Saturday, June 17, 2017

Publishers Lunch


Today's Meal


Bloomsbury announced that Sir Richard Lambert will join their board as a non-executive Chairman for a term of four years on July 18 following their annual meeting.Lambert is chairman of the British Museum, and former director general of the Confederation of British Industry. As announced previously, current chair Sir Anthony Salz is retiring from the board as his term ends.

Lauren Plude has joined Montlake Romance imprint as acquisitions editor. Most recently she was a freelance editor.

Transworld editorial director
Giles Elliott's position is being eliminated and he will leave the publisher on June 28 after 10 years at the company. Publisher Bill Scott-Kerr said in a statement: "We have taken the difficult decision that, in the face of a rapidly declining market, Transworld will be publishing fewer sports books in the future and therefore no longer require a dedicated editorial director in the genre."

Agent Andrew Wylie will speak at the Frankfurt Book Fair's half-day The Markets conference on October 10, and is
interviewed by FBF's Publishing Perspectives ahead of time in promotion of the event. His theme-in-progress is how the international community of publishers can and should counter nationalistic movements in many parts of the world. "The rise of nationalism, including in the United States, but also through Europe and even in Asia, has underscored the importance of internationalism—as a subject and as an approach to the markets for the publishing community and for writers," Wylie says. "The publishing world, and writers, are at odds with the nationalist agenda."

He points to "the rise of young African writers" as, "for us [his agency], one of the most important developments of recent years.... Many of them from Nigeria but not only from Nigeria. They’re from across Africa. These works are necessarily political as well as purely aesthetic. Many of those writers are engaged at a very deep level on questions of internationalism because many of the writers travel between Nigeria and the United States. They talk about the difficulty of assimilation not only in the United States but on return to Africa. It's a marvelous demonstration of the strength of internationalism and the question that internationalism raises with a young writer."

In the piece which reminds us that Wylie has focused on representation in the "upper end of the market" but notes that is said "without criticism of more commercial work, he hastens to add, but simply as his natural milieu."

Briefs

A draft of Milo Yiannopoulos's book Dangerous submitted to Simon & Schuster in early January has been read by BuzzFeed. Yiannopoulos tells BF the manuscript was a "sketch" that has since been changed, and insists, "That manuscript has absolutely no relation to what we are printing on July 4. But his agent Thomas Flannery Jr. said otherwise: "For the most part the content is the same. The file you have — that's basically before a line edit has been done. Simon & Schuster never did a line edit."

They also "obtained" Milo's contract with S&S, which they say was executed on December 13, though it called for the draft manuscript to be submitted on December 31.

Based on what they read, BuzzFeed declares, "If the version of Dangerous that comes out on July 4 is anything like the draft, it will be a terrible book, not good by any measure. And in the two most important duties of its kind as an airport book — to reflect the zeitgeist and to entertain the reader — the draft is a staggering failure." They also note, "An analysis with iThenticate, an anti-plagiarism tool, revealed that the draft contains dozens of instances of self-plagiarism, with sentences and even paragraphs lifted directly from Yiannopoulos's stories on Breitbart."

In more new bookstore openings, as first reported last September, Belmont Books has now
opened in Belmont, MA, a few months behind schedule "due to permitting and construction delays."

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