Amanda was VP and Director of
Subsidiary Rights for Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc. 1989-2003
Beginning at Bantam as Associate Direct, Domestic Rights, she worked with authors such as Daniel Goleman,
Dean Koontz, Stephen Hawking, Christiane Northrup, Bill Bryson, Elizabeth McCracken, Allen Mandelbaum, Tom Levenson, Tami
Hoag, and Norman Schwarzkopf. From 1989–1998, in addition to
her work for Bantam, Amanda served as Subsidiary Rights Director for BDD Audio, and from 1995–1998, she was also Subsidiary Rights Director for Broadway
Books during its launch.
She
was also a founding Member of Random House Corporate Steering Committee (1998-2003) for the in-house RMS software project.
This integrated contracts and royalty payment system continues to set new industry standards for subsidiary rights accounting
and statements.
From
1980-1989, Amanda ran the New York marketing office of the University of California Press, an
award-winning West Coast publisher.
While
at UC Press, she orchestrated national publicity campaigns for bestselling trade books such as Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks and The California
Dante: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso translated by Allen Mandelbaum and illustrated by Barry Moser, Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, et al, Revolt Against Regulation
by Michael Pertschuk, and The Managed Heart
by Arlie Hochschild.
Her first job in publishing
was at Harcourt (then HBJ) and Helen and Kurt Wolf Books. At HBJ, she helped sell rights for new books by the
authors Quentin Bell, Jan Morris, Max Frisch, Gunter Grass, Jessamyn West, Ivan Doig, Stanislaw Lem, and brought several
classic backlist titles, such as Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co., back into print.
Education:
Amanda holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, where she taught composition.
She is a past-president of Women in Scholarly Publishing (WISP) and a former board member of the Association of American
University Presses (AAUP).
Speaking Engagements:
Amanda Mecke interviewed writers about book proposals at the June 2009
Annual Washington Writers Conference at George Washington University, DC, sponsored by the American Independent Writers Association
(formerly Washington Independent Writers)
http://www.washwriter.org/
She was an invited agent in
2008 as well.
