Shelf Awareness for Tuesday, August 2, 2005


Del Rey Books: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Dial Press: Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood

Pantheon Books: The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Peachtree Publishers: Leo and the Pink Marker by Mariyka Foster

Wednesday Books: Castle of the Cursed by Romina Garber

Overlook Press: How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix

Charlesbridge Publishing: If Lin Can: How Jeremy Lin Inspired Asian Americans to Shoot for the Stars by Richard Ho, illustrated by Huynh Kim Liên and Phùng Nguyên Quang

Shadow Mountain: The Orchids of Ashthorne Hall (Proper Romance Victorian) by Rebecca Anderson

News

Bookselling Notes: Moves, a New Web Site, Podcasting

At the end of the month, Carytown Books, Carytown, Va., is moving from its current location, where it's been almost 40 years, to a temporary space, then move to a new storefront next year, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

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Just Books, the Greenwich, Conn., bookstore that's been in business since 1949, is consolidating its operations in Just Books Too, the Old Greenwich branch that owner Jenny Lawton opened three years ago, PW Daily reported. Lawton said the new store has much foot traffic while the original store is, well, just a destination store. As a result, the company is setting up a delivery service and a book pickup program at a nearby photo shop.

Under longtime owner Warren Cassell, tiny Just Books indeed sold just books, mainly hardcovers, had an extensive reading program (usually offsite) and boasted some of the highest per-square-foot sales of any bookstore in the country.

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The Great Lakes Booksellers Association has set up a consumer Web site, Books-n-Authors.com, to promote book and author events in the region. On the site, booklovers can find out where authors are appearing and buy a signed copy from the store hosting the event. The site includes a link to the Heartland Independent Bestseller list, information about the winners of the Great Lakes Book Awards and a list of indies in GLBA territory.

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Larry Portzline, creator of bookstore tourism, has gone podcast: he has launched a weekly podcast featuring news about bookstore tourism and tips for listeners about planning their own bookstore road trips and literary adventures.

The debut program, available on Portzline's Web site, features news about the Southern California Booksellers Association's San Diego bookstore tour, the Senate's passage of reader privacy safeguards for the USA Patriot Act and a bookstore tourism tip.

HarperOne: Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster


NAIBA Trunk Show Unpacked

This venture is worth storing away for future use.

The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association's first Trunk Show, held last Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y., drew 80 people, including 40 booksellers from 25 stores, according to executive director Eileen Dengler. Besides the formal catalogue presentations from Random, HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, Penguin, Time Warner and Wiley, 16 other publishers, wholesalers and rep groups made appointments and conducted sales calls.

Josh Harwood at Houghton Mifflin told Dengler that he appreciated the "face to face with smaller accounts" and found the trunk show a good way to keep the "territorial dialogue alive."

For Lucille Smart of the College Store at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, the trunk show was "a great opportunity to see what was new and network with other booksellers," while Bill Reilly of the River's End Bookstore, Oswego, said he was "very happy with the publishers' presentations and to see reps I didn't know."

Park Street Press: An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey by Peter A Levine


Making Bookstore Dreams a Reality

As all booksellers know, the competition is rough, but many people continue to want to start bookstores. Here's a great way to learn how to do it right:

The next edition of Opening a Bookstore: The Business Essentials, the week-long workshop devoted to helping prospective booksellers learn what they need to launch a bookstore, will be held Sept. 19-24 in Stillwater, Minn. The workshop will overlap with the Midwest Booksellers Association Trade Show Sept. 23-25 in nearby St. Paul.

Subjects covered range from defining competitive advantages to understanding financial dynamics, store design and merchandising to choosing a computerized management system and selecting an opening inventory.

Facilitated by Donna Paz Kaufman and Mark Kaufman of the Bookstore Training and Consulting Group of Paz & Associates and co-sponsored by the ABA, the Stillwater workshop is the last to be held this year. For more information, go to Paz & Associates's Web site or call 800-260-8605.

G.P. Putnam's Sons: Take Me Home by Melanie Sweeney


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Fishing, Junk, Bingeing, Racing

It's August, so many shows are in reruns, but some continue to talk "live" with authors.

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Tomorrow on the Today Show, Barrett Seaman, author of Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You (Wiley, $25.95, 0471491195), tells perhaps too much about college life.

