Movable Type Management

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:57:00 -0400

ARTISTS AND ARTISANS AND MOVABLE TYPE LITERARY GROUP AGREE TO MERGE, CREATING NEW MANAGEMENT FIRM FOR AUTHORS

NEW YORK, NY (October 4, 2011) Artists and Artisans and the Movable Type Literary Group announced today a definitive merger agreement to create a new bicoastal management company, Movable Type Management (MTM). The new firm will manage more than 200 authors in a variety of categories and genres, and develop properties for distribution across platforms, devices, and territories. With five senior literary managers, the company will keep offices in New York and Los Angeles, and perform in-house film, television, and digital development.

Jason Allen Ashlock, founder and principal of Movable Type Literary Group, will serve as President of Movable Type Management, developing book and digital properties. Adam Chromy, founder and principal of Artists and Artisans, will serve as President of Movable Type Media, the performance arm of MTM.

Chromy founded Artists and Artisans a decade ago, and has led the company to hundreds of book deals at major publishing houses, many of which have become international and New York Times Bestsellers, among them James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency and most recently Steven Adler’s My Appetite for Destruction. He has set up a number of performance packages with Mosaic Media Group (Please Fire Me), Valhalla Pictures (Your So-Called Life) and a pilot deal at USA Network with Berman Braun for David Ellis Dickerson’s memoir House of Cards. At Movable Type Literary Group, Ashlock lead the company to more than 60 deals in its first two years, and has overseen a number of digital rights initiatives, including a multi-author partnership with INscribe Digital, the production of enhanced ebooks with Vook, and sales of innovative digital properties such as the serial ebook anthology Shock Ring to Random House Digital.

“This is a move that accelerates our strategy to offer authors inventive and expansive management, and to offer publishers properties of utmost value,” said Ashlock. “Combining two successful and highly complementary companies allows us to focus the efforts of each of our members, and create customized strategies for each of our authors. At a particularly challenging and exciting time for the publishing industry, this combination vaults us into a leadership role with our clients and our partners.”

Chromy said, “The increasingly competitive marketplace has made brand awareness ever more critical to the success of an author’s career, and there is no greater platform for building that awareness than film and television adaptations of their work. The new organization will allow me the opportunity to more aggressively pursue clients’ performance exploitations in Hollywood while also mining its rich creative community for talent.”

The company’s Senior Representatives will include Jamie Brenner, Brianne Mulligan and Michele Matrisciani. Brenner, who will focus primarily on literary and commercial fiction, worked in online bookselling at Barnes and Noble and publicity at Harper Collins prior to becoming an agent. Mulligan, who will manage mostly middle grade and young adult authors, has worked in editorial at Razorbill, Gotham, and Broadway. Matrisciani, who will handle primarily prescriptive and narrative nonfiction, was for the last five years editorial director of HCI books, after working in editorial at McGraw-Hill and Hyperion

International rights will be handled by Baror International (www.barorint.com)

Movable Type Management can be found on the Web at MTMgmt.net and at PublishersMarketplace.com/companies/MovableType

For additional information, contact Jason Allen Ashlock at Movable Type Management: 646/484.6419 | mtm@MTMgmt.net.

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