Hyperion Books for Children editorial director Donna Bray and executive editor Alessandra Balzer (pictured) will launch a new HarperCollins imprint called Balzer & Bray in May. This news is unrelated to Hyperion adult founder Bob Miller's decision to start up a game-changing new imprint at HC adult, but it probably doesn't feel like it to Disney, Hyperion's parent company. After protesting that "Hyperion is not going away" to PW, senior v-p and publisher of Global Children's Books, Disney Publishing Worldwide Jeanne Mosure added that Hyperion is in the process of changing its name to "Disney-Hyperion," because "[t]he company is really proud of Hyperion and wanted to associate it more closely with Disney." Right, and also, after Balzer takes authors like Mo Willems and Eoin Colfer out the door with her, there isn't going to be much for Hyperion Books for Children to do but publish Disney-branded book content.

Hyperion President and founding publisher Robert S. Miller is bailing on that company to "launch a new global publishing program based on a non-traditional business model" at HarperCollins. He'd shared the news of his resignation with a few coworkers earlier this week and had planned to make a formal announcement at the monthly staff meeting on Monday, but word had begun to leak out, prompting HarperCollins to make the news public today in a press release, which just arrived here prefaced by its forwarder with the heading, "Holy shit." Well: Yes! Not only has Miller been the driving force at Disney-owned Hyperion since he started it 17 years ago, but his departure follows hot on the heels of longtime Editor in Chief Will Schwalbe's, in January. What does this mean for Hyperion, and just what exactly will the "non-traditional" Harper startup entail?

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When Collins hired Adam Bellowas an executive editor two weeks ago, one of my first, private reactions was that if the hiring of Nancy Miller had been announced on January 24, and that of Gillian Blake on February 27, Bellow's arrival to the Collins executive editor squad had come two weeks early.

Apparently somebody there read my mind, because Collins just sent out a memo about Caroline Sutton becoming its fourth new executive editor for 2008. She'll take over the "Lifestyle/Wellness" imprint on April 14; her track record as an executive editor at Ballantine includes books by Deborah Tannen, Nicholas Perricone, Dean Ornish, and Sylvia Boorstein. "Caroline has an extraordinary talent for acquiring and editing books that inform, improve, and generally change lives for the better," Mary Ellen O'Neill, the imprint's publisher, tells HarperCollins colleagues in her memo. "I'm looking forward to seeing her continue that publishing tradition here at Collins, both in the industry and among her new colleagues."

Collins publisher Bruce Nichols sent a memo out this morning announcing the hiring of Adam Bellow (left) as an executive editor for the nonfiction imprint. Bellow comes from Doubleday, where he was the acquiring editor on Jonah Goldberg's bestselling Liberal Fascism, as well as titles by other conservative thinkers like Dinesh D'Souza, Norman Podhoretz, Peter Schweizer, Bruce Bawer, and Charles Murray.

The move is a reunion of sorts, as Bellow and Nichols worked together at Free Press in the early 1990s. "Adam was a rising star, and a wonderful colleague," Nichols says in his internal memo. "In the years since then his finger has remained directly on the pulse of intellectual conservative publishing, with the track record to prove it. I could not be more pleased to be working with him again." Bellow becomes Collins' third executive editor of 2008, following the hiring of Nancy Miller in January and Gillian Blake in February.

David Nudo, the former publisher of Publishers Weekly, has accepted a new position as the director of sales and marketing for Shelfari, the book-themed social networking site. "We've been looking for somebody with deep connections to the publishing community," CEO Josh Hug told me over the phone from Seattle yesterday afternoon, describing Nudo's role as "creating relationships in the industry, helping us understand how we can add value to the industry... being our eyes and ears in New York, really."

For Nudo, Shelfari's interest in finding someone with connections to book publishing and the media was "perfect timing," as his tenure at PW was winding down and he had already become an active and enthusiastic participant in online social networks. In our phone conversation, he spoke about the original development team at Shelfari's status as "tech people" and "book enthusiasts," observing, "They didn't come from the publishing industry, and maybe that's a good thing, because what they created was unfettered by industry thinking." He acknowledged, too, that the site exists in an already-crowded field, with competitors like Goodreads.com and LibraryThing. (Shelfari's the one with the emphasis on the visual interface, with the shelves that actually look like a bookcase rather than just an array of JPG files.)"We're all looking at each other, trying to suss each other out," Nudo conceded, "but I'm sort of glad I don't have to do that [in this job]. I can take my lead directly from the marketplace: What do authors want from the site? What do publishers want from the site? And what do readers want from the site?"

