MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
October 29 – November 5, 2009 Edition
Steve Rubin Named President and Publisher of Holt
NEW YORK, NY/AUTHORLINK NEWS/10/27/09– Stephen Rubin, the former publisher-at-large at Random House, has been named president and publisher of Henry Holt & Company, a division of Macmillan publishing, it was announced today by Macmillan CEO John Sargent. Rubin succeeds Dan Farley, who will now exclusively oversee Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. Both men will report to Sargent.
Rubin, 67, had stepped down from the Random House Doubleday imprint which underwent restructuring last December. He had served for the past seven months as publisher-at-large of Random House, where he worked closely with authors including Dan Brown, John Grisham, Pat Conroy and Bill
Dan Farley had been leading Holt since February 2008 when the previous president and publisher, John Sterling departed.
In a media statement, Rubin said he plans to publish books “that bridge the gap between commercial and literature. I believe that Holt is the perfect place to do this, given that its sister companies are the distinguished Farrar Straus and the powerhouse St. Martin’s Press.” Rubin also said he was eager to “develop a tight, powerful focused list.”
While at Doubleday/Broadway, Rubin was called “the expansionist publisher.” He used the company’s riches amassed from The Da Vinci Code (and A Million Little Pieces) to keep the business growing in a downsizing era.
Rubin had spent his entire twenty-six year career at Random House and its predecessor companies and divisions. For fifteen years, until December 2008, he was President and Publisher of Doubleday and later the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group. Prior to that, he was Executive Editor and Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at Bantam Books in the eighties, and the London-based former Chairman of the Transworld U.K. division.
Privately-owned Macmillan Publishers Ltd, with over 7000 staff operating in more than 80 countries, is held by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, based in Stuttgart, Germany. Macmillan is one of the largest and best known international publishing groups in the world, with divisions in the USA and UK.
The US group includes Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt & Company, W.H. Freeman and Worth Publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Picador, Roaring Brook Press, St. Martin’s Press, Tor Books, and Bedford Freeman & Worth Publishing Group.
