Friday, June 30, 2017

Publishers Lunch


Today's Meal


Marlene Kelly has been promoted to senior marketing manager for Amazon Publishing.

Meg Reid has been promoted to director of Hub City Press effective July 1. Founder and current director Betsy Teter will retain the title of editor and director of development. Also starting July 1, Hub City Press titles will be distributed by Publishers Group West.

Alongside his attorney and his existing representation for publishing, novelist John Irving signed with Gersh Agency for theatrical representation.

Antonia Byatt will
serve as interim director of English PEN.

The Guardian conducted an
informal study investigating the gender gap in UK book publishing, "following up anecdotal reports that women were being kept out of the top tiers despite making up the bulk of the industry's workforce." Speaking to 80 women and 12 men, they found that "the majority felt women had been increasingly excluded from the top tier due to a variety of factors: institutional sexism, inflexible working practices, and opaque promotional and pay structures that result in men consistently being paid more than female colleagues in the same role." As one women put it, "Diversity is a keyword for the company, but trying to achieve equality for men and women in senior positions does not seem to be a concern."

Quartz was
given the first 50 pages of Milo Yiannopoulos's self-published Dangerous, releasing next Tuesday, and Gizmodo obtained a complete copy. Neither is impressed -- but then, neither is likely the audience for the book either, which will sell to fans and the faithful. Gizmodo concludes, "Dangerous is dreadfully dull. Beneath the regurgitated propaganda arguing against a fair, multicultural, egalitarian society is a portrait of an e-celebrity without an audience, a blogger without a publisher, and, above all, an attention-seeking troll whose playbook of goads no longer elicits any emotion whatsoever. To the detriment of the book, self-reflection is utterly absent." They say the new book is close to the prior manuscript that Simon & Schuster's Threshold Editions cancelled, though it has a new introduction and some other adjustments. "The substance of the book has remained largely unchanged in the six month interim. It remains a tedious and at times bitter self-defense written by a man who claims to enjoy the negative attention he sought out. Dangerous is not offensive, shocking, or thought-provoking. Had it met its original release date of mid-March, many of the topics contained within would still have felt well past their prime."

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