heads Now that synergy’s been debunked, and good old Thomas Middelhoff has been spun off, the publishing world has settled down to the rather more prosaic task of whittling away at its already bare-bones cost structure. “It’s clear there is retrenchment,” as one public relations executive says, but…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Heads rolling in and rolling out: Marco Ausenda, who comes from Touring Club Italia, will replace Antonio Polito as the head of Rizzoli US, reporting to Giulio Lattanzi. . . Jean-Marie Messier’s still running Vivendi, but of course major changes at Houghton Mifflin: Teri Kelly succeeds Wendy Strothman as SVP and head of trade…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Congrats to Phyllis Grann — and Random House — who have finally tied the knot in what is perhaps the last good news of ’01? Word is that not all publishers there are equally excited, leading to speculation about whether the last card has yet been played. Back at Penguin Putnam, Adrian Zackheim has…Continue Reading
As Pearson Hones Its Corporate Units, Penguin Putnam Starts Making Sense As Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino likes to say, “It’s hard to make complicated things simple, but it’s usually worth it.” Well, this month Publishing Trends takes her at her word, and plunges into the fearsome Penguin Putnam organizational chart to sort out the dizzying…Continue Reading
