Books
TGC Worldwide Adds Three Hires Spanning Retail, Publishing and Screen Deals
Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk
TGC Worldwide, a firm that manages author platforms, publishing strategy and speaker representation, has appointed three new team members covering retail placement, editorial acquisitions and script-to-screen media, according to the company’s announcement.
Jeanie Bailey joins as an advisory board member and director of retail and publishing partnerships. Per the announcement, she brings more than 40 years in retail, wholesale, publishing and e-commerce, including three separate tenures at Books-A-Million in retail operations, book purchasing and wholesale. Before retiring, she served as senior director of e-commerce sales and operations there, and earlier held director of mass market sales roles at DK Publishing, Thomas Nelson and Parragon, plus a vice president post overseeing U.S. operations for Make Believe Ideas.
Lara Butler-Montague returns to TGC as director of client services, a role the company says will expand its work connecting books to screen and broadcast media. She previously served as creative director at Redirect Marketing Group, where she ran bilingual television, radio and digital campaigns from scripting through paid media and sales reporting. In an earlier stint at TGC, she managed author and executive accounts and secured broadcast and podcast placements. She holds marketing and photography degrees from Drexel University.
Meredith Johnson joins as account manager, bringing editorial and acquisitions experience from Springer Nature, Rizzoli International Publications and Wiley. The announcement states she met her 2025 acquisition targets a quarter early as a commissioning editor at Springer Nature and has worked on contract negotiation, international rights acquisition and production across nineteen books. She is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course.
"Most authors fight battles they can’t see: winning over a publisher, a retailer, and the media," said Charlie Fusco, founder and CEO of TGC Worldwide, in the announcement. "Our team has now sat on every side of that table."
According to the company, Bailey will build exclusive retail and media partnership packages across national, wholesale, independent and e-commerce accounts, while Johnson will apply her editorial and rights background to client campaign management and publisher negotiations. "I spent four decades watching strong books fail because nobody built the retail plan," Bailey said. "TGC treats a launch as an operating system, not a publicity moment." Butler-Montague framed her focus around measurable results: "Airtime only matters if it moves books. Every placement we build should connect to a measurable sale." Johnson, for her part, pointed to the acquisition side of the business: "Publishers decide in weeks what an author has worked on for years. Knowing how that decision actually gets made changes how you build the book and the pitch."
TGC Worldwide describes its broader business as helping authors and executives turn visibility into sales, media coverage and speaking engagements, through services spanning book development, launch publicity, retail strategy, book tours and speaker representation.
Studio CarryOnHarry sees this as a staffing move built around a specific pitch: that a launch succeeds or fails on retail and editorial relationships as much as on publicity, and three hires with direct experience on those sides of the business is how a mid-sized author-services firm tries to prove that case to prospective clients.
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Richard Blum has published "I Do Not Like Escargot," a rhyming picture book that began as a sixth-grade English assignment and, decades later, made it into print through Page Publishing.
The original assignment, according to Blum, asked students to write a book in the style of Dr. Seuss’s "Green Eggs and Ham" about something they didn’t like. Blum chose escargot, despite never having tried it, on the strength of a sixth grader’s confidence that he wouldn’t. The book, released in September 2025, keeps that premise intact and runs with it in verse and illustration.
Blum brought his artistic background to every page, having trained in art while maintaining employment elsewhere. He has roots in Arizona and Missouri, both of which he says shaped the voice in his writing. The finished book, aimed at young readers, follows a child’s insistence on disliking a food he’s never tasted — a setup borrowed directly from the Seuss book it imitates, where a character’s refusal to try green eggs and ham eventually gives way.
This one doesn’t flip the formula. Blum has said that when he finally tried escargot as an adult, he didn’t need to walk anything back. He’s described the experience in blunt terms, comparing the taste to eating rubber soaked in dirt, and says the title stands as written.
The book is listed for sale through major retail outlets including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play, as well as through Page Publishing directly.
Studio CarryOnHarry’s take: there’s something genuinely funny about an author spending twenty-some years validating a sixth grader’s snap judgment about snails, and that’s the hook here, not the publishing deal behind it.
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Meiyen Kennedy has released a new dystopian novel, "The Ledger," published through Hawes & Jenkins. The book centers on Bridgett Kingsley, a woman living under the rule of an omniscient algorithm called The Ledger, which monitors behavior, regulates emotion and predetermines choice across an entire surveillance state. A routine review of her record exposes a truth that sets the story’s conflict in motion.
The publisher notes that Bridgett’s solitary moment of resistance expands into a wider movement that reaches multiple regions as others begin pausing before obeying directives and choosing prayer over compliance. The publisher describes the novel as building toward a central question: whether a system built for total control can withstand the force of individual conscience, and whether real freedom is found in total allegiance to a higher authority rather than in autonomy itself.
Kennedy’s background is in property management and education, fields that put her in regular contact with institutional systems and the people who move through them. The announcement credits that experience with shaping the novel’s depiction of bureaucracy and constraint, grounding a speculative premise in something closer to observed behavior than invention.
"I wanted to write a story that honors the sovereignty of Christ while confronting the very real tensions between faith and the systems that surround us," Kennedy said in the announcement. "The Ledger is about discovering that true freedom begins where our loyalty to Jesus becomes unshakeable, regardless of what the world demands."
The novel joins a steady stream of faith-driven speculative fiction aimed at readers looking for genre storytelling built around explicitly Christian themes, a corner of publishing that has kept finding an audience even as mainstream dystopian fiction trends toward secular surveillance-state anxieties. "The Ledger" is available in bookstores and through Apple iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Barnes & Noble.
Studio CarryOnHarry will be watching whether Kennedy’s dual background as educator and property manager gives this entry in the genre a sharper eye for institutional detail than most faith-based dystopias manage.
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