Patricia Wood, author of Lottery (which was shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize), sent the following e-mail from Honolulu in response to last week's column by Robert Gray--'Ideas That Work' at GLiBA:

Your article struck a chord. I went to my local bookstore today. I'm doing a workshop on writing at a school and wanted to make sure my '10 good books on writing" list conformed/complemented what they carry. They place a "shelf talker" on titles local authors recommend as good books for writers and I will send my students there to buy them.

They asked me to give a talk next month on the publication process (they are located in a mall) and another on getting kids to read. NOT a book signing--I think it's important as an author to do things for bookstores that DON'T involve promotion. I also volunteered to talk at a book fair that high school students are holding there.

I guess the point is, they don't hide when I come into their store. (Yes, I own a Kindle--I live on a boat and have limited space--but I left there with an armful of books that I purchased as well)

Light bulbs: Figuring out ways to get people in a store works both ways. Authors need to go out of their way to help booksellers survive and not just by doing self-serving signings. Okay. My rant's done lol!!--Much aloha, Pat.

The American Booksellers Association Board of Directors sent a letter to the Department of Justice requesting that it investigate practices by Amazon.com, Wal-Mart and Target "that it believes constitute illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers," according to Bookselling This Week.

In the letter, the ABA board observed: "We would find these practices questionable were they taking place in the market for widgets. That they are taking place in the market for books is catastrophic. If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.

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More indie bookseller reaction to the book pricing war: The Dallas Morning News interviewed Kyle Hall, director of marketing and events at Legacy Books, Plano, Tex.

"We've been open almost a year now and our business has never been primarily driven by the standard bestseller lists," Hall observed. "I think there are two reasons for that: 1) People shop independent bookstores for things beyond the bestsellers anyway--and I can't stress enough how pleased we are that this was true of Legacy Books from opening day, and 2) by the time we opened last year, the manner in which the Targets and the Costcos and the Wal-Marts and supermarkets, etc., skim bestseller sales from other booksellers was well established, so that now the bookstores that have lasted are able to sit on the sidelines and watch the big box stores and online retailers sell at a loss and hope to make it up by selling you shampoo, cereal and pet food from their other departments. They will lose money on every copy of those books; they are selling below wholesale, as you know."

Hayley Wright, owner of Between the Covers, Bend, Ore., told the Bulletin that "people come to her store not for the price of the book, but for the kind of book. Sure, she might have a copy of Dan Brown’s newest novel, but it's very possible that it’s cheaper at Costco or Wal-Mart. However, a customer probably won’t find anything by Jack Kerouac or Tom Robbins on the shelves of a big-box store, Wright said. And, at her store, people will find someone who knows something about literature."

"We add to people's experience," she said. "We can make recommendations to people who read and are looking for a good book."

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This Sunday, October 25, the Independent Booksellers of New York City and the Emerging Leaders Project of the ABA will host "Hunting for the Future of Bookselling," from 4-6 p.m. at the Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, N.Y.

Author and bookseller Vincent McCaffrey will kick things off with a reading from his first novel, Hound (Small Beer Press), a mystery starring a bookseller who gets caught up in the drama after an ex is killed, and set against the backdrop of his own history with Boston and its used bookstores (including his own).
 
McCaffrey will then join three Brooklyn booksellers on a panel about the past, present, and future of bookselling. Panelists include Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, co-owner of brand-new Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene; Christine Onorati, owner of WORD in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and Henry Zook, co-owner of Bookcourt in Cobble Hill.

To reserve your seat, call (212)587-1011, e-mail info@mysteriousbookshop.com with the subject line "HOUND" or RSVP at this Facebook link.
 
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Is Australian kitchen saleswoman Rebecca James the next J.K. Rowling? The Wall Street Journal asked this question now that "the 39-year-old mother of four has discovered that her debut novel Beautiful Malice, a gritty psychological thriller for teenagers upward, isn't merely to be published, but has become a publishing phenomenon that is sparking an aggressive bidding war world-wide."

