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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

New Digital Publisher Hires "Harry Potter" Publisher


Open Road, a year-old digital publisher, is entering the children's eBook market...and for starters they have acquired Barbara Marcus, the former children's book publisher at Scholastic publishing...The one who secured the Harry Potter books!

Quite a coup.

Matthew Flamm reports this for Crain's New York Business:

Digital publisher Open Road hires Barbara Marcus, the former Scholastic children's book president who brought the Hero of Hogwarts to the world, as an adviser.

Open Road, the year-old digital publishing startup founded by Jane Friedman to focus primarily on backlist titles, has hired Harry Potter's former publisher in an effort to break into children's books.

Barbara Marcus, who was president of children's book publishing and distribution at Scholastic until 2005, has been named an advisor for children's publishing to Open Road Integrated Media. The announcement was made Wednesday at the Frankfurt Book Fair by Ms. Friedman, the onetime HarperCollins boss who is co-founder and chief executive of the New York City-based startup.

Ms. Marcus oversaw Scholastic's acquisition of the first title in J. K. Rowling's wildly popular series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which came out in 1998. She stayed on through the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, No. 6 in the series.

Read more http://alturl.com/qcj2w


2 comments:

Frances Jeanne said...

Smart Move!

Unknown said...

Yes indeed!

This from Media Bistro dot com on Barbara: "Barbara Marcus has been in publishing for more than 27 years. For 22 of them, she worked at Scholastic, eventually ascending to president and bringing the Harry Potter series to the United States. She currently acts as a consultant for a number of companies and organizations including the Penguin Young Readers Group, Knowledge Adventure, and Media Source."