Who’s Scouting Whom: Literary Scouts Contact Sheet 2012

The 2012 version of our annual Who’s Scouting Whom Literary Scout Contact Sheet remains largely the same as last year’s. The most notable change among the 14 agencies listed is the growth of the Erin Edmison / Peter Harper venture and Liz Gately Book Scouting, both of which have more than doubled their roster of clients in the past year. Each scout’s clients are separated by country or region, and representation for children’s titles is denoted where applicable. We also include the handful of TV and film studios represented by the scouts in our roundup.

While in Frankfurt, the PT editors noted particular enthusiasm at the International Rights Directors Meeting over the number and range of titles Chinese publishers are buying. While one or two scouts on our list have added Chinese clients to their lists this year, there does not seem to be as great a number as one might expect, given the international trend.

Please click here or on the image below to download the PDF of the Publishing Trends 2012 Literary Scouts Contact Sheet:

Click on the image of the chart above for a full PDF version of the 2012 Literary Scouts Contact Sheet.

People Roundup, November 2012

PEOPLE

Sandy disrupted our office (and schedule), so here’s an update on the last few weeks’ news:

It has been announced that Steve Perrine, Publisher of Books, is leaving Rodale. Also as part of the announcement, it has been said that he and David Zinczenko, SVP and Editor-in-Chief of Men’s Health and General Manager of Rodale’s Healthy Living Group, are leaving to to team  up on a new venture.

Wendy Bronfin, who was Director, Product Management for Nook at Barnes & Noble, is leaving to become SVP Consumer Products and Marketing at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on November 26.

Former Crown Executive Editor Heather Jackson has rejoined the company as consulting Editor-at-Large for the relaunched Harmony imprint and Sydny Miner has been moved into the position of Executive Editor for Harmony (after acquiring in the past for Archetype and Three Rivers Press).  Leah Miller has been hired as Editor (she was previously at Free Press).

Longtime Crown Editor and Executive Charlie Conrad was laid off earlier this week, after 22 years at the company (first Bantam Doubleday Dell and then Random House Inc.). Spokesperson David Drake tells us “the change did not involve a broader reassignment of responsibilities or roles within the Crown trade publishing editorial team led by Molly Stern.” Conrad’s titles have been reassigned to other editors. He’s looking for a new editorial position and can be reached at rock1230@gmail.com.

Peter Berkery, Jr. has been named Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), starting March 1st. Berkery was VP, Publisher of the US Law division of Oxford University Press (OUP)  and will succeed long-time AAUP Director Peter Givler.

Maria Modugno will join Random House Children’s on November 26 as Editorial Director, Picture Books, for the Random House and Golden Books group. She was VP, Editorial Director at Harper Children’s.

Martha Levin, EVP and Publisher of Free Press, who left Free Press in early November, may be reached at mlevin004@nyc.rr.comDominick Anfuso, VP Editor in Chief, has left as well may be reached at dominickanfuso@gmail.com Free Press comes under S&S and Jon Karp. Stacy Creamer, VP Publisher of Touchstone, now reports to Susan Moldow. 

James Attlee has joined the University of Chicago Press as UK Editor-at-Large. Previously he was Sales and Rights Director at Tate Publishing.

Ben George has joined Penguin as an Editor. He was co-founder and Editorial Director at Lookout Books of Wilmington, NC and Editor of the literary magazine Ecotone.

Clay Smith has joined Kirkus Media as Features Editor, reporting to COO Meg Kuehn. Most recently he was Literary Director of the Texas Book Festival.

Allison Hollett has joined Osprey as US VP, Sales and Marketing, where she will develop and manage all aspects of the company’s marketing and publicity efforts working out of Osprey’s New York offices. Hollett, was previously Director of Trade Sales and Marketing for the Taunton Press replaces John Tintera, who will now oversee US sales and marketing for Watkins Publishing.

Liate Stehlik announced that Catherine Felgar has joined HarperCollins as Publishing Operations Director, managing the Morrow and Ecco lists in both digital and print.  She was at Cambridge U. Press and succeeds Kim Lewis. Ashley Garland has joined the Ecco as Publicity Manager. She was previously with Ballantine.

Jeff Pinsker has been named VP, Scholastic Inc., and President of Klutz a division of Scholastic, Pinsker will assume his new responsibilities December 3, 2012, and will report to Ellie Berger, President of Scholastic Trade.  Pinsker was most recently CEO of INFINITOY.

Kirsten Neuhaus has been hired as Director of Foreign Rights for adult titles at Foundry. For the past three years, she has been running her own agency. Also at Foundry,Rachel Hecht, who joined the agency in 2011, has been promoted to Director of Foreign Rights for children’s books. She was previously a YA scout for Mary Anne Thompson Associates.

