Jones Joins Keen Communications
by Bridget Kinsella -- Publishers Weekly, 12/14/2007 6:28:00 AM
Mike Jones, former director of sales and marketing at Graphic Arts Center, has joined Keen Communications LLC, the parent company of Clerisy Press and Menasha Ridge, as director of special sales. Jones will be working from Portland, Ore.
His appointment comes just about a year after Richard Hunt of Clerisy Press in Cincinnati teamed up with Bob Fehlinger of Menasha Ridge in Birmingham, Ala. and formed a partnership that launched Keen Communications. The offices are in Cincinnati and Birmingham. Between to two imprints, Clerisy and Menasha Ridge, the company publishes about 50 titles per year, in several nonfiction areas, with a specialty in outdoors and regional books. The move to join Keen is a homecoming of sorts for Jones, who had been associate publisher at Menasha Ridge before he went on to be publisher at Wilderness Press before he joined Graphic Arts Center.
“We needed somebody with a specialty in sales and marketing, especially with the non-trade accounts, and Mike is the right person for that,” Hunt said. He said trade sales still make up 75% of the company’s sales. “It will be a new adventure with old friends,” said Jones.
