Quadrille has made a series of promotions and appointments within its sales teams, with Melanie Gray stepping up to become UK sales director, joining the board at the independent publisher.

The moves follow Faber's launch of indie sales force Faber Factory Plus, with Quadrille sales director Ian West leaving the company to join the new project in October as sales director.

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Simon & Schuster has appointed Meg Wang as editorial director for licensed properties.

She will be responsible for the publisher's licensed character list, which includes tie-ins for the likes of the Smurfs, the Nickelodeon portfolio, Mike the Knight and Octonauts. She will also direct the development of digital products for the characters.

She starts the newly created role on 28th November and joins from Penguin, where she was media and entertainment editorial director.

Michael Joseph has appointed Sam Humphreys to the role of publisher, in a move that will see Humphreys depart the post of publisher at Serpent's Tail just months after taking it up in March.

Humphreys will report to MJ m.d. Louise Moore, and will concentrate on acquiring fiction. She will take up the new post at the end of November.

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Kevin Conroy Scott has been appointed m.d. of the Charles Pick Consultancy.

CPC's owner Martin Pick continues to be Wilbur Smith's agent and also to be executive chairman of the agency.

Meanwhile Pick becomes chairman of Tibor Jones & Associates at the invitation of Conroy Scott, who founded the agency with Landa Acevedo-Scott in 2007.

Sophie Lambert, associate agent at Tibor Jones, and accountant Glyn Booth have both been appointed directors.

Icon Books m.d. Simon Flynn will leave the publisher at the end of the year, with non-executive director Philip Cotterell taking his place.

Flynn, who has worked at Icon for nearly 15 years, has decided on a career change and will become a secondary school science teacher.

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HarperCollins has appointed Katrina Troy, currently head of commercial affairs for Vintage and Mainstream Publishing, as commercial director for its fiction division.

Troy will join in January 2012 and report to group commercial director Tom Fussell. She will work with fiction publisher Kate Elton and be involved in acquisitions, budgets and forecasting.

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Vampirates author and long-time children's book publicist Justin Somper has set up Author Profile, a training company aimed at helping authors navigate the media and social networking.

Writers including Damian Kelleher, Graham Marks, Anita Naik and Jeremy Finch will be among the trainers in the new venture, co-founded by learning and development specialist Phillip Norman. Somper will run in-house training days for individual publishers and agents and well as out-of-house training for authors to book onto direct.

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Orion non-fiction publishing director Rowland White is moving back to Penguin in the role of publishing director for Michael Joseph.

White will focus on mainstream non-fiction and thriller-based fiction, and will report to MJ m.d. Louise Moore. Before joining Orion, he had previously worked for Penguin for 12 years.

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Hachette UK has appointed Matt Wright to the role of managing director distribution, effective immediately, promoting him from his role as finance director of Hachette Distribution.

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HarperCollins has hired an executive at Turner Broadcasting System Europe, which owns CNN, as its new chief operating officer.

Laura Meyer replaces Julian Thomas, who left the publisher in July after four years. She joins in mid-January 2012, will report to chief operating officer Keith Mullock and will sit on the HC executive board. Her initial responsibility will be upgrading the publisher's systems to deal with the change towards digital.

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