This week, HarperCollins is hiring a publicist, while Random House is on the hunt for a copy editor for its children’s books division. Oxford University Press is seeking a senior editor of social work and public health/epidemiology, and Macmillan needs a metadata manager. Get the details on these jobs and more below, and find additional just-posted gigs on mediabistro.com.

• Publicist HarperCollins (New York, NY)
• Copy Editor Random House (New York, NY)
• Senior Editor Oxford University Press (New York, NY)
• Metadata Manager Macmillan (New York, NY)
• Writer Island Press (Washington, DC)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

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This week, HarperCollins is on the hunt for a new senior production editor, while Chronicle Books needs a senior editor for its lifestyle publishing group. University of California Press is hiring an editorial director, and Bedford/St. Martin’s is seeking an online content specialist. Get the details on these gigs and more below, and find additional just-posted publishing jobs on mediabistro.com.

• Senior Production Editor HarperCollins (New York, NY)
• Senior Editor, Lifestyle Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA)
• Editorial Director University of California Press (Berkeley, CA)
• Online Content Specialist Bedford/St. Martin’s (Boston, MA)
• Managing Editor Oxford University Press (New York, NY)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

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Follow this link to read the complete release. Thomas Nelson publishes many inspirational titles, including books by authors like Billy Graham, Max Lucado and Dave Ramsey. In 1988, HarperCollins acquired the Christian publisher, Zondervan.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray had this comment in the release: “Founded in 1798 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Thomas Nelson shares a long and rich heritage with both New York’s Harper Brothers and Scotland’s William Collins & Sons. It is thus with great pleasure that I look forward to welcoming Thomas Nelson to the HarperCollins family.”

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This week, HarperCollins is looking for a production editor and a marketing manager, while Harvard Business Publishing is hiring a senior online editor. Bloomsbury Publishing needs a controller, and Cambridge University Press is seeking a college sales and marketing assistant. Get the details on these just-posted gigs below, and find more new openings on mediabistro.com.

• Production Editor HarperCollins (New York, NY)
• Marketing Manager HarperCollins (New York, NY)
• Controller Bloomsbury Publishing (New York, NY)
• Senior Online Editor Harvard Business Publishing (Watertown, MA)
• College Sales & Marketing Assistant Cambridge University Press (New York, NY)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This week, HarperCollins is looking for a senior designer, as well as a marketing coordinator. Palgrave Macmillan is on the hunt for a new inside sales representative, and Oxford University Press is hiring an assistant online marketing manager. Get the details on these jobs and more below, and find additional just-posted publishing gigs on mediabistro.com.

• Senior Designer HarperCollins (New York, NY)
• Marketing Coordinator HarperCollins (New York, NY)
• Inside Sales Representative Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY)
• Graphic/Website Designer Bookazine (Bayonne, NJ)
• Assistant Online Marketing Manager Oxford University Press (New York, NY)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

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This week, Orbit is looking for a new editor, and Amazon is hiring a senior manager of site merchandising and product management. HarperCollins is searching for an online marketing manager, and Random House needs an senior publicist for its children’s division. Interested? Get the scoop on these gigs and more below, as well as on mediabistro.com.

• Editor Hachette Book Group/Orbit (New York, NY)
• Online Marketing Manager HarperCollins (Watertown, NY)
• Senior Publicist Random House (New York, NY)
• Publishing Product Manager Bloomsbury Publishing (New York, NY)
• Senior Manager, Site Merchandising & Product Management Amazon (Seattle, WA)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Lassam shared the example of novelist Diana Ilinca. The author will publish Zirconya: The Sage of Aluh’Nehn in June, but Ilinca developed a side story from the novel on Wattpad. After interacting with her readers every week, Ilinca built a fan base for her upcoming novel.

Stier suggested that people pay more attention to mobile devices. She highlighted Foursquare’s use of coupons and how food trucks use Twitter to announce their locations. Stier predicted that writers, especially those in nonfiction, can capitalize on similar techniques.

continued…

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Self-published authors have long been stigmatized for writing and selling their own books, but digital publishing is changing the game — and the industry’s perception. In a talk at the upcoming Mediabistro Circus, HarperCollins SVP and associate publisher Debbie Stier will discuss how digital trends are affecting publishing, from book acquisitions to marketing. Writer Jennifer Pullinger asked Stier: Because would-be authors can amass influence more easily through online and social media today, and the barriers to entry like economics and distribution are not as insurmountable as before, is that stigma fading faster, or will they always be two steps behind the established publishing houses?

“The barriers to entry for a writer to publish a book are lower than ever, and as a result, there are more self-published books than ever before. However, I think there’s still a stigma attached (whether justified or not) and that an established publisher still represents quality control. The fact of the matter is that the Internet is the ultimate tool for allowing the cream to rise, and I do believe that this will ultimately lead to the stigma diminishing. I don’t think we are there yet, but we are well on our way.”

Debbie Stier shares “Lessons From a Publisher” in her upcoming presentation at Mediabistro Circus on May 20 in New York.

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Doubleday recently posted the cover art for the new J. California Cooper novel, Life Is Short But Wide, and it seems the design team pulled up the same photo from the Getty Images archives that HarperCollins used three years ago for Jeffrey Ford‘s Edgar-winning The Girl in the Glass. If you look closely, you can spot the three main differences: When Georgia Liebman designed the cover to The Girl in the Glass back in ’05, she added, well, a girl in the glass, along with a blue butterfly—and, as far as my untrained eye can see, those two pairs of shoes in the Doubleday cover appear to have been put in by that illustration’s designer. (But I could be wrong—UPDATE: And no less an authority than Jeffrey Ford writes in to correct me: “I believe the boots were actually original to the photo, because Harper Collins originally showed it to me with the boots, and I asked them to remove them as there are no boots in the story.”)

