Browse GalleyCat July 2007 archives - GalleyCat

Keith Richards Settles On Little, Brown

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:28:15 +0000

Following up on last week’s item about the multi-million dollar bids for Keith Richards‘ life story: Little, Brown announced this morning that it had acquired the autobiography, written in collaboration with James Fox, for publication in the fall of 2010. Publisher Michael Pietsch will edit the book personally, along with Alan Samson of fellow Hachette imprint Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which will publish the UK edition simultaneously. No word yet on whether the final cost actually rose to the $8 million Sarah predicted while the auction was still going on…

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Temporary Head for Houghton Mifflin’s Trade Division

Sarah — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:34:13 +0000

Publishers Marketplace reports this morning that Gary Gentel has been promoted to interim president of Houghton Mifflin‘s Trade and Reference Division, effective immediately. Gentel moves up from corporate vp, director of sales, a position he’s held the last four years. HM CEO Tony Lucki told employees today that “Gary will lead the division’s strategic direction with the support of the trade and reference management team, who will report directly to him. He will also be an instrumental part of planning the integration of Harcourt Trade with Houghton Mifflin Trade and Reference.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Cannon Named Editor-at-Large at Ballantine

Sarah — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:17:07 +0000

Pamela Cannon will join the Random House Publishing Group as Editor at Large, Ballantine Books, specializing in acquiring and editing lifestyle books. Cannon’s hire is effective September 10 and she will report to Libby McGuire, Senior Vice President and Publisher, working from her office in Weston, Connecticut. Previously, Cannon ran her own literary services outpost and worked for Artisan, Pocket and Random House in a variety of publicity and editorial positions.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

NYT Sends Iraq War Novelist to Berlin

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:51:09 +0000

“I’m pretty pumped,” Nicholas Kulish (left) says over the phone Friday morning as he’s preparing to leave for Berlin, where he’ll be the new bureau chief for the New York Times. “This is the job I’ve always wanted, since back in college.” And, for Kulish, it’s a return to the city where he did much of the writing for his recently published Iraq war satire, Last One In, working off a Fulbright grant in the gap between leaving the Wall Street Journal and joining the Times as an editorial writer two years ago.

Kulish freely admits that his own experiences as an embedded journalist for the Journal during the invasion of Iraq weren’t much like those of his novel’s protagonist, a disgraced gossip reporter for a New York tabloid who’s sent to the frontlines because he happens to share the name of an incapacitated war correspondent. “Being with the helicopter squadron was really different,” he explains. “We flew in, we flew out. But I took tiny things from my experiences, and those of other journalists I worked with while I was there.” So far, the reponse has been positive—”I haven’t gotten any enraged emails yet”—and the novel recently went back for its fourth printing.

Once he reaches Berlin, Kulish won’t actually be spending much time in the city, as the Times gig bascially has him covering all over Eastern Europe down to the northern border of Greece. Not that he’s worried; in fact, he welcomes the travel: “Berlin is a city filled with young artistic people who don’t have to go to work,” he quips, “so I’m a little anxious about being the only person I know there with a 9-to-5 job.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Her Book Tour Is Making Waves

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:27:26 +0000

“I really loved the book business,” Mary South says as we sip our beers on the rooftop deck of Cabana yesterday afternoon, watching tourists line up along the dock at the South Street Seaport for a harbor cruise. “The job I had at Riverhead was the best job I ever had in publishing.” After helping the imprint launch in the mid-’90s, South took a detour into the dotcom industry, then came back to book editing for a stint at Rodale. “I like the Rodale family, and I admire the fact that they had a genuine sense of mission that was historic, going back to their beginning… It was a good company with good goals,” she reflects, “but it wasn’t a good fit for me.” In fact, the opening scenes of her memoir, The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water, detail how she reached her breaking point as an editor there, finally leaving the industry behind and buying a 30-ton trawler, which she then proceeded to navigate from its Florida berth back to New York. But it’s clear in the telling that the abrupt rebooting of her life wasn’t just about the job, but about everything else that was going on as she approached 40. “I’m always glad I took that job,” she emphasizes, “because it forced me to take the leap and have that adventure.”