C&W literary agency brought the slush-pile find to the Frankfurt Book Fair last week and "was struggling to keep up with offers from publishers that had received the manuscript. Even though the C&W agents have yet to meet Ms. James, the novel is set to be translated into at least 30 languages, and they envisage a series of similar 'sexy, psychological thrillers' from the author. . . . Bantam USA was so determined to acquire the rights, it bid up to $600,000 for two books (the second is a thriller titled Cooper Bartholomew Is Dead)," according to the Journal.

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Bookselling this Week explored the new space into which Wellington Square Bookshop, Exton, Pa., expanded in August when it "moved two doors down to a 3,700-square-foot storefront, where sales have doubled monthly and the space is nearly filled to capacity again."

"Our clientele has expanded each month," said owner Sam Hankin. "We host numerous book clubs. We have weekly children's reading hours, and we have an open microphone night, at which time students and adults can read their own material, or that of others. We also have local author signings, and are expecting to have more prominent authors schedule events in the near future. . . .  We intend to expand our retail collection with more exotic and eclectic items. We have been working with local artists to obtain paintings and other artwork on consignment, and in that we have already basically filled the expanded space, our visionary plans include warehouse space where excess inventory will be housed."

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100 Scope Notes showcased "Things Librarians Fancy," and asked, "Ever wanted to delve into the unexplored world of librarian culture? If you just said 'no,' I can't hear you. If you just said 'yes,' then today, my friend, is your lucky day." (Via the Boston Phoenix.) 

At Amazon.com, net sales in the third quarter ended September 30 rose 28% to $5.45 billion and net income rose 68% to $199 million.

The company offered an optimistic prediction for the fourth quarter, anticipating net sales between $8.125 billion and $9.125 billion, which would reflect a 21% to 36% increase compared with fourth quarter 2008.

Amazon also lowered the price of its recently debuted international Kindle e-reader by $20 to $259. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, "Kindle has become the number one bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars--not just in our electronics store but across all product categories on Amazon.com."

Today on All Things Considered: Jeff Kinney, author of the Wimpy Kid series.

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On CBS Sunday Morning: Valerie Bertinelli, author of Finding It: And Satisfying My Hunger for Life without Opening the Fridge (Free Press, $26, 9781439141632/1439141630).

The "man behind American Pie and About a Boy wasn't the obvious choice to take on The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second book in Stephenie Meyer's blockbuster teen vampire romance series." The Hollywood Reporter observed

How Chris Weitz fared will ultimately be determined by filmgoers when the movie is released November 20, but in an interview with THR, Weitz said his interactions with Meyer were frequent, noting that "we've had a real good collaboration. Crucially, she approved me as director, and she didn't have to. We had some discussions that were very important--my convincing her that I didn't want to take her baby and run away with it, or tell a story that was counter to the spirit of what she was trying to tell. I see myself, in the last few movies I've done, as adapting literary properties into film, so that's how I treated this one. We got along like a house on fire."

Simon Armitage, chair of judges for this year's T.S. Eliot Prize, observed that the 10 finalists are poets "who have dreamed and who have dared," the Guardian reported. Valerie Eliot, Eliot's widow, will present the winner with a £15,000 (US$24,635) check January 18, 2010.

The shortlist:

• The Sun-fish by Eiléan Ní Chuilleánain
• Continental Shelf by Fred D'Aguiar
• Over by Jane Draycott
• The Water Table by Philip Gross
• Through the Square Window by Sinéad Morrissey
• One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds
• Weeds & Wild Flowers by Alice Oswald
• A Scattering by Christopher Reid
• The Burning of the Books and Other Poems by George Szirtes
• West End Final by Hugo Williams

Writer and book critic John Freeman has written for many publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, People and the Wall Street Journal. Freeman won the 2007 James Patterson Page Turner Award and was recently named editor of Granta. He lives in New York City and London. His first book, The Tyranny of E-mail, was just published by Scribner.

