Steve Rubin, former Doubleday Broadway President and Publisher, who began at Bantam Books in 1984 and was most recently Random House Publisher-at-Large, has been named President and Publisher of Henry Holt, reporting to Macmillan CEO John Sargent. Dan Farley will now focus exclusively on his other job as President and Publisher of the recently formed Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, also reporting to Sargent.

Paul Von Drasek has been named Trade Sales Manager of Capstone Publishers. He was Executive Director of Sales at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Mikyla Bruder has been named Associate Publisher at Timber Press, which was acquired by Workman in 2006. She was previously Executive Editor in the Gift division at Chronicle. Meanwhile, Chronicle announced that former Ten Speed Press Publisher Lorena Jones has taken over as Publishing Director. Jones will begin a digital food and drink publishing program and oversee Chronicle’s food and drink list as a whole. She left Ten Speed in November 2008, prior to Random House’s acquisition of the company.

Former Pantheon Publishing Director Janice Goldklang has joined Globe Pequot Press as Executive Director of Editorial, responsible for all trade programs. Steve Culpepper has the same title and is responsible for the regional travel and outdoor recreation programs.

Crown Executive Editor Heather Jackson announced that, having “thoroughly enjoyed nearly two decades in publishing,” she has resigned in order to “create and produce content in other media, as well as keep a hand on a few editorial projects each year.”

Brendan Cahill has moved to Jane Friedman’s Open Road Integrated Media as VP Publisher. He had been a Senior Editor at Gotham before attending Wharton, where he received his MBA. Most recently, he was at Boston Consulting Group.

Nick Trautwein has been hired as Senior Editor at the New Yorker, succeeding Emily Eakin. He was an editor at the Penguin Press.

Will Pesce, President and CEO, and Steve Smith, EVP and COO, of John Wiley announced the retirement dates and successors for Steve Kippur, EVP and President, Professional/Trade (retirement date July 31, 2010; successor Mark Allin); Eric A. Swanson, SVP, Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly (retirement date October 31, 2010; successor Steven Miron); and Bonnie Lieberman, SVP & General Manager, Higher Education (retirement date April 30, 2011; successor Joseph S. Heider). Heider will be promoted to the role of VP and COO of global effective May 1, 2010 and will continue to report to Lieberman.

Andrews McMeel has hired Linda Jones as SVP of its calendar and greeting card and Accord Publishing divisions, reporting to CEO Hugh Andrews. Jones was SVP Merchandising at Borders.

Abrams has hired Veronica Wasserman as License and Brand Manager for Children’s and Amulet Books. Wasserman previously worked in the Penguin Children’s licensing department.

Diane Bailey is joining HarperCollins as SVP of Human Resources, replacing Jim Young, who left earlier in the year. She will oversee all Human Resources functions for HarperCollins worldwide and sit on the executive committee. She was most recently at Heineken USA.

George Bick has joined the Doug Grad Literary Agency as an Associate Agent. He was most recently SVP, Director of Sales and Associate Publisher at HarperCollins.

Mary Grey James, a former book buyer for Ingram, has joined East/West Literary Agency as a partner agent. James serves as VP and President-elect of the Women’s National Book Association.

PROMOTIONS AND INTERNAL CHANGES

Simon & Schuster EVP, Operations Dennis Eulau has also been named CFO. Eulau takes over from David England, who has resigned. The company has hired David Byrnes in the new position of VP, Finance and Strategic Planning, reporting to Eulau. Elsewhere at Simon & Schuster, Kerri Kolen and Sarah Hochman have been promoted to the position of Senior Editor.

Ben Sevier has been promoted to Executive Editor at Dutton.

Julie Will has been promoted to Executive Editor at Rodale.

John Freeman, former president of the National Book Critics Circle, has officially been appointed Editor of Granta. He was appointed Acting Editor in May after the departure of Alex Clark and will be based in New York and London. His book The Tyranny of Email was published by Scribner in October.

Alison Donalty has been promoted to Executive Art Director in HarperCollins’s Children’s division. She began at HarperCollins in 1994 as an Assistant Designer.

