Praveen Madan Named CEO-Publisher At Oakland’s Berrett-Koehler
India-West Staff Reporter
OAKLAND, CA – Berrett-Koehler, a mission-driven publishing company, named Praveen Madan as its new CEO and publisher. The decision comes as current CEO and publisher David Marshall retires from BK after 17 years of dedicated service, the company said.
As CEO of Kepler’s Books since 2012, he has led a successful turnaround and reinvention of this legendary cultural institution.
His innovative strategies, such as embracing the nonprofit model, implementing community financing and governance, developing new revenue streams, and raising wages to build a strong team, are being replicated by many bookstores around the US, the company said in a statement.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers has been facing financial difficulties over the past year due to several factors, including the lingering effects of the pandemic and market pressures within BK’s areas of publishing. Madan’s vision and turnaround experience will guide the company through these challenges to emerge stronger than ever, the company said.
Madan said, “One of the reasons why I am accepting this challenge is the urgent necessity to reimagine the relationship between book publishers and bookstores. I would also love to see more publishers, bookstores, and authors adopt the human-first approach that Berrett-Koehler has pioneered. Our collective future is at stake.”
Praveen Madan is a nationally recognized leader in reinventing bookselling and building literary communities. In 2021, he co-convened the Reimagining Bookstores movement with a mission to strengthen communities, deepen literacy, and pay living wages to people working in bookstores. Reimagining Bookstores’ inaugural conference attracted nearly 600 participants from all walks of the bookstore ecosystem and was reported by Publishers Weekly to be “one of the most invigorating gatherings on independent bookselling in a generation.”
Madan holds an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. Before moving to the book industry, he spent a decade working at Kearney, the global management consulting firm.