The original photograph was taken by the late Debra McClinton, who committed suicide last year by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. This weekend, San Francisco’s Gallery 291 showed a memorial exhibition.

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Durand’s recent portfolio of acquisitions for the Morrow, Avon, and Harper imprints ranges a memoir from the wife of the lead singer for Stone Temple Pilots and an etiquette guide for Goths to a tour of the world’s Jewish communities (“from Rangoon to Havana and from Tehran to the hills of Uganda,” according to the deal announcement). Her track record is most clearly established, however, in the acquisition of mysteries and thrillers. Either way, she looks to be a good fit with Atria’s existing areas of focus.

(photo: Gawker/N. Tamindzic)

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I don’t know the answer to that, but maybe the subject leads us to a bit of advice Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash offered last week: “Ignore those agents who play publisher egos off one another and convince them when they’ve overpaid for yet another debut novel that they’ve ‘won,’ that they ‘beat’ the other house.” He reiterated the point yesterday in a panel discussion at NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute, quipping that only in publishing is the editor who’s willing to spend the most money on a (frequently untested, unproven) author and subject his or her company to the steepest financial risk the “winner.”

Now, I don’t want to lay too much of a burden on Twitter, but I do think it’s possible that one of the ways to shatter the mystique of the “potentially huge book” is the development of a publishing culture where industry professionals start mulling over possible projects more publicly, whether it’s actively soliciting feedback from readers with whom they’ve formed customer-based relationships or simply pulling the curtain back for those readers who are interested in such things.

And as long as I’m daydreaming, maybe Twitter could kill the concept of the media embargo, too.

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The Beijing Book Fair – the world’s fourth-largest after Frankfurt, London and BEA – just wrapped up yesterday and here are some notable highlights:

• Penguin gets big money for Victoria Beckham‘s new style book from a Chinese publisher.[The Bookseller]
• HarperCollins will distribute a travel guide published by China’s military just in time for the 2008 Olympics. [Forbes]
• Macmillan hooks up with Chinese publisher FLTRP (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press) for Chinese course guides. [The Bookseller]
• Katherine Rushton (from whom we swiped the above photograph) blogs about the BIBF experience.
• Germany was the guest of honor at BIBF. [CCTV]
• An Indian perspective on BIBF. [Times of India]
• Toby Eady: still the go-to agent for Chinese literature. [China.org.cn]

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Remember the time when it was almost impossible to get a novel published if you were under 40? Remember when author photos were nixed if you looked too young for a serious endeavor? Yeah, I don’t either, but I have it on pretty good authority that’s what publishing was like in the thirty years after World War II. And then the photogenic boom set in and now we get articles like the cover story of this week’s Boston Phoenix about why authors must look goooooooood to get published. All the usual suspects – Pessl, Kunkel, Krauss & Foer, Freudenberger, Vachon – are namechecked and analyzed for why their looks helped get them a big publishing contract (a topic Ron covered in similar detail for Writer’s Digest last year.)

“It’s easier in life to be attractive. That’s reductive but true,” says HarperCollins editor Gail Winston to Sharon Steel. “On the other hand, a brilliant book by an author who is not young and not attractive isn’t going to fail. It’s just, I think that those other books – for those reasons, those authors maybe get a little bit of an advantage.” But Gawker’s Emily Gould wishes the story was a little different. “The combination of fair-to-middling – or even strong but underdeveloped – talent with attractiveness and youth seems to be eternal catnip to publishers, if not reading audiences, and I think that’s a shame. What I am deeply, passionately opposed to is all the ridiculous praise that’s heaped on just-okay books because of the looks and pedigree and other accomplishments of their authors.”

Another feeling the adulation and backlash is Katherine Taylor (first talked about here last fall when I speculated she was a good bet for a Starbucks pick, which didn’t happen.) “I haven’t had a very long career as a writer, but while I was publishing stories, and when I got this book contract [for RULES FOR SAYING GOODBYE, published last spring by FSG] nobody knew what I looked like or who I was at all. My appearance had nothing to do with anything,” Taylor says. “But I’m not terribly concerned…The book is there, the book is always going to be there…I think the book stands on its own. All the noise surrounding it is just noise. I feel like whatever you have to do to get your book in the cultural conversation is all fair,” Taylor continues. “Because the bottom line is, you’ve put so much of yourself and so many years of your life into what you’re doing. The greatest tragedy would be if nobody noticed.”

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According to Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU, which broadcasts at 750 campuses nationwide, was the No. 1 choice to inaugurate the position. “He resonates with college students that we’ve talked with,” said Friedman. And Ashber was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry.” But will droves of young people respond? “It’s our hope that we will interest college kids in poetry in a new way, make it hip for them,” said Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins that has published Ashbery’s work. But, Halpern admitted, “it’ss very hard to tell what exactly is going to come of all this.”

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The advance will be inflated by Blair’s perceived value in the US, said one leading publisher of political books. “The Americans love him. They see him as an articulate George W. Bush. He’ll get a good whack out of a US publisher.” And the direct approach to the US is seen to thwart UK agents who were vying for a slice of the action. “It will be a shoot out between HarperCollins and Random House, but I think HarperCollins will prevail despite the much trumped link with Gail Rebuck‘s husband. [Rupert] Murdoch‘s keen and he’s got deep pockets,” said a major non-fiction publisher. “They’ve been political bedfellows for a very long time, and [News Corp] is a multimedia company,” a leading UK literary agent added. Shootout royale? Major league auction? Stay tuned, as the drill goes..

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