Nicholas Ciani

A book editor, media strategist, and publishing veteran who has spent a career finding the voices and ideas that define the conversation before anyone else sees them coming.

Over more than six years as an editor at Simon & Schuster—most recently as Executive Editor at the One Signal and Atria imprints—he built a list of acclaimed nonfiction that speaks for itself: Jason Stanley's Erasing History, called "a blueprint for the worldwide fascist attack on history" by Althea Butler; Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell, a New Yorker Best Book of 2022; Tamika D. Mallory's State of Emergency, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2021 selection; Alice Randall's "landmark" (Bookpage) My Black Country; and Nathalia Holt's The Beast in the Clouds, anAmazonTop 20 Books of 2025 selection. He has published numerous “best of the year” titles, with honors from The Economist, The New Yorker, Esquire, Kirkus, and more. His books have included a Nautilus Gold Medal winner, an ALA Stonewall Prize honoree, and multiple Silvers Grant work-in-progress honorees. He was a 2020 Publishers Weekly Star Watch nominee.

At One Signal he helped launch a new imprint at Simon & Schuster that produced bestsellers from Brian Stelter, Katy Tur, Amanda Montell, Maggie Smith, and more.

At Black Privilege Publishing he helped launch a new imprint at Simon & Schuster that championed diverse voices and produced multiple bestsellers from the likes of Charlamagne tha God, Dawn Staley, and Alice Randall.

Before that, he cut his teeth at The New Yorker, Macmillan, and Vigliano Associates, where he represented authors in fiction and nonfiction—including novelist Max Gross, whose The Lost Shtetl won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award.

Forged in newsrooms and editorial boards, he knows how to take a rough idea and turn it into something that lands—on bestseller lists, in reviews, and in the culture.