We’ve met the day before she drives out to Sag Harbor with her girlfriend and two Jack Russell terriers to prepare her boat, Bossanova, for its latest voyage—a one-week journey along the New England coast, with stops at independent bookstores in Mystic, Edgartown, and Nantucket. As we talk, I discover that South had actually sold the proposal for her book before she took her boat out. “I always wanted to have the adventure,” she explains, “but then it occurred to me that there just had to be a book in here.” And, luckily, the advance helped cover some of the trip’s finances, as the process of selling her house and buying the trawler was pretty much “an even trade,” absorbing all her finances.

What was it like for her on the other side of the author/editor relationship? “I was a spoiled by my own experiences at Riverhead,” she admits, discussing her active involvement in every step of the publishing cycle for the books she acquired there, and her enthusiasm for creating the imprint’s paperback line even before they’d had their first hardcover frontlist. In contrast, she’s learned now what it’s like to be one project among the many on an editor’s agenda. “But I’m sure it’s difficult for any editor to deal with a former editor as an author,” she concedes. Is she ever tempted to get back into the game? “I can’t really see going back to being an editor,” she shakes her head. For now, she’s happily supporting herself with freelance writing and mulling over the proposal for her next book—which is also likely to be of a nautical nature.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Scribner PR Chief Turns Indie Filmmaker

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:00:19 +0000

Elizabeth Hayes worked on some small theater productions before she joined the publishing industry sixteen years ago, but she’s the first to admit that she’s hardly a seasoned show biz veteran. Nevertheless, after just six months as Scribner‘s publicity director, she’s leaving her job to work as a producer on Dancing With Shiva, the next Jonathan Demme film. She met the director through her role, back at Simon & Schuster, as the longtime publicist for Jimmy Carter, while Demme was making a documentary about the ex-president during the tour for Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

“Book publicity can be, visually speaking, painfully boring,” she recalls telling the film crew, but they ventured forth—and one day, as they were all crowded together in the back of a limo after an event, Demme—impressed by Hayes’ work orchestrating Carter’s itinerary—suggested that the two of them should work together again some time. She wrote it off as typical industry chatter, she says, “but darned if he didn’t do it,” asking her help in producing a film from a script by Jenny Lumet (Sidney’s daughter), to which Anne Hathaway has already been attached. “[Scribner publisher] Susan Moldow was so gracious about understanding my opportunity,” Hayes says. “It’s intimidating to start all over, but I would never have forgiven myself if I didn’t take this chance.”

Hayes’ replacement, Brian Belfiglio, comes to Scribner from the PR firm Hilsinger-Mendelson East, and has also run the publicity for three different imprints at Crown and served as marketing director for Workman. “That makes me feel a little bit better about giving this up,” Hayes admits, confident that she’s leaving the Scribner legacy in capable hands once she signs out Friday afternoon. And she doesn’t even have to go to Hollywood; Demme’s production offices are based in Nyack, allowing her to stay at home in Chelsea for most of the production cycle.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Snakes on a Plane Finally Snags a Prize

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 08:59:54 +0000

In a quiet corner of last weekend’s San Diego Comic Con, hidden under the glare of the blockbusters, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers handed out their Scribe Awards for the best adaptations and licensed spin-off books linked to media properties. In other words, it was Christa Faust‘s novelization of Snakes on a Plane that won an award, not the movie itself. Marv Wolfman also won a prize for rendering Superman Returns into prose, which shouldn’t be too surprising since he was one of the comic book writers who rebooted the Man of Steel in the late 1980s and clearly knows the characters well. Alice Henderson took the YA award for her Buffy novel, while Stephen Niles and Jeff Mariotte won one of the spin-off categories for a novel set in the vampiric 30 Days of Night franchise; Mariotte grabbed another spin-off prize—solo this time—for Las Vegas: High Stakes. (Yes, there are novels set in the world of NBC’s Las Vegas; I didn’t know that, either.) And Donald Bain, the man who actually does the heavy lifting on all those Murder, She Wrote paperback mysteries “written by Jessica Fletcher,” received the Grandmaster title for helping keep that franchise alive more than a decade after the last original episode aired on CBS. (I know, I know, four TV-movies between 1997 and 2003; I was fortunate enough not to own a television for most of that period.)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This Miss Cleo’s the Real Deal

