PEOPLE As we move into summer, some job changes include geographic movement, along with the usual hopping across town: Close to home Laurie Rippon, Publisher of CollinsDesign, is leaving HarperCollins effective July 31. She may be contacted through the company until then. Meanwhile, Steve Wasserman, fresh from his LA Times gig, is once again a…Continue Reading
Random Redux, Freese Helms PGW: Client Distribution Biz Jostles and Grows Don Fehr, nearly a year into his tenure as Director of Smithsonian Books, needed a distribution fix. The august publishing concern (formerly Smithsonian Institution Press) was gunning for trade sales growth — aiming to reverse its mix of 80% academic and 20% trade-bound titles…Continue Reading
“Best of times, worst of times” was the Dickensian scenario facing representatives from more than 50 publishing houses who hunkered down at the first Management Forum for Independent Publishers, hosted April 4-6 by NYU’s Center for Publishing. At the top of the agenda? “The economy, the economy, the economy,” chanted Center for Publishing Director Robert…Continue Reading
Beefing Up Special Sales, Publishers Surf the Downturn Be it a defensive maneuver, market opportunism, or plain necessity, a number of major book publishers are blocking and tackling their way into nontraditional retail accounts like never before. And no wonder, you might say. “You look at the relative flatness in the book trade, and it’s…Continue Reading
70,000-Odd Small Publishers Might Be Wagging Your Dog They’re out there — all 73,000 of them — scrabbling for your shelf-space, mucking up your mindshare. That’s the number of book publishers in the US, according to Bowker’s Books in Print database, and it has nearly doubled in the past decade. Blame the go-go ’90s, the…Continue Reading
PEOPLE Simon & Schuster’s various imprints have been trimmed over the past few weeks: Rachel Klayman has been laid off from The Free Press, Jeff Neuman has left S&S (and may be reached at neudors@yahoo.com), and Rosemary Ahern (who arrived from Dutton less than two years ago), and Kim Kanner and an assistant have departed…Continue Reading
PEOPLE We will skip over the Thomas Middelhoff debacle, and move on to some moves that are less well covered, including that by a Middelhoff chronicler: The NYT’s David Kirkpatrick is leaving the Book Beat, to cover media, focusing on AOL Time Warner, along with Vivendi, Bertelsmann, and News Corp. His replacement will be named…Continue Reading
PEOPLE There’s been major movement in publishing these last few weeks of summer, which PT will recap for those who have been literally or figuratively out of it: Kara Welsh has been named VP, Publisher of New American Library, reporting to Leslie Gelbman. She was VP, Deputy Publisher at Pocket Books. And Therese Burke, formerly…Continue Reading
Are Bulked-Up Book Distributors The Industry’s Next Goliaths? Time was, you would call a guy like Gilbert Perlman a book distributor. The warehouse, the sales staff, the publishing clients, even the name on the door — Client Distribution Services — all fit the modus operandi of firms schlepping books from the presses to the masses….Continue Reading
