Iconoclast Books and Café, Ketchum, Idaho, may have lost a third of its annual income in less than two weeks last month when the Beaver Creek Fire "drove thousands of people out of the Wood River Valley during the peak of the summer tourism season, stopping a multi-million-dollar cash flow in mere days," the Twin Falls Times-News wrote. The fire also led to the cancellation of the four-day Sun Valley Writers' Conference, an important source of income for the store.

photo: Joe Cadotte/Times-News

Iconoclast owner Sarah Hedrick told the paper she worries about meeting payroll and can't take out a Small Business Administration loan because she is still paying off an SBA loan she took out after the 2007 Castle Rock Fire, which had a similar effect on the town's business.

"I'm in a position, with the way Amazon has changed people's book-buying habits, that I can't make it on my local business anymore," she said. "I can't. I absolutely am dependent on the tourism. And without that, that's where I feel like I can't recoup this."

But at the same time, she added, "You look at places where there were fires four or five years ago, the growth is beautiful. I don't feel that doomsday-ish. Winters after fires are some of the best. We're poised for one of the best ski seasons ever. It might be our best September on record, with everything rescheduling and everyone so determined to come and support this area."

Four days before his first visit to the Washington Post, which he is buying from the Graham family, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told the paper he will be asking many questions of management and staff.

In what the Post billed as Bezos's first interview since the purchase announcement, the new newspaperman said, "We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient. If you replace 'customer' with 'reader,' that approach, that point of view, can be successful at the Post, too."

He noted that he will provide "runway" financing: "financial support over a lengthy period in which the management can experiment to find a profitable formula for delivering the news," as the Post put it.

He said, too, "If we figure out a new golden era at the Post... that will be due to the ingenuity and inventiveness and experimentation of the team at the Post. I'll be there with advice from a distance. If we solve that problem, I won't deserve credit for it."

Effective Sunday, Amazon began collecting Virginia's 5.3% retail sales and use tax, due to a change in state law that applies to out-of-state Internet retailers that "maintain a distribution center, warehouse, fulfillment center, office or similar location in Virginia that facilitates the delivery of tangible personal property," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Amazon built distribution centers in Chesterfield County and Dinwiddie County in 2012.

"I think it's a long time overdue," said Nancy Thomas, president of the Retail Merchants Association in Richmond. "Really, the impact on the retail industry is that it finally levels the playing field, at least with Amazon. This is a great first step. What we really need is a federal bill to level the playing field for good."

As we reported last month, September 1 was also the day Amazon started collecting Georgia's 4% sales tax.

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In other sales tax news, Amazon "is taking a fight over sales tax in the state of New York to the U.S. Supreme Court. Exactly why is a little unclear," the Wall Street Journal reported, noting that the online retailer has filed documents "arguing that Amazon customers shouldn't be subject to sales tax in New York because the Seattle company's operations there aren't substantial enough to trigger the levies.... What seems odd about the filing is that Amazon has brokered deals with a variety of states--or chosen not to fight--allowing sales tax collection there."

Amazon contends that a New York State Court of Appeals ruling earlier this year that upheld the sales tax was in error "because Amazon's online advertising efforts through third parties in the state don't constitute a physical presence there," the Journal wrote. Overstock.com also filed a petition with the Supreme Court over New York's sales tax laws.

Kobo has suspended usage of the Goodreads API, the Amazon-owned service that it had been using for book reviews and ratings. Kobo's chief content officer Michael Tamblyn confirmed the suspension, telling Good E-Reader the company was "evaluating re-adding the API at some point in the future, but was cryptic on whether it would actually happen or not."

Noting that investing in the Goodreads API "in the long-term for reviews and ratings might be shooting yourself in the foot," Good E-Reader wrote that it might be more effective for Kobo to "develop their own system for user-generated content. It might be slow going at first, but would be the correct business path for long-term sustained growth."

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In related news, using data from MM Research Institute in Tokyo, the New York Times estimated that the e-reader market in Japan is divided into three parts, with Amazon at 38.3%, Kobo at 33% and Sony at 25.5%. Although this is much more evenly divided than in the U.S., the Times's take was that Amazon had bowled over the competition in Japan.

Some 470,000 e-reading devices will be sold in Japan last year and should climb to 520,000 next year, MM Research predicted. By comparison to the U.S., Japan has many fewer e-book titles available. For example, the Japan Kindle store has just 140,000 Japanese-language titles, Kobo has 130,000 and Sony 108,000.

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Some purchasers of e-books during April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012, have received notices from the retailers of those e-books that they will be eligible for rebates on those purchases as a result of settlements in the Justice Department suit against five major U.S. publishers for collusion related to the agency plan for e-books. Amazon has estimated that customers who bought e-books published by Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan during the period at issue will receive payments of between 73 cents and $3.82 for each book.