As for immediate developments to the site, Nudo raised the possibility of a Shelfari blog, one that might incorporate guest voices from the publishing, bookselling, and other book-centric communities, as well as other unspecified innovations aimed at making the site more user-friendly for authors. Hug agreed; during our conversation, he assured me, "You're going to see some pretty exciting things coming." The official press release, however, has another quote that offers a more precise hint at the overall plan: Citing a desire to "bridge the gap between publishers and their readers," Hug asserts that "David's standing in the industry will guide us as we develop the best possible advertising platform for the publishing industry."

It was a little over a year ago when I reported on Colleen Lindsay's move from Soho Press to Abrams, which took her from running a publicity department to directing marketing operations. After a reorg at Abrams, she went back to freelance publicity, which led to a staff position at Doubleday, where she worked on titles like Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. Now she's making another radical career shift, joining FinePrint Literary Management as an agent, where she'll be looking to represent science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels, which aligns with her previous role as the director of publicity at Del Rey.

That announcement reminds me that I heard last month about former Thunder's Mouth senior editor Anita Diggs launching her own literary agency last month, Diggs McQuillar Inc., and her active search for a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction authors. Diggs was also a book publicist before switching to editorial; in addition to Thunder's Mouth, she also held positions at Ballantine's One World imprint (coincidentally, when Lindsay was at Del Rey!) and what was then Warner Books. She's also blogging about her new company: "When Thunder's Mouth Press went out of business, I decided it was time for me to become my own boss," she writes. "As an editor there are times when you have to work on books that you are not particularly interested (if another editor quits or is fired, the boss has to give the abandoned projects to someone). There are also times when you desperately want to work on a book but the agent sells it to another House for more money. Now, I will never have to work on projects unless I love them and I can't lose a project that I love."

Leon Neyfakh reports: Bloomsbury has fired editorial director Annik LaFarge, "ater a devastating year that saw U.S. sales plunge 14.9 percent." According to Neyfakh, "Ms. LaFarge confirmed by phone this morning that she had been fired and had started giving away her office supplies, but declined to comment further."

LaFarge had come to Bloomsbury just over two years ago after a stint as a senior editor at Crown Books where, Publishers Weekly noted at the time, "she was behind a number of high profile acquisitions (if no memorable bestsellers)." Before that, she had been the associate publisher at Simon & Schuster, a position she left to venture into the digital media world with the short-lived Contentville.

The anonymous tips (and, presumably, phone calls) started going out late yesterday morning, but as best I can make out it was Leon Neyfakh at the Observer who pinned down the details to the level of confirmability late Tuesday afternoon: Janet Silver out, and Becky Saletan in charge at the newly-bonded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Saletan is now the senior vice president and publisher of the unified company's adult trade division, a move HMH presiden Gary Gentel heralds in the press release as indicative of "an exciting future" given her "innovative sensibility to publishing."

A little over two years ago, mediabistro.com interviewed Saletan, who described herself as "a big champion of nonfiction" with "a very low threshold for what I perceive as sentimentality or phony emotionalism—sometimes to the detriment of my commercial success, probably!" Also worth noting is her sense of the editor's role in making a successful book: "I see editors as advocates for their books throughout the process. One of the most important things editors do is figure out how to 'talk' their books—how to present them succinctly and powerfully—and then help all the others in turn who must do so: publicists, sales reps, rights directors, etc."

Shortly after breaking the news that Will Schwalbe is leaving Hyperion next week, Observer publishing correspondent Leon Neyfakh extracted more details from the outgoing editor-in-chief. So what do we know? Schwalbe's been thinking about his future for a while, but he only made the decision last week. And he's not planning to go be a book publishing executive someplace else, but he's not sure exactly what he's going to do, either. "I have some ideas that I'm excited about," he told Neyfakh. "There are a lot of people I want to talk to." The possibility of "new media" as an outlet for Schwalbe's creative energies is mentioned.

Leon Neyfakh just posted the news of Hyperion editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe's resignation, effective at the end of next week, "to pursue some ideas he has for the next chapter in his career," according to an internal memo distributed around the company. Schwalbe had recently achieved no small amount of extracurricular renown as the co-author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.