Publishing executive joins rival house

NEW YORK -- A Random House executive forced out of her job for not generating enough profits has joined a leading rival, the Penguin Group.\nAnn Godoff, who published such best sellers at Random House as Caleb Carr's The Alienist and Zadie Smith's White Teeth, will become president and publisher of her own imprint at Penguin.\n"The Penguin Group is the perfect environment for those authors whose careers I've shared for many years and also those authors whose careers I've yet to find," Godoff said in a statement issued by Penguin on Monday.\nA Random House spokesman said he was not concerned about the possibility that Godoff might lure away some of her favorite writers.\n"Our authors' representatives know us as a company that honors its contracts and as a company who expects those who have contracts with us to honor them as well," said Random House spokesman Stuart Appelbaum.\nBesides Carr and Smith, Godoff's other writers at Random House included Salman Rushdie and John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Authors at Penguin include Saul Bellow, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell and Amy Tan.\nGodoff's hiring by Penguin comes 10 days after her sudden, blunt departure from Random House, part of the Random House Inc. publishing group owned by the German media giant Bertelsmann.\nGodoff was publicly criticized for failing to make enough money and her imprint was merged with Ballantine Books, a Bertelsmann imprint that specializes in mass market paperbacks.\nIn a statement Monday, Penguin Group CEO David Shanks said Godoff would be joining a company that welcomes "measured risks."\nRandom House Inc. and Penguin have a history of hiring each other's top people. In late 2001, Random House signed up Phyllis Grann, who as a Penguin executive had published Clancy, Tan and many other popular writers.