Macmillan announced that Dominic Knight has been appointed Chairman of Palgrave Macmillan UK and US and takes on a new role of Executive Director, Business Programs for the Macmillan Group.  Sam Burridge has also been promoted to Managing Director, Palgrave Macmillan Scholarly, effective 1 November 2012.  Burridge joined Macmillan in 1995. Burridge will report to Dominic Knight, who moves into the new role of Executive Director, Business Programmes, with responsibility for corporate change strategy within Macmillan.

Ginger Curwen is returning to publishing, joining Julia Lord Literary Management as an agent representing mysteries and thrillers. Curwen previously worked at HarperCollins, the American Booksellers Association, Bantam, and Random House.

John Groton has left Innodata. He can be reached at jgroton@gmail.com.

University of North Carolina Press Editor-in-Chief David Perry intends to retire in March 2013. He was named Editor-in-Chief in 1995. Read More »

Comparing Ereading Devices: A Visual Guide

While the past couple of months have been filled with press conferences with big presentations announcing the latest tablets and ereaders on the market, many older models from the major players have left the market with little fanfare. The iRiver Story seemingly disappeared as soon as it hit the shelves, and Nook has simplified its ereader options by focusing on the Simple Touch and doing away with its classic model. Even the iPad 4 is replacing the very recently released iPad 3. All these changes in device offerings come on top of ever-changing price wars with Barnes & Noble announcing some cheaper prices on its Nook Color and Nook Tablet, just in time for the holidays. In addition, Sony just recently threw its hat in the ring on the retail front when it announced its iOS ereading app, meaning that not only are there a wide variety of new devices on the market, but that each of them have their own ecosystem now, too.

Are you getting dizzy keeping up with the ereader wars? So were we. To help clarify what’s out there, we did a roundup of all the major available devices, for your convenience in the chart below (which you can download as a print-ready PDF by clicking on the image):

Click on the image of the chart above for a full PDF version of the ereader device roundup chart.

New Zealand Cookbooks: Coming of Age by Staying Close to Home

A glance over the list of nonfiction authors who traveled from New Zealand to Frankfurt in celebration of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s Guest of Honor reveals a decidedly gourmet bent: of the 18 authors listed, eight are food or wine writers–almost 45%. This skew toward one particular category, says Kevin Chapman, MD of Hachette New Zealand and President of the Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ), is due to a relatively new addition to the Frankfurt Book Fair program: The Frankfurt Culinary Festival, founded in 2011 as a joint venture between the Book Fair’s Guest of Honor team and chef Leon Joskowitz.

Even if the Culinary Festival did “skew” demographics, New Zealand has become a global culinary force with remarkable speed. Much like the San Francisco Bay area, New Zealand’s entire cultural and economic landscape was impacted by the emergence of its globally respected wine industry in the 1970s and 80s. As in San Francisco, gourmet food culture was a direct consequence. Gone are the days when readers would write cookbook authors “in desperation asking where to buy white wine vinegar…and when not many people knew where to find [olive oil,” says Julie Biuso, a mega-bestselling cookbook author and Cordon Bleu-trained chef, who has been on the Kiwi food writing scene for the past 30 years.

Read More »

Reading Deadlines and Disruption: New Media, New Pedagogy

PublishingTrends.com continues its regular column in which we review, explicate, and excerpt books that we think will resonate with people in the business of publishing and media. 

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In creating the curriculum of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism as inaugural Dean, Stephen B. Shepard* had to fill in many blanks. It seemed that there was no set path to becoming a journalist anymore, as it became clear that online and broadcast video classes were not created equal, international journalism tracks were unexpectedly popular, and a particularly beloved “Journalistic Judgment” course was dropped from the roster as students looked for more concrete skills to help them in the job market. Having served as Senior Editor and Editor-and-Chief at Newsweek and BusinessWeek, respectively, for more than twenty years, Shepard had observed first-hand the way news media had evolved over the past few decades, and in his book, Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital (McGraw-Hill, August 21, 2012), Shepard outlines how the many shifts in the news media industry brought on by digital disruption influenced him in building a new pedagogy to meet new journalism hopefuls’ needs.

One of the biggest shifts is one that Shepard refers to as “The Great Unbundling,” or the fragmentation of media as people are able to pick and choose content from a greater whole. This has been a problem for the music industry with the rise of song downloads, and it’s also been a challenge for newspapers and magazines whose individual articles now attract narrower audiences based on readers’ interests. These articles also now compete with free niche news content generated by independent bloggers and aggregate sites. This issue is not unfamiliar for book publishers, who now compete against self-publishing options (and their hybrids), as well as digital short form titles, in a crowded marketplace. Read More »

People Roundup, Mid-October 2012

PEOPLE

Chris Lloreda, VP, Associate Publisher of Atria Books, is retiring at the end of this year, though she will continue to work on projects through February.

