Publisher’s Weekly, my favorite e-newsletter to quote, has this snippet today, about Simon & Schuster:

“Eloise Flood, the Alloy Online veteran Simon & Schuster brought on to
oversee its children’s paperback imprints, will be leaving the company
at week’s end. Flood lost her job as paperback publisher in last
month’s reorganization of the S&S children’s unit and was made
editorial director of Simon Pulse, a role the put in her in charge of
only mass market titles that aren’t media tie-ins. An S&S spokesperson
said Flood will be replaced.”

With all due respect to Eloise Flood, what interests me in this note isn’t Ms. Flood, but the sentence “Simon Pulse… in charge of only mass market titles that aren’t media tie-ins.”

Think about that for a minute… having a media tie-in for mass market titles is so common that there’s actually a separate group whose distinction is that its titles are not tie-ins. Says a lot about the relationship between the crass capitalism of print -> sell -> earn and the world of books and literature, doesn’t it?

Oh, and I can’t blame Ms. Flood for deciding that it wasn’t a good alternative to running the entire children’s imprint department. Good luck, Eloise, whomever you are. 🙂