Murphy Joins Scholastic
Suzanne Murphy, v-p of marketing at Simon & Schuster's children's publishing group, will move to Scholastic July 7 as v-p of trade marketing. With her arrival, Jennifer Pasanen will become v-p of franchise management for trade publishing. Murphy will report to Ellie Berger, who now has the title senior v-p, trade publishing.
April Bookstore Sales Drop
Bookstore sales fell 5.0% in April, the biggest decline so far this year. Total book sales were $938 million in the month, according to estimates from the U.S Census Bureau. Sales for the entire retail segment rose 7.5% in April. For the first four months of 2005, bookstore sales were down 3.9%, to $4.97 billion, while sales for all of retail rose 6.5%.
Harry Tops 560,000 on Amazon
Amazon.com has pre-sold more than 560,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince just to customers in the U.S. Earlier this year, Amazon reported that it had orders for more than 700,000 copies, a figure, a company spokesperson said, that included worldwide sales. No worldwide update was provided by Amazon last week.
'Herald' Cuts Back Book Coverage
Cutbacks in book coverage at the Boston Herald continue after a round of editorial layoffs at the tabloid newspaper. Book review editor Rosemary Herbert is taking a buyout and will not be replaced. The paper dropped its page of Sunday book coverage this spring and ended its five-year-old book club in January. Reviews and book stories now appear in the arts section. Feature editor Linda Kincaid said the paper will continue to cover books, but will focus more on popular culture and "buzz" books.
Editors Leave MacAdam/Cage
Two of MacAdam/ Cage's top editors are leaving. Anika Streitfield is heading back to Random House as a senior editor at Ballantine, but will be based in San Francisco. Founding editor Pat Walsh is leaving to pursue his own writing career after just publishing 78 Reasons Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Might Be with Penguin. Streitfield, who worked at Ballantine before returning to California in 2001, will start in August; she'll edit eight books a year for her old boss, senior v-p and editor-in-chief Nancy Miller. No comment on whether Streitfield's authors will follow her.
Coady Takes Second Store
Roxanne Coady, owner of R.J. Julia bookstore in Madison, Conn., is taking over the management of Elm Street Books, in nearby New Canaan, Conn. Coady's agreement gives her an option to buy the store, which has been renamed R.J. Julia—Elm Street Books.
Barry to Doubleday Religion
Bill Barry, one-time deputy publisher at Doubleday, will return to the company on August 1 as v-p and publisher of Doubleday Religion. Doubleday Broadway group president Steve Rubin said Barry's mandate is to increase Doubleday's market presence by doubling the religion group's sales through organic growth as well as through acquisitions over the next three years. Barry most recently served as president of DK Publishing; prior to that he was president of Hungry Minds.
New Teen Press Debuts
What Kids Can Do, a nonprofit focused on documenting the lives of teenagers, has launched Next Generation Press to publish commentary and writing by teens involved in WKCD. The press will publish three books this year. Distribution will be by National Book Network. The first book, What We Can't Tell You: Teenagers Talk to the Adults in Their Lives, was released in May. WKCD (whatkidscando.org) was founded in 2001 in Providence, R.I. Next Generation will be funded by grants. WKCD previously joined with the New Press to publish Fires in the Bathroom, which sold about 20,000 copies.
Known World Wins Impac Prize
Edward Jones has been awarded the 2005 Impac Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, The Known World, published in 2003 by Harper/Amistad. The award includes a $120,000 prize. This is just the latest award for Jones's novel about a black slaveowner. The book also won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award; it has more than 500,000 copies in print.
CBLDF Moves To NYC
To be closer to comics publishers, the media and legal resources, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is moving from Massachusetts to offices on Madison Avenue in New York City.
Clarification
In an article on CBA (May 30), our edit of the lead paragraph may have implied that the entire paragraph was a paraphrase of a statement by Bill Anderson, when only the material in quotes should have been attributed to him. Also, the correct name of CBA's new magazine is Aspiring Retail.
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