On your nightstand now:

William Trevor's Love and Summer. British novelists seem to be rediscovering the '50s lately. First Ian McEwan with On Chesil Beach, and earlier this year Colm Toíbín with Brooklyn. I guess repression gives desire the necessary restraint to turn into longing, right? Anyway, now Trevor is resurrecting the period with the story of a woman who has to reconsider everything she knows for a passion that overtakes her. I watched soaps with my mother growing up, so I love melodrama.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Le Petit Prince. I love that he had a tree growing on his tiny moon planet, that he always looked dapper no matter how late he had stayed up, or how far he had travelled. I later discovered Saint-Expery had crashed his plane in the desert, and I loved his book even more for its brave, clear-eyed wisdom.

Your top five authors:

Jack Kerouac, because he wrote Whitman's bardic yawp into the American novel, James Baldwin for his melodrama and his moral seriousness, Virginia Woolf for her intelligence, George Orwell for his anger, and Mahmoud Darwish for the beauty of his longing.

Book you've faked reading:

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. When I first moved to New York in 1996, long after the Odeon was a tourist destination and cocaine was as much of a relic as Don Johnson, my roommates were in love with this book. I didn't feel like I even had to read it--I could simply absorb it through osmosis. I finally finished it years later, and I wished I had read it at the time.

Book you’re an evangelist for:

The Education of Henry Adams. The first modern American memoir, written by the Adams who was too smart to become president. It's a great account of what it is like to live through enormous technological change, so it'll be forever relevant, since I think we always feel like we're witnessing a huge leap forward--that is the nature of technology, to overwhelm us.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The latest Adrian Tomine book. Drawn & Quarterly publish his books beautifully, and as a Sacramento kid, I love watching him draw his own universe.

Book that changed your life:

The Education of Henry Adams. I read this in college the year e-mail became compulsory and felt a kinship with this mind, a hundred years dead, and to think he could do it all with this deeply uncool beard.

Favorite line from a book:

"Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death."--Gravity's Rainbow.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. The fury of the writing, the music of it, the sense of being aloft on this great magical strength . . . forgetting myself and anything else in the world. That happens only on a few occasions with reading; after that, no matter how good the book, I worry it is the memory of that first escape that keeps you going, as a reader.

"Probably no other president presents such a chasm between actual accomplishment and popular recognition," writes Robert Merry in this richly informative account of James K. Polk's administration.

In 1844, Polk went with the Tennessee delegation to the Democratic convention planning to sew up the vice presidential slot on the Van Buren ticket. Merry captures in vivid detail the tumult and politicking that ended with Polk being nominated as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency--the outcome of a party's convention was clearly not a foregone conclusion as in our day. Boulevard wits mockingly asked each other, "Who is James K. Polk?" After a contentious campaign and very close election, they would come to know him as the youngest man yet to assume the presidency (he was 49 upon inauguration) and one who declared in his campaign that he would be a one-term president.

Early in his tenure, the usually reticent Polk confided his four major goals to George Bancroft, his Secretary of the Navy: to settle the Oregon question with Great Britain and extend U.S. territory to the Pacific Ocean; to acquire California from Mexico; to revise the stifling tariff policy; and to revive an independent Treasury. These were ambitious plans for any president, but even more so for an uncharismatic and seemingly bland leader like Polk. Concerning the first two goals, Merry tells us, "While Polk was willing to risk war to fulfill his design on Oregon, it appeared he might actually need war to get what he wanted from Mexico." Brinkmanship became one of his signature strategies.

Despite appearances to the contrary, Polk had many strengths that enabled him to succeed. He focused on large ambitions. He was an indefatigable worker. He loved politics. And he was unstoppable in his drive toward victory. He also had many weaknesses: impatience, a love of intrigue and discomfort with face-to-face confrontations. In his discussion of the controversial two-year war with Mexico, Merry shows that Polk's weaknesses and his inability to instill a spirit of teamwork in his staff and military officers wound up prolonging the conflict. Polk convinced himself that the war was justified and necessary; that view is challenged to this very day and continues to cloud his reputation although presidential historians consider Polk to be the most effective one-term president in our history (and have ranked him just under the great ones). Merry's history gives Polk the credit he so richly deserves and helps us to appreciate his remarkable contributions.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A rich and detailed history of the four years when James K. Polk redrew the map of the United States.

