Today HarperCollins announced a major restructuring of its sales department, including a number departures and retirements. We’ve included the complete company memo about the restructuring below…

Customer service VP Dan Holod, customer service director Gail Kunda and distributor sales director Jeff Rogart will all be retiring this summer. Ken Berger, Mike Brennan, Mark Hillesheim, Kathy Smith and Jeanette Zwart will all depart on July 20th.

Here’s more about the shift from Josh Marwell, president of sales: “Effective July 2012 the pricing, promotional, market insight and sales analytics efforts of the company will combine to become part of the sales department. This change will enable us to maximize opportunities for our authors and their readers, our customers, and our publishing divisions. Frank Albanese will now join the sales department as SVP, Market Insight and Sales Operations. In this newly created role Frank will focus on helping the company make sense of consumer behavior both digital and print, providing insight into sales and market trends as well as take on the overall direction of day-to-day sales operations. Dan Lubart SVP, Sales Analytics and Pricing will continue his work analyzing how pricing affects sales, developing tactics to maximize revenue and author exposure and creating interfaces to help his colleagues access complex data quickly and easily.”

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Over at eBook MarketView, information technology consultant Dan Lubart spotted a dramatic change on the Kindle Bestsellers List–the average price of all the bestsellers had plunged from from $7.75 to $6.43 in a few days.

You can see the change mapped on Lubart’s graph (embedded above). The consultant speculated that Amazon’s Sunshine Deals program had created this price shift, selling 600 Kindle titles at $0.99, $1.99 and $2.99 for two weeks. What do you think–can the $12.99 agency priced eBook survive in this climate?

Check it out: By promoting discoverability of cheaper titles, they have likely created a surge in sales in that price band, driving many of these titles onto the bestseller list for the first time.  Ranking doesn’t tell the whole story, but we have to wonder if this program has had a significant downward effect on sales volume of higher priced titles.  It certainly speaks to the tremendous promotional power Amazon has to influence what people are buying.”