Eric Price is joining Melville House as v-p, new business development. He was formerly director of sales and marketing at Quercus Books and earlier was the longtime associate publisher and COO of Grove/Atlantic, where he started just before it was bought by Morgan Entrekin.
"Eric was right there with Morgan when he was building what turned out to be one of the greatest American indie publishing houses ever--if not the greatest," Melville House co-founder Dennis Johnson said. "So we're absolutely thrilled to have someone not just of Eric's stature on our team, but someone of his obviously brilliant mix of skill and passion."
Melville House co-founder Valerie Merians said that Price was hired in large part to help the company maintain the growth it has had since 2008, when it moved its sales and distribution to Random House, now Penguin Random House Publisher Services. "We've grown every year since, and we felt we had to deepen the company in several key areas if we wanted to continue that, while simultaneously maintaining ourselves as a mission-driven indie. Eric really knows how to do that, and Dennis and I felt he was a really simpatico spirit."
And Price said, "As the publishing landscape consolidates, it is exciting to be able to work for a publisher that continues to have a strong independent voice and has a growth strategy that is committed to publishing books that add to our cultural discourse. In addition, I'm looking forward to once again working with the wonderful and dynamic people at Penguin Random House Publisher Services, who are dedicated to providing wide and effective distribution of important literary voices."
Full disclosure: Shelf Awareness publisher Jenn Risko had a hand in this appointment. In June, Merians and Johnson had hired Paul Kozlowski, the beloved veteran publisher and bookseller, but the week before he was to start, Kozlowski suddenly died. Johnson wrote a very poignant remembrance of Kozlowski, mentioning that he was about to start working at Melville House. "That piece prompted several people to write to me," Johnson recalled. "One of them was Eric himself, just to kind of commiserate about how sad it was. We'd never spoken before. But then a couple more people wrote to me, including a bookseller and one of our sales reps at Random House, saying, 'Do you know Eric Price?' Then Jenn just wrote to me and cc'd Eric and bluntly said, 'You two should talk.' We did what we were told!"