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 08:31:46 +0000

Cleo (left) provided author Jennifer Niesslein with the inspiration to write Practically Perfect in Every Way, a memoir that tracks the results of following a whole lot of self-help advice. “She was diagnosed with liver disease, and it was my first day-to-day dealing with mortality,” Niesslein recalls. “As the cliché goes, it got me thinking about what sort of person I was, what I was doing with my own life, how I could make things better all around.” In the book, she describes the comfort she took in hearing Cleo’s nails clacking on the floor as she followed her around, “like the heels of a small, adoring secretary.” But, ultimately, “I think I mischaracterized–Cleo was really more of a taskmaster, barking orders.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Another Cat Who Wants to Edit

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 08:10:37 +0000

Mystery writer Clea Simon sent us a picture of her cat, Musetta, with no commentary beyond a simple “nuff said,” but I couldn’t resist tweaking the image just a bit. Simon is also the author of The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats, which leads us to an important point: If you’re wondering why we’re running all these cat/dog pictures—apart from the shameless bid for your affection—Da Capo publicity director Lissa Warren has a Huffington Post essay that explains it all.

Confessing her love for cat tomes, Warren points out that “book product” like The Little Grey Cat Book sells, and well. “I can’t say that they represent anything other than commerce,” she admits. “But there’s something about the honesty of them—the ‘we’re in it for profit’-ness of them—that I have to admire a bit.” Not to mention where that profit winds up being spent. “Want to buy a volume of poetry or a collection of short stories by a first-time author?” she asks. “Better hope that holiday sales of Catmas Carols were strong that year.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Dolby’s Imprint at Random House UK is Named

Sarah — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:25:41 +0000

The Bookseller reports that Trevor Dolby and Rosie de Courcy‘s new imprint at Random House UK has been named Preface Publishing. The announcement comes simultaneously with the launch of the imprint’s Spring 2008 list, comprising A POINT OF VIEW by Lisa Jardine and THE CLEANER by Brett Battles (a debut spy thriller published this month by Bantam Dell.) Dolby, formerly publisher at HarperCollins, joined Random House in April to set up Preface as a new list straddling non-fiction and fiction. “I am delighted that Preface has developed at such a fast pace since its inception in April,” he said. “It is very exciting to be able to formally name the imprint and give it a strong identity.” De Courcy joined the company as publishing director in March.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

University Press Try Out New Models

Sarah — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:25:00 +0000

Last week, InsideHigherEd’s Scott Jaschik looked at how University Presses are moving – or not – towards the Digital Age. Now he zeroes in on the model adapted by Rice University Press, which was eliminated as a standalone press in 1996 but came back last year with the idea that it would publish online only, using low-cost print-on-demand for those who want to hold what they are reading. Since the announcement that the press was coming back – and using a unique model by not publishing in traditional book form – many in academic publishing have wondered how Rice would shift to a new format for publishing while maintaining the rigor associated with a university press.

The answer, Jaschik discovers, is that Rice is getting started in a way that points directly to the economic logjam in academic publishing. Rice is going to start printing books that have been through the peer review process elsewhere, been found to be in every way worthy, but impossible financially to publish. In this way, Rice will be linking established peer review systems – sometimes in tandem with Stanford University Press – with its new model of distributing scholarship. The end result? Long Tail Press, as Rice is dubbing it. Alan Harvey, editor in chief at Stanford, said he saw great potential not only to try a new model, but to test the economics of publishing in different formats. Stanford might pick some books with similar scholarly and economic potential, and publish some through Rice and some in the traditional way, and be able to compare total costs as well as scholarly impact. “We’d like to make this a public experiment and post the results,” he said.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Finally, We Get to Run a Blind Item

