What if a blogger were executive director of Harry Potter’s U.K. publisher?
Hypothesize no more. Richard Charkin, CEO of Macmillan and a blogger with an interest in e-books and related matters, is moving over to Bloomsbury, according to Publishers Weekly. Here’s the news directly from The Source.
So, Richard, do you think you can educate J.K. Rowling? Or, behind the scenes, has Amazon money already done so? No deal announced. But we can all dream.
Good Thing—even if his focus is more ed/ref than trade
Yep, folks, this is the same guy who “borrowed” a Google computer at a trade show to make his point about intellectual property.
At Bloomsbury he’ll be into acquisitions and, alas, will be focusing more on the reference and education area than trade books, the category into which Harry falls. Just the same, his presence at Bloomsbury is a Good Thing from an e-book perspective and shows a little more willingness to experiment.
Little detail: Will Macmillian redirect the Chark blog to a Bloomsbury address? Or will his new duties at Bloomsbury preclude his blogging? He writes of the change: “What it means is that I won’t have to think of something to write about every morning on this blog. Just for the record we’ve had 1,137,267 visitors and generated $338.37 in advertising income. More importantly I’ve made new friends, learned tons and had fun. Thanks to all of you and pip pip from charkinblog.” So perhaps I should have used the term “former blogger” in the lead. We’ll see. I hope that he’ll keep up the blogging even if the pace is less than daily.