For more information, see the official e-book settlement website.

Conan Gorenstein, a senior sales representative for Hachette and former bookseller, died Sunday. He was 64. The New England Independent Booksellers Association posted the following on its Facebook Page yesterday: "Last night NEIBA and the bookselling community lost one of its best when Conan Gorenstein passed away. A sales rep for Hachette for many years he was a true bookman. He touched many booksellers and authors over the years and will be greatly missed."

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Frederik Pohl, "one of the giants of science fiction" who won more than 16 major writing awards--including six Hugos and three Nebulas--died yesterday, Tor.com reported. He was 93.

To find the "most beautiful bookstore in China, travelers just have to follow the yellow-striped road to an underground car park," CNN reported, noting that before Librairie Avant-Garde owner Qian Xiaohua "obtained the 4,000-square-meter underground space beneath Wutaishan Stadium in Nanjing in 1999, it was a government car park and, earlier, a bomb shelter."

"We chose this car park because it borders Nanjing University--it has become the second library for university students," said Qian. "There is an old saying in Chinese--turn something rotten into a miracle."

The main hall of the bookstore serves as a forum for talks and concerts, and a pair of long reading tables with more than 300 seats are available for readers, CNN wrote. Pillars in the store are etched with famous verses and poems.

"A good bookshop should provide space, vision and nurture the city with its humanitarian spirit," said Qian. "It's a place for people to have dreams in the city.... Independent book shops represent the well being of the city. When a city is losing its bookshops, it's actually losing something in its soul."

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance has chosen Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and physician Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown, Sept. 10) for its inaugural One Book, One SIBA read for #SIBA13 in New Orleans later this month.  

Fink will be joined by author Susan Larson (The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans), who hosts WWNO's The Reading Life, and SIBA booksellers for the One Book, One SIBA discussion.

Every bookseller can tell you one of those stories you would only experience working in a bookstore. On Saturday, Nick Berg of Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, Wis., had a "chance encounter" on the sales floor with an "enormous Harley-Davidson rider" who "looked like one of the Vikings from the Capitol One Venture Card television commercials and towered over me like a grizzly bear on its hind legs."

Lifting his mirrored sunglasses, the biker said, "I'm looking for The Song of the Lark." What happened next? Read Berg's entertaining post at the Boswellians blog.

A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam (Soho Press), a video that features Auymo, a chimpanzee who's doing a memory exercise. Ayumu has proven that chimpanzees have the ability to memorize and place a sequence of numbers after seeing it for less than a second. The task is nearly impossible for humans (you can try it here). A portion of all proceeds from sales of the book, in physical and digital, will go to Save the Chimps to help feed rescued chimps.

Charlie Hunnam (FX's Sons of Anarchy) and Dakota Johnson (The Social Network) have been cast in the roles of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele in the Universal Pictures and Focus Features adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Sam Taylor-Johnson is directing a script by Kelly Marcel and Michael De Luca. Deadline.com reported that Hunnam "has shown the ability to summon a dark edge which will come in handy in playing the emotionally damaged Christian Grey over the course of three movies."

Johnson is the daughter of actors Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. "It is not surprising the role went to a newcomer," Deadline.com wrote. "Nudity and erotic situations are plentiful in the book, and the movie will be no different, even though all involved are determined to get the film to an R rating." The film will be released August 1, 2014, in North America.

An international trailer for the next season of Downton Abbey shows, according to Deadline.com, "hugs and kisses, dancing and brawling, smile and scowls, lots and lots of meaningful glances, even advice on a life-or-death decision." The series lands in the U.S. January 5 on PBS.

This morning on the Today Show: Lori Duron, author of Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son (Broadway, $15, 9780770437725).

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This morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe: Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, authors of Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America (Touchstone, $27.99, 9781476727936). They will also appear tomorrow on MSNBC's the Cycle and Fox Radio's Alan Colmes Show.

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This morning on Good Morning America: Si Robertson, author of Si-cology 1: Tales and Wisdom from Duck Dynasty's Favorite Uncle (Howard, $22.99, 9781476745374). He will also appear today on Extra and tomorrow on Fox & Friends.

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This morning on Fox & Friends: Lil BUB, subject of Lil BUB's Lil Book: The Extraordinary Life of the Most Amazing Cat on the Planet (Gotham, $16, 9781592408504).

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Today on NPR's Diane Rehm Show: Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (Little, Brown, $27, 9780316182904).

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Today on NPR's All Things Considered: J.M. Coetzee, author of The Childhood of Jesus (Viking, $26.95, 9780670014651).