Ron Hogan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:39:18 +0000

Someone forwarded us an email that’s apparently been making the rounds lately, in which a prize-winning author notifies some of the grad students in his creative writing program that his lovely wife, also a writer, has left him for one of America’s most prominent captains of industry—so those students can “clarify the issues for any of your fellow grad students who ask,” as “this sort of thing can get wildly distorted pretty quickly.” At which point, he explains in great detail how she’s always found it difficult to live under his shadow, how he rescued her from depression and then she left him for a guy who probably reminds her of the relative who abused her as a child, and how she’s not even going to be this tycoon’s only girlfriend, but that’s okay, because he’s really supportive, and anyway this means she’ll have a room of her own in which to create literary masterpieces. And the author doesn’t mind sharing all this in email, because the couple “will now conduct ourselves as if this is public knowledge,” and, besides, “I am not up to the task of telling this story over and over.” (I’d run longer extracts, but they’d require so much redaction that it’s not really worth it…and, he added a few hours later, the whole thing’s online now.)

With the headers stripped, it’s hard to say with genuine certainty whether or not the email is authentic, although it’s also hard to imagine anybody going to great lengths to pretend to be this particular writer: cui bono?, as the saying goes. At least this particular story, while bizarre, seems slightly more plausible than that rumor about publishing’s latest gay couple that our SoHo colleagues recently revisited…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sales Boost for EUK

Sarah — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:26:34 +0000

The Bookseller’s Alison Flood reports that Woolworths subsidiary EUK saw third party sales for the 25 weeks to 28th July increase by 36.2%, the company said today, in what it described as “a period of considerable operational change and challenge for the business. Woolworths said that the books market “continues to perform solidly” for EUK, but the traditional music market is in decline. The games market is showing strong growth, while sales of DVDs have been higher than anticipated, “in part because of the unseasonable weather”. The news follows the Competition Commission‘s move last week to provisionally clear EUK’s acquisition of Bertrams.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

South African Publishing Merger Questioned

Sarah — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:19:25 +0000

The South African Business Day reports that the Shuttleworth Foundation had lodged an objection with the Competition Commission to the possibility of a merger between South African publishing companies Maskew Miller Longman and Heinemann, resulting from the merger of their international holding companies, Pearson and Harcourt Education International, the foundation said yesterday.

If the Competition Commission found that there was an effective South African merger and that this contravened South African anti-monopoly laws it could force one or both of the international companies to sell off their South African concerns, or dispose of them in a way that did not constitute a merger, said Andrew Rens, the foundationâ€™s intellectual property fellow. The commission has until August 14 to decide whether the international merger means an effective merger between the South African companies.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Hodgman Hops from Holt to Houghton

Ron Hogan — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:57:27 +0000

In the first sign of Houghton Mifflin‘s plans after buying Harcourt earlier this month, the company announced that it had hired Henry Holt executive editor George Hodgman as the vice-president and senior executive editor of the adult trade editorial group. Hodgman’s eye for narrative nonfiction is highly respected in the biz; his picks at Holt included Kevin Boyle‘s award-winning Arc of Justice and Mockingbird, Charles J. Shields‘ bio of Harper Lee. His resume also includes lengthy stints at Simon & Schuster and Vanity Fair.

In a 2005 interview with mediabistro.com, Hodgman explained his approach to buying nonfiction: “I like big characters and—this sounds incredibly pretentious—but things that reflect some human spiritâ€”perseverance, desire, imagination. I like writerly journalists who can render character, detail, and place beyond ‘just the facts’ and who are narrative-oriented.” The interview also offers a possible hint as to how he’ll run his new department come September. “It’s all going too fast,” he warns. “Corporate-think means ‘Get it out for Christmas’ or whatever. Business types don’t really think editing matters. They can’t tell the difference so they don’t think readers can. I say, why spend so much money and not take the time to actually get it right?”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.