Effective January 19, John "JD" Wilson will join Northwestern University Press as director of marketing and sales, a new position created in response to "the increasingly complex business environment within which university presses operate today."
Wilson has 26 years of experience in publishing and marketing with an emphasis on scholarly books and brings expertise in book sales and distribution, product development, marketing, publicity, metadata management and social media.
He has been sales and marketing director at the University of Alabama Press and previously was academic sales manager in both the Vermont headquarters and Tokyo office of the Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company. He also served as director of marketing at the Cheng & Tsui Company of Boston, Mass.
Incidentally Northwestern University Press has just received a three-year, $73,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (the grant is one of the first of the new Humanities Open Book program, jointly sponsored by Mellon and the National Endowment for the Humanities), which will be used to make important but out-of-print titles available digitally and to demonstrate the usefulness of open access monographs for research in the humanities. The press will create free e-book versions of 64 outstanding humanities titles in African studies, literary criticism and philosophy.