Following the announcement of a distribution deal with Random House Publisher Services, for the launch of Quercus U.S., Publishing Director Richard Green tells Publishing Trends “we will be making further announcements shortly about the start-up and staff.”

Robert Marsh will join Rowman and Littlefield as EVP of Finance and Operations when he departs from his CFO position at Bloomsbury at the end of the year.

Jennifer Klonsky, Editorial Director at Simon & Schuster/Simon Pulse, has moved to HarperCollins Children’s as Editorial Director.  Farin Jacobs has left to pursue freelance editorial work. 

Yassine Belkacemi has joined Dystel & Goderich Literary Management as Project Manager for their ebook program.  She had been an intern at the agency and was previously at the National Health Service in Scotland.

Adrianna Dufay joins HarperCollins on October 22 as Director of Digital Product Development. She was at JPMorgan Chase and previously in various positions for AOL. Dufay will support the Avon, William Morrow, Morrow trade paperbacks, Voyager, and HarperOne imprints.  Brian Perrin has joined HarperCollins in the same role.  He comes from NBC Publishing where he was Director of Digital Development. Prior to NBC Publishing, he held positions at Rodale, B&N, and Running Press, where he was Associate Publisher and Editorial Director for five years. He will support Amistad, Ecco, Harper, Harper Business, Harper Design, Harper Perennial, Harper Trade Paperbacks, and It Books imprints. Both hires will report to HarperCollins VP Marketing Carrie Bloxson.  And Ana Maria Allessi has been named VP Digital Innovation, a newly created role, reporting to Chantal Restivo-Alessi, Chief Digital Officer.  She will be responsible for planning and executing global digital innovation strategies across all divisions of the company. Alessi, who joined HarperCollins in 2001 as Audio Editor, was most recently VP Publisher of HarperMedia.

Julia Pastore has left Crown, where she was Senior Editor, Crown Archetype and Harmony Books, and she may be reached at pastore.j.a@gmail.com or  917-856-2822.  Meanwhile, Crown has hired Wade Lucas as Agent Director of the Random House Speakers Bureau; he will report to Publicity Director David Drake. Lucas was previously at the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau.

Tom Miller has moved to McGraw-Hill, as of October 8, as Executive Editor.  He was Executive Editor at Wiley.

Brenda McLaughlin will join Lonely Planet on October 22 as SVP, General Manager of Lonely Planet Americas, reporting to Stephen Palmer. McLaughlin, who was previously at Antenna International, will be responsible for defining and executing the strategy in the US, Canada, and Latin America.

At Open Road, former Pocket Books Editorial Director Maggie Crawford joins the company as a strategic advisor, focusing on commercial fiction, including romance, women’s fiction, thrillers and mysteries, and reporting to Tina Pohlman. Read More »

Freelance Publicists Contact Sheet 2012

Publishing Trends’ annually updated contact sheet of freelance book publicists includes 49 firms and individuals specializing in a wide range of genres and approaches. The majority of the publicists listed use both traditional and digital approaches, plus we’ve included eight digital-only publicists who specialize in various aspects of online and social marketing and publicity. Each firm chooses a few specialties to list here; to download a PDF of the whole sheet, click below.

* Updated 10/10 to include Kimberly Burns Literary Publicity in chart.

* Updated 10/15 to include Eleanor Van Natta Publicity in chart.

Click on the image of the chart above for a full PDF version of the 2012 Freelance Publicists Contact Sheet.

New Month, New Toys: Who’s winning in this month’s war of the ereaders?

Everyone seems to have thrown their hats into the ring this month with several new devices making their debut in the ereader market. September started with a bang with the big Amazon press conference, where four new devices were introduced, including the Kindle Paperwhite ereader and Kindle Fire HD tablet. In addition, Amazon is boasting several new features like FreeTime for kids. Though the iPad Mini has yet to have its official announcement, the iPhone 5 was also introduced this month, and with 29% of ebook readers reading from smartphones, the iPhone 5’s half-inch-larger screen (than the iPhone 4S) might come in handy. Samsung, however, is not going down without a fight, and their latest ads for the Galaxy S3 make fun of waiting in line for the iPhone 5. Also sneaking in just before October starts, Barnes & Noble announced its new HD tablets, making the Nook HD+ the cheapest 9-inch tablet on the market, undercutting the Kindle Fire HD. The new Nooks will also feature customizable homepages, allowing users to create multiple profiles on the same device.

Ereaders seem to be coming out fast and furiously, but who will withstand the test of time? Read on to make your own predictions.