At Dial Press, Noah Eker has been promoted to Editor.

DULY NOTED

Beginning in March 2010, American Vampire, a comic from Vertigo (DC Comics), will be released each month, including two stories: one by short story writer Scott Snyder and the other by Stephen King. King will write about Skinner Sweet, a bank-robbing, murderous cowboy of the 1880s who becomes a new breed of vampire. Snyder’s half will tell the story of a vampire in America during the 1920s. Both stories will be drawn by Rafael Albuquerque, who will continue the series with Snyder after King’s story ends.

UPCOMING EVENTS

The first Self-Publishing Book Expo will be held Saturday, November 7. The press release quotes Bowker figures claiming that the number of books self-published in 2008 increased 132% over the prior year. With a total of 285,394 titles, on-demand publishing surpassed traditionally published books for the first time. The Expo will feature panels and over 25 exhibitors, including authors, self- publishers, and POD companies, and was created by Diane Mancher and Karen Mender.

The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction honors Gerry Howard and announces the recipient of the First Novel Prize on November 9.

“The Wall in Our Heads,” the 2009 Words Without Borders fundraiser, also takes place on November 9. The evening features readings from the group’s new anthology, The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain by Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, and Peter Schneider. You can buy tickets here.

“Reading in a Digital Age,” a panel discussion moderated by Bill Goldstein and featuring, among others, New York Magazine’s Adam Moss, the NYPL’s Ben Vershbow, and Fourth Story Media’s Lisa Holton, takes place November 11 at CUNY.

Sonny Mehta, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, has been named the 2009 winner of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The Workshop will hold a cocktail reception and gala dinner in Mehta’s honor on November 13, at At Vermilion. Mehta will receive the award from the Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje. The dinner marks the beginning of Page Turner: The Inaugural Asian American Literary Festival, a two-day event showcasing award-winning authors reading together at the powerHouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

The Independent Booksellers of New York City (IBNYC) unite to celebrate Independent Bookstore Week, “a citywide event highlighting the diverse cultural contributions made by indie bookshops across the five boroughs,” November 15–21. The week will kick off with a party at powerHouse Arena and will conclude on America Unchained Day. A special poster designed by New Yorker cartoonist Bruce McCall will be on display in participating shops and available for sale. The IBNYC is an alliance of booksellers working together to promote the cultural, literary and economic benefits of shopping at New York City’s over 60 independent bookstores.

With all eyes focusing intently on the latest deals from the London Book Fair, we thought we’d swivel the periscope toward what’s hitting the stores this summer in the UK. For starters, Charles Cumming’s A Spy By Nature (May, Michael Joseph) is a tautly paced, tightly plotted novel about the new face of spying: industrial espionage. The protagonist, Alec Milius, is approached by MI6, and the first quarter of the novel is a detailed and compelling look at the process of reinventing oneself as a British spy. The (extremely promotable — PT has seen a photo) author was himself approached by MI6 upon his university graduation, and the narrative has a convincing insider’s tone. With a blurb from Robert Harris calling him the new le Carré, this one is sure to have legs. See Lucas Alexander Whitley for rights.

There’s certainly nothing covert about Simon Prosser, publisher at Hamish Hamilton, who can do no wrong at the moment. With Zadie Smith under his belt, and having acquired the smoking novel of the fair (Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist from Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown), he’s currently publishing the brilliant Ali Smith’s new novel, Hotel World. The latest work from the prize-winning Scottish short story writer is set in an English seaside hotel and focuses on the strange circumstances surrounding the death of one of the five characters in the novel, examined through the eyes of the other four characters. The prose is startlingly fresh and original, and the author’s eye for detail makes for a high-impact read. Newly crowned prince of literary fiction Jim Crace declares, “I doubt I shall read a tougher or more affecting novel this year.” All rights are handled by David Godwin.