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Also on the Today Show: Sue Whitney, co-author of Decorating JunkMarket Style (Meredith, $19.95, 0696222825), talks trash, er,  junkmasters.

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Tomorrow Diane Rehm hauls in Dick Russell, author of Striper Wars: An American Fish Story (Island Press, $26.95, 1559636327).

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Tomorrow night, the Late Show with David Letterman speeds along with Jeff MacGregor, whose new book is Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death!: A Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR (HarperCollins, $25.95, 0060094710).

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Yesterday on Morning Edition, book lusty Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl recommended 10 memoirs. Listen in.

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Yesterday Fresh Air served up spaghetti westerns with cultural historian Christopher Frayling, whose new book is Once Upon A Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone (Abrams, $40, 0810958848).

Books & Authors

Display Ideas/Hooks for Books

August is Black Business Month, Happiness Happens Month, National Inventors Month and National Win with Civility Month.

Notable anniversaries this week include, on Saturday, the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945; on Sunday, the start of ground operations for Operation Desert Shield in 1990; also on Sunday, the anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, which marked the formal start of the Vietnam War.

This week's birthdays include:

Tuesday: James Baldwin (b. 1924), Isabel Allende (b. 1942), and Caleb Carr (b. 1955).

Wednesday: Ernie Pyle (b. 1900), P.D. James (b. 1920), Leon Uris (b. 1924), Martha Stewart (b. 1941), Steven Berkoff (b. 1937) and Steven Millhauser (b. 1943).

Thursday: Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. 1792), Knut Hamsun (b. 1895) and Louis Armstrong (1900-1971).

Friday: Conrad Aiken (b. 1899).

Saturday: Alfred Lord Tennyson (b. 1808), Andy Warhol (b.1928) and Lucille Ball (b. 1911).

Sunday: Garrison Keillor (b. 1942).--Edward Nawotka [ink@edwardn.com]


More...

Bookworld Offers Help Reaching Rich Niches

Ron Smith, chairman of Bookworld Companies, is a 100% believer in the 80/20 rule as applied to big publishers and the trade. "Their impressive sales forces reach 80% of potential business, more or less," he said to Shelf Awareness. "But they're probably missing 20% or so."

Because of some of its specialties, Bookworld's sales force has experience selling to much of that unrealized 20%, Smith said. With headquarters in Sarasota, Fla., and a warehouse in La Vergne, Tenn., the company's dozen reps call on, for example, Spanish-language accounts ranging "from bookstores to bodegas," New Age shops that "sell lots of incense," religion stores, including buying groups and church bookstores, hardware buying groups for craft titles, truck stops for music, African-American outlets, even Jungian societies.

In a kind of piggybacking effort to help publishers reach the unreached niches, Smith has set up what he calls the Super-Wholesaler program, which HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin have signed on for. Under the program, Bookworld's reps who sell the company's more than 100 client publishers ask customers if they're being called on by reps--in person or telephone. If the customers have no direct representation, Bookworld services them. The publishers sell to Bookworld in the same way they do to wholesalers, although with a higher discount to compensate the costs of the salespeople.

Just last week in announcing its new Spanish-language sales division, Bookworld said that it would use this approach for its 500 or so Spanish-language accounts, most of which are not called on by major publishers' sales forces. "But the dynamic applies to a hell of a lot more than the Spanish market," Smith said.

Smith said that one of Bookworld's reps surveyed 20 Spanish-language accounts in Los Angeles and found that none were called on by major publishers. "They were gratified to see us," Smith stated.

Bookworld has used commission reps but five or six years ago decided to invest in a sales force because "it was just impossible to get enough face time with buyers with 2,000 titles," Smith said. "There's a lot of power in having a sales force." He attributed a tripling of sales in the six months since Bookworld took on Daughters of St. Paul, Boston, as a publisher to the efforts of the sales force. He added that eight of the publishers he had picked up last year from Words Distributing had doubled sales.

Bookworld has other positive news involving a new division. The bindery it acquired late last year has so much business that it will move into a building under construction on Bookworld's property in Sarasota. While it had specialized in custom work--restoring Bibles, binding dissertations and collections--it is now, with the investment of new equipment, doing major orders, such as binding 20,000 children's books at a time. "It's so jammed now," Smith said. "20,000 books take up a lot of tabletops." Happily he added that the financial numbers for the bindery business are "so different from distribution."

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