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Who

A former publisher at Random House, Godoff runs the Penguin Press imprint at Penguin.

Backstory

The daughter of a music executive, Godoff was raised in New York and Beverly Hills (where she attended Beverly Hills High alongside Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss), and went to film school at NYU. She was a late bloomer in the publishing industry: When she was 30, she was temping at Simon & Schuster and landed a full-time job thanks to S&S's Alice Mayhew. In 1987 Godoff joined Atlantic Monthly Press, where she worked with Gary Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin. After an abortive move to Doubleday in 1990 that lasted just three weeks, she went back to Atlantic, then in 1991 moved yet again, this time to Random House.

By 1998, Godoff was president and publisher of the company's namesake imprint (known as "Little Random"), where she developed a rep for paying authors mammoth advances, such as $8 million for Charles Frazier's second novel. When she failed to match those advances with sufficiently big sales, Random House CEO Peter Olson sacked her in January 2003. A week later, Penguin chief David Shanks offered Godoff her own imprint, Penguin Press.

Of note

Godoff is one of the most respected editors in publishing; her authors over the years have included Salmon Rushdie, Caleb Carr, Annie Leibovitz, Ruth Reichl, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, and Kurt Andersen. Indeed, after Godoff was fired from Random House, many big names broke their contracts to follow her to Penguin, including Ken Auletta, John Berendt (whose mega-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil made his and Godoff's careers) and biographer Ron Chernow; ICM's Esther Newberg commented at the time that the number of defections was "unprecedented," although Carr and Frazier opted to stay with Random House.

Since the inauguration of Penguin Press there's been occasional in-house tension between Godoff's team and long standing prestige imprint Viking, such as when Penguin Press paid $8.5 million for former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's memoir, despite the fact that Greenspan had originally met with Viking president Claire Ferraro and her executive editor Rick Kot.

Personal

Godoff's partner is Annik LaFarge, a book industry veteran herself and the former publishing director at Bloomsbury. Until 2007, the couple lived at the Dakota on the Upper West Side; they sold the apartment for $3.25 million to hedge funder John Angelo.