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Today on MSNBC's the Cycle: John U. Bacon, author of Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football (Simon & Schuster, $26.99, 9781476706436). He will also appear today on ESPN Radio's College Football and ESPN2's Olbermann and tomorrow on Fox Business's Lou Dobbs Tonight.

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Today on Tavis Smiley: Richard N. Haass, author of Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order (Basic, $25.99, 9780465057986).

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Today on Charlie Rose: Shane Salerno, co-author of Salinger (Simon & Schuster, $37.50, 9781476744834).

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Tomorrow on a repeat of Ellen: Kirstie Alley, author of The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine al Dente) (Atria, $25, 9781451673586).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Diane Rehm Show: Norman E. Rosenthal, author of The Gift of Adversity: The Unexpected Benefits of Life's Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections (Tarcher, $27.95, 9780399163715).

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Tomorrow on Tavis Smiley: Terry McMillan, author of Who Asked You? (Viking, $27.95, 9780670785698).

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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report: Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (Spiegel & Grau, $16, 9780385523394).

The Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Award winners were announced over the weekend at LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention.

The John W. Campbell Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2011 or 2012, sponsored by Dell Magazines, went to Mur Lafferty.

The Hugo winners:

Best Novel: Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi (Tor)
Best Novella: "The Emperor's Soul" by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
Best Novelette: "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi" by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
Best Short Story: "Mono no aware" by Ken Liu (The Future Is Japanese, VIZ Media)
Best Related Work: Writing Excuses, Season 7
Best Graphic Story: Saga, Volume 1 written by Brian K. Vaughn, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): The Avengers screenplay and directed by Joss Whedon (Marvel Studios, Disney, Paramount)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: "Blackwater" written by George R.R. Martin, directed by Neil Marshall (HBO)
Best Editor (Short Form): Stanley Schmidt
Best Editor (Long Form): Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Best Professional Artist: John Picacio
Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Jason Heller, Sean Wallace, and Kate Baker
Best Fanzine: SF Signal edited by John DeNardo, JP Frantz, and Patrick Hester
Best Fancast: SF Squeecast
Best Fan Writer: Tansy Rayner Roberts
Best Fan Artist: Galen Dara

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The Crime Writers' Association announced finalists in three categories of the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards, the Bookseller reported. Winners will be named October 24 in London. The book finalists are:

CWA Gold Dagger
Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman
Dead Lions by Mick Herron
 
CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger
Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller
Something You Are by Hanna Jameson
The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay
Shadow of the Rock by Thomas Mogford
 
CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger
Ghostman by Roger Hobbs
Ratlines by Stuart Neville
The Sentinel by Mark Oldfield
Capital Punishment by Robert Wilson

Earlier this summer, the Chuckanut Writers' Conference held its third annual event in Bellingham, Wash., at Whatcom Community College. Co-presented by the college and Village Books (and partly sponsored by Shelf Awareness, among others), the theme this year was "Inspiration into Action," ably put into practice by the enthusiasm of the 16 faculty members and the 150 attendees.

The faculty members included a publicist (Alice Acheson), educators, a publisher (Gary Luke from Sasquatch Books), agents and, of course, writers, with three Writers' Studio plenary sessions, 25 breakout sessions, faculty readings, faculty book signings, and even a bit of tai chi. From "Writing a Book Proposal" (Suzanne Paola) to "Life Story" (Brenda Peterson) to "Making Chicken Soup from Chicken Scratch" (Wendy Call), it all made for a very full and rewarding weekend.

Garth Stein opened the conference with "The Writer and Society." His talk was inspirational and rousing; Frances McCue said it "ignited a sense of courage about writing." Naseem Rakha's plenary speech, "The Radical Rib," was igniting also--passionate and heartfelt, and she strode about the stage like a performance artist and pushed the audience to "Be honest. Be true. Be radical. Be a writer." She spoke of the magic that is story. "In order to find your passion you have to get through what blocks you." And "Writing is where the sticky and scary stuff is if you write with passion." If you are spending your time writing, make sure what you are writing you are passionate about, because life goes by very fast.

Frances McCue gave another stimulating, kinesthetically adept plenary talk about "The Mighty Contraption," confirming the impression that many of the faculty members are also, in fact, performance artists. She likened the writer's work to a contraption, saying that it "can be a fragile thing, and some screws could pop out in the feedback process." How does one protect the contraption? One way is to be careful about the language you use to get feedback. Your readers may not know what you want, so make sure they are reading what you think you have written. You should be able to agree on at least that. "What we all want more than anything is a good reader." She is a not a fan of altering one's writing because of "community feedback;" the artist must stay in charge of the contraption. It's not a well-oiled machine.

