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| Matt Baldacci | |
In connection with Jenn Risko stepping down from Shelf Awareness, Matt Baldacci is being promoted to publisher, and Neil Strandberg is being promoted to CEO. Matt will be in charge of sales and marketing and ideas for new products and services. Neil will be in charge of administration, HR, tech, and making new products and services happen.
John Mutter commented: "Both Matt and Neil have already helped immensely in the transition. They're both amazingly talented and experienced in the book world, and I am so looking forward to working with them on a daily basis."
Matt joined Shelf Awareness in 2015 as director of business development. He has an MBA from the Stern School of Business at NYU, and worked for several decades on the publishing side with Simon & Schuster, DK, and St. Martin's Press.
Matt said, "I want to thank Jenn and John for giving me the opportunity to work with them and the amazing people at our great company. As we move forward into this next era, the potential to further their great work of helping independent bookstores thrive is a challenge I accept, and I can't think of better partners in this coming journey than Neil, John, and our colleagues at the Shelf."
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| Neil Strandberg | |
Neil also joined Shelf Awareness in 2015, as director of technology and operations. He had been director of technology at the American Booksellers Association and before that was at the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colo., from 1989 to 2012, rising from bookseller to manager of operations.
He has served as a board member of the Book Industry Study Group, was the Tattered Cover representative to the Independent Booksellers Consortium, and was v-p and board member of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association. In 2007, he won the MPIBA's Gordon Saull Bookseller of the Year award. He began his bookselling career at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, Calif.
Neil said, "Jenn and John created an amazing company that reminds us, each day, that booksellers, publishers, librarians, agents, authors, and editors are bound together in an industry that relies on our individual and collective passions to connect books and readers. Whether it is daily industry news as found in Pro or our work to support regional trade associations and sales at independent bookstores through our partner programs, Shelf Awareness sustains our connections with each other and our industry's reach to readers.
"Speaking for my own career, I have had the privilege to learn and grow with three remarkable people: Joyce Meskis, Oren Teicher, and Jenn Risko. It is a great gift to me that what I will conjure on my own to steward Shelf Awareness into the future is enhanced by these singular individuals as well as my current partners: John Mutter, Matt Baldacci, and all of my colleagues at Shelf Awareness--truly gifted people sharing their lives with me (and you) in this business. I'll be blessed if my work helps them do theirs in service to authors, publishers and independent booksellers."