The Harry Potter boom continues: a quick mention here for Philip Pullman, who has at last gone onto the bestseller list with the third part of the His Dark Materials series, The Amber Spyglass. Pullman now has deals in 21 languages — watch out Joanne Rowling. (Incidentally, Peter Tallick of Weidenfeld & Nicolson has just commissioned a piece of non-fiction about the psychology of Harry Potter — Chicken Soup for the parent’s soul?) In the same sphere, also set in a recognizable but curiously skewed England and written by Jasper Fforde is a series of books that have crossover appeal to an adult/young adult market (sound familiar?). “There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where Wales is a Socialist Republic, dodos are available in home-cloning kits, the Crimean war is 131 years old, and the ending to Jane Eyre is less than satisfactory. This is the 1985 of Thursday Next, a literary detective without equal, fear, or boyfriend.” Hodder has commissioned two and will publish the first in June, and Terry Pratchett declares he’s going to be “watching my back.” See Janklow & Nesbit for rights.

Back in the real world, but set a little further afield, two China-related novels are looking like strong contenders for the summer’s big reads. The first, sold by Annette Green at last year’s book fair, is Justin Hill’s The Drink and the Dream Teahouse, which does have a US deal, and second is Sid Smith’s debut Something Like a House, for which the agent, Caroline Dawnay, says she’s never seen such reviews for a first novel. Set against the austere times of the cultural revolution in China, James Stuart Fraser, a private in the British Army, deserts and ends up spending 35 years “among the unshiftable Chinese.” Many of those years are spent in the wretched poverty of a village of the despised Miao people, where life revolves around the solitary buffalo. The tedium of Fraser’s rural subsistence (existence is too strong a term) is evoked in a controlled prose, filled with convincing detail. It’s an extraordinary leap of imagination for the writer, a copy-editor at the (London) Times, who has never been to China. Rights are still available from Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.

Meanwhile, Meaghan Delahunt’s novel In the Blue House (Bloomsbury) lands on the recently announced Orange Prize longlist. The book covers the years that Trotsky spends with Frida Kahlo in Mexico, and flashes back to Trotsky and Stalin’s childhood, building up a portrait of Stalinist rule at the height of the purges. The author, an Australian short story writer, dropped out of college to become a communist recruiter on the factory floor. Rights have been sold only in Greece so far; see Bloomsbury UK.

Sceptre’s Orange hope lies with Fred and Edie by Jill Dawson. The novel is based on a 1922 trial of a woman tried for conspiring with her young lover Frederick Bywaters to murder her husband, Percy. The trial took place in front of heaving crowds at the Old Bailey, who thrilled to a story of an illicit love affair, a back-street abortion, domestic violence, murder, and the prospect of a double execution. Drawing on newspaper reports as well as letters by Edie to Freddy, the author creates an intimate voice for Edie in a story of one woman’s attempts to defy convention. Hodder controls world rights, and a film based on the book, Another Life starring Natasha Little and Ion Gruffedd, will be released (in the UK) next month. We also note that many of the big hitters are returning to the shelves this spring, including Jonathan Coe with The Rotters Club and Pat Barker with Border Crossing. Talk of a hotly contested Booker has already begun.

It’s adieu to a long reign on the Australian list for The Blue Day Book, a small-format, picture-based book containing cute and humorous photos of animals with captions lightheartedly illustrating the misery of human existence. Working off a similar market to the Little Book of Calm series, which scored huge successes for Penguin worldwide, the book was originally turned down by nearly everybody, reports agent Al Zuckerman. Published in the US by Andrews McMeel with a first printing of some 20,000 copies, it was jumped on first by Walden buyer Linda Jones for counter display. The rush began and sales at Walden alone now stand at over 100,000, with over 300,000 in print. Meanwhile, sales are just taking off at Target and look set to be huge. Book two, Dear Mom, published in March, is already over 75,000 copies and September is set for the third, Looking for Mr. Right.

A brief welcome to Greece, where Louis de Bernières continues to reign supreme (in both languages). Thanks to Eleftheroudakis bookstores, Greece’s finest and best-established chain, details of the hottest sellers there will be forthcoming next month.