For a different, more nuts-and-bolts kind of inspiration, in "Marketing Is Everyone's Job," Alice Acheson said authors have to bear some responsibility for marketing to find a paying audience. She had no magic for authors; instead, she had a plethora of advice, from a six-page author questionnaire to the creation of a short, verbal pitch: you have no idea to whom you might be talking, and to whom they might be related. The greatest marketing tool of all is the voice.

Gary Luke, in his "Life of the Book," answered the question, "Why does it take so long to make a book?" with a 60-step response. Even the humorous reasons had more than a grain of truth. Some of the steps: The author gets an idea. Author turns in manuscript only two months late. Hooray. Editor lavishes praise upon the author but urges major revisions--the manuscript is 10,000 words too long. A year after the start, the sales department says the title is too boring and won't sell books. Editor scrambles to come up with an alternative and negotiates a happy solution, absent his own sense of what the book should be called. Repeat above for subtitle. Readers flock to stores after hearing clever author on NPR. Tornado sweeps across the Southeast and Norway declares war on Sweden. The buzz on the book drops.

"Inspiration into Action" was an appropriately named conference: the attendees all seemed to be wholeheartedly serious and enthusiastic, as were the faculty members and the associates who put the conference on. One thing stood out, which hopefully is the norm at all conferences like this: the faculty were unstinting in their generous praise of each others' works. I bought three books at the mini-store that Village Books had set up, based purely on authors' praises in their sessions. That's good selling. --Marilyn Dahl, editor, Shelf Awareness for Readers

The controversial critic Stanley Crouch has worked for 30 years to complete his two-volume biography of saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. The wait is understandable considering Crouch's output during this time: a dozen books (e.g., Notes of a Hanging Judge, The Artificial White Man), poetry, jazz criticism, television spots, NPR commentary and New York Daily News columns. In Kansas City Lightning, the first volume of his epic biography, he gathers interviews, primary news stories, early recordings and period photographs and spins them with a novelist's touch into the story of Parker's journey from cruising the jazz clubs of "Boss Tom" Pendergast's wide-open 1930s Kansas City to 1940 Harlem, trying to jam his way into a full-time gig at Clark Monroe's Uptown House. When this volume ends, Parker is only 20 years old and already a father, a heroin addict and the genius who caused his fellow Midwestern musicians to marvel at his sounds, "devoid of vibrato, notes flying thick as buckshot, slapping chords this way and that, rambling quicker with more different kinds of rhythms than they'd ever heard from a saxophone."

Charlie Parker's tragic story has been told before, perhaps most memorably in the 1988 movie Bird, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Forest Whitaker, but Crouch's version is as much about the birth of modern jazz and "Negro" (Crouch's usage) history as it is about Parker. The southwest jazz circuit at the time featured nearly all the giants who at some point earned their chops in Kansas City. To hear Crouch lovingly describe Bill Basie and Lester Young or Hot Lips Page and Jimmy Rushing is to be there at a smoky table in Lena's club on 18th Street. He can be forgiven if this enthusiasm produces prose that sometimes gets away from him, as in this description of a typical after-hours cutting competition: "Chu Berry came through Kansas City and pushed his foot through the bell of his tenor and up the butts of the roughest men in town."

The Charlie Parker of Kansas City Lightning is "lean as a telephone wire" and overwhelmed by his mother, Parkey, who raised him in a tough neighborhood. He doesn't care much for school (Crouch quotes him as saying, "I went in as a freshman, and I left as a freshman"); when it comes to learning to play like Roy Eldridge on trumpet or Buster Smith on alto, he schools himself. While Crouch spends considerable time describing Parker's young romance with Rebecca Ruffin and their marriage, parenthood and separation, the real romance of his early life came on the dark streets, where Kansas City provided plenty of dope, women and booze to musicians who could see "the high and mighty get low down and dirty, the low down and dirty get high and mighty... and [see] what women might do for the excitement of experiences with... these colored fellows who appeared free and drifting on a cloud of glamour, gifted with the ability to shape moods with sound."

This romance with "the life" may have ultimately brought Parker down, but that is for Crouch's second volume. In Kansas City Lightning, Bird is still working at his music, moving up the jazz ladder and making his mark... all in the place where "the blues got shouted, purred, whispered, and cried in such inventive style that the city became the third great spawning ground for jazz after New Orleans and Chicago." Apparently, in the case of Kansas City and its jazz stars, lightning struck 18th Street more than once. --Bruce Jacobs

Shelf Talker: This first volume in the epic biography of Charlie Parker showcases Stanley Crouch's encyclopedic knowledge of jazz history and effusive prose.