The 2024 Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry
Jack Covert used to tell us that one of his first insights when he started selling books was that business books could be sold in boxes. Working directly with authors, publishers, and companies who needed books in bulk quantities, he figured out how to move boxes of books around the country and around the world.
Jack was an expert in business books, of course, but he helped build the business book industry based on his knowledge of business and how to run one. Jack Covert thought of himself as a merchant, an he saw in this year’s Jack Covert Award winner a fellow merchant.
Previously Senior Vice President and Executive Publisher at John Wiley & Sons, where he oversaw a team of 85 staff, Matt Holt has acquired over 1,000 titles and published 10,000. Over his 29-year career, he has published works by prolific bestselling authors like Jon Gordon, Patrick Lencioni, Jeffrey Gitomer, and David Meerman Scott.
He is currently Editor-In-Chief of Matt Holt Books, a business and non-fiction arm of BenBella Books, founded in 2020. Matt Holt Books prides itself on offering an extraordinary degree of publisher-author partnership and author satisfaction. By maintaining a deep commitment to aggressive, creative, customized marketing, and offering extremely lucrative high-upside deals for our top authors, the imprint utilizes the world-class distribution of Simon & Schuster to help their authors achieve global success.
Matt Holt knows how to move books in boxes. A merchant of ideas, this year’s Jack Covert Award for Contribution to the Business Book Industry is Matt Holt.
