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| Gary Urda | |
Gary Urda, senior v-p, sales, of Simon & Schuster, died yesterday morning after collapsing at the gym. He was 59.
"It is shocking and disorienting to lose someone as great as Gary so suddenly and tragically," S&S president and CEO Jonathan Karp wrote to staff. "We will want to honor his memory as best we can, and we will share information on how to do so as soon as we have it."
Urda joined S&S in 1996 as v-p for sales development at Pocket Books, and held a series of positions in both Atria/Pocket Books and the sales division before taking on the role of senior v-p, sales, in 2017. During his career, he managed sales in nearly every channel of the company's business, adapting and adjusting strategies to account for the changes in S&S's customer base and in consumer reading habits.
Karp called Urda "the best kind of colleague--engaged, thoughtful, attentive, constructive, upbeat, humorous, warm, and always approachable, personable, and capable. He was a quintessential sales executive, with a deep knowledge of our industry, and he demonstrated on a daily basis that his job was absolutely the right job for him. He cared about our books and all of the people selling them, and was himself a terrific reader, with a particular expertise in thrillers. He cared about doing his best for all our authors. He cared about our company and providing good service to his accounts. Gary would often tell me that for him, work was about people, and that's what he loved about his job: the people. His constant refrain was that the job was 'all about the relationships,' a belief that he put into practice every day. He was a team player through and through, and whenever there was a problem with sales for one of our titles, or an issue with one of our accounts, I knew I could call Gary and that he would do his best to solve it."