“The best all-around Android tablet is still the Nexus 7. Its polish, speed, software and pocket-friendly size give it an edge over the fantastic Fire HD. But this misses the fact that the Kindle Fire HD isn’t trying to be just another Android tablet. Yes, Android runs through its veins, but the Fire HD is geared toward feeding Amazon’s super consumers (and creating more of those super consumers). Given that mission, the Fire HD works exactly as it should. Still, we’d rather spend our $200 on the Nexus 7.”

— Nathan Olivarez-Giles and Roberto Baldwin, Wired (9/11/2012) Read More »

People Roundup, October 2012

PEOPLE

The Ingram Content Group has made two new executive appointments: Kelly Gallagher has been named VP of Content Acquisition. He was VP of Publishing Services at Bowker. He will join Ingram October 8, as will Pep Carrera, who has been named Chief Information Officer.

Jessica Schmidt joins Perseus Distribution as Associate Director of Client Services on October 15th.  She was most recently at Audible as Editorial Manager and PR.

CEO Caroline Marks has left Bookish, but her successor has not yet been named.

William (Billy) Clark joins Hachette Book Group on October 1 in their Nashville office as VP of Client Sales and Services/Nashville Sales. In this new role, he will oversee Client Services, manage the newly-formed Client Sales team, and act as Nashville Sales Liaison/Sales Director. He was at Anderson Merchandisers for over 18 years, most recently as VP of Merchandising, Sales and Marketing. Also at Hachette, Bruce Paonessa, VP Director of Sales, has left the company.

Anica Rissi moved to HarperCollins as Executive Editor.  She was Executive Editor, Simon Pulse/S&S. Mary Ann Zissimos has been named Senior Publicist at HarperCollins Children’s Books. She was previously a senior publicist at Abrams.

Brettne Bloom has been named a partner of Kneerim, Williams & Bloom.  In other agency news, Gemma Cooper has joined The Bent Agency, representing children’s and young adult fiction exclusively. She was previously with the Bright Literary Agency.

John Groton has left Innodata, where he was Account Executive eBook Publishing. Previously, he was VP Sales Director NBN. He can be reached at jgroton@gmail.com.

Pamela Horn will join Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum as head of cross-platform publishing. She was previously Editorial Director at Sterling and succeeds Chul R Kim, who went to MoMA as Associate Publisher this summer.

IAC chairman Barry Diller and film producer Scott Rudin announced the launch of Brightline, led by Frances Coady (who was President and Publisher at Picador until February 2012)with $20 million in funding from IAC. Brightline will partner with The Atavist and books will be published under the Atavist name.

Tal Goretsky will join Scribner as Art Director. He was previously Senior Designer at the Penguin Press.

Ben Adams has joined PublicAffairs as Senior Editor, Print and Digital Books. He was previously a Senior Editor at Bloomsbury.

Tamra Tuller will join the children’s editorial group at Chronicle Books as an editor. She was previously with Philomel Books.

Mike Underwood has joined Osprey as Sales and Marketing Manager. He was previously with the Wybel Marketing Group.

Erin Harris is leaving Irene Skolnick Literary Agency to join Folio Literary Management, representing YA and narrative non-fiction titles, along with the agency’s growing fiction list. Read More »

Publishers Offering Creative Writing Classes, in the UK and Beyond

In a world where “content and form can be easily separated, writers…are nothing short of desperate to understand the change that technology has forced upon traditional publishing,” writes Jason Allen Ashlock, President of Movable Type Management, in a recent Digital Book World post. In the interest of authors being better informed, some publishers are getting involved in providing instruction not only on what Ashlock calls “form”—publicity platforms, digital publishing options, etc.—but also in what has traditionally been the concern of authors: the craft of writing itself.

The leading example is Faber & Faber’s Faber Academy, which launched in 2008 and now offers a variety of classes around the world and online. Courses range from six months to one day and range in price from under £500 to nearly £4,000. Classes cover more traditional, “creative” topics like novel-writing and memoir, but also more technical skills, like editing and blog-building. All courses but “Writing a Novel” and “Writing a Novel: Online” require no application other than a deposit fee while there are still slots open, which makes the Academy’s results all the more impressive. Among others, Rachel Joyce, whose debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was long-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, was in the second-ever Faber Academy class, and SJ Watson’s mega-bestseller, Before I Go to Sleep, also boasts Faber Academy beginnings.

Both Harold Fry and Before I Go to Sleep were published by Random House UK imprints (Doubleday and Black Swan, respectively), and the Academy makes very clear that participation in one of its classes is not a ticket to publication by Faber. But pre-empting the next smash hit shouldn’t be the point of a publisher’s creative writing course, says Ian Ellard, Sales Manager for the Faber Academy. In a time when publishers are diversifying, education programs use Faber’s preexisting resources to do what it’s always done from a different angle: “We are bringing books out of new writers so that they can take them to readers,” he says.

Read More »