In yesterday's issue, we quoted the Guardian's description of Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare. Unfortunately that description was inaccurate: Going Rouge is not a spoof on Sarah Palin's upcoming memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. Instead, Going Rouge is a collection of essays edited by Nation editors Richard Kim and Betsy Reed that includes pieces by, among others, Naomi Klein, Jane Mayer, Katha Pollitt, Jim Hightower, Christopher Hayes, Gloria Steinem, Joe Conason and Tom Frank. This is the inaugural title published by OR Books, founded by John Oakes and Colin Robinson, which will put out one or two books monthly in e-book format or via POD direct to consumers. More about OR here.

You already know about the current book pricing conflict that Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target and Sears are engaged in; a price war that probably won't end all price wars, and their own version of the old state fair Wall of Death motorcycle stunt, where two or three bikes whizzed around a cylinder, "defying gravity and the Grim Reaper!"

Titling this column the "Shame List" might reasonably cause you to think I'll be writing about those 10 inevitably hot--but now literally almost price-less--upcoming titles that have quickly become linked on a new list of their own (call it what you choose), defying retail gravity.

But I'm not writing about them. I bring up the Shame List only because it is an old, venerable independent bookseller creation that I am preemptively saving from potential misuse.

I recently heard the concept mentioned during a seminar at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association trade show in Cleveland. "The Art & Science of Buying & Selling Backlist" featured Michael Boggs of Carmichael's Bookstore, Louisville, Ky., Sue Boucher of Lake Forest Bookstore, Lake Forest, Ill. and Melissa Weisberg of Macmillan. The moderator was Anne Storan of Paragraphs Bookstore, Mt. Vernon, Ohio.

"Backlist used to be defined by publishers," said Boggs. "Now backlist is much more what you define backlist to be for yourself. Special offers aside, backlist is the books you want to have most of the time."

I was a backlist buyer for many years, so I was intrigued by the insights about a process that I already knew was, as the title suggests, on the thin borderline between the artistic and scientific. The Shame List offers the best of both worlds.

More specifically, the Shame List includes those backlist books every bookstore would be "embarrassed" and even "mortified" not to have in stock when a customer asks for them. Boucher brought up the term while discussing titles that may not turn regularly but are essential to any bookshop's credibility--books, as she put it, that "I'd hate not to have," the ones for which she has to ask herself the question: "How important is this book to me as a bookseller?"

Boucher observed that, when pulling returns, a report was never a sufficient guide for her. "I have to go through the sections myself. I know what the embarrassment factor is."

There are, of course, obvious choices for the Shame List, like Great Expectations or The Age of Innocence. Where it gets tricky is moving down an author's bibliography. Is Dombey and Son on the Shame List? Perhaps not. What about The House of Mirth? Probably. Ethan Frome? Maybe; maybe not. And, depending on where your bookstore is located, regional books can often be Shame Listers, as are books by midlist authors who happen to live in your area, whether or not their titles sell. It's only polite, after all.
 
What intrigues me beyond these categories, however, is the personal Shame List every bookseller develops over time; those books, for example, that you instinctively handsell in a conversation without even doublechecking the shelf to see if the title is on hand. You assume--sometimes at your peril if you aren't the buyer for that section--that it will be nestled in the stacks, waiting for you to pluck it free and place in the grasp of its next reader.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I had to consider my own Shame List and came up with just a few key titles that I recall having often handsold "sight unseen": 

• Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill
• Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
• The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
• The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac
• Train by Pete Dexter

Years ago (I looked it up, in fact, and the year was 2001), Slate ran a piece, "The Literary Critic's Shelf of Shame," in which book critics and literary journalists played "Humiliations," a parlor game from David Lodge's Changing Places "in which participants confess, one by one, titles of books they've never read."

There are no comparable humiliations on a bookseller's Shame List. It's what keeps us in the game.

I would love to hear what titles are on your personal Shame List. In particular, I'd like to hear from frontline booksellers who may not have