Madeline McIntosh

Penguin Random House announced a substantial change to the organization and management of its U.S. adult publishing divisions in three separate letters to PRH staff today. The letters detailed the creation of the Penguin Publishing Group, a unified adult publishing division that merges PRH's Berkley/NAL and Penguin Adult.

Penguin Random House today announced the formation of a cross-company Consumer Marketing Development and Operations Group. It will both support the dedicated title-, author- and category-marketing, and the marketing innovation within each of its U.S. publishing groups

A memo yesterday from Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House, and Madeline McIntosh, U.S. President and Chief Operating Officer announced that the Penguin warehouses in Kirkwood, New York and Pittston, Pennsylvania will close a year from now, signaling a major step in the Penguin Random House merger.

According to the memo, the closure of the two facilities will begin in February 2015 and be complete by June 2015. The operations at the two Penguin warehouses will move to the Random House warehouses located in Westminster, Maryland and Crawfordsville, Indiana.

In a memo this morning, Markus Dohle, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Random House and member of the executive board of parent company Bertelsmann AG, announced that Madeline McIntosh been promoted to the company's Chief Operating Officer.

McIntosh, 43, had been serving as Random House's President, Sales, Operations and Digital.

Said Dohle in a memo to his colleagues: "When I asked Madeline McIntosh in 2009 to rerejoin Random House I believed she had the wide-ranging skill set, service-focused ethic, and strategic aptitude necessary to help us drive our business forward and increase the audience for our authors' works. In her role as President, Sales, Operations and Digital, she has exceeded expectations."

One of the concurrent conferences under the BookExpo America umbrella, the International Digital Publishing Forum's (idpf) Digital Book 2012 has, for the last two days, tackled the digital reading from a multitude of angles, and with specific emphasis on Business & Marketing, Technology & Production, and Education & Professional.

As we eagerly anticipate Book Business blogger extraordinaire and general man-on-the-scene Eugene G. Schwartz to weigh in with his detailed conference recap and analysis, we'll provide some quick takes from the two-day conference.

I was brought up to believe in the virtues of a large field sales force. One of Dad’s early successes in his career as Director of Research at Doubleday was when he analyzed sales rep effectiveness to advise the company about the optimum number of reps to keep when they combined sales forces that had 10 and 14 members, respectively. The company expected him to come up with a number between 10 and 14, or, perhaps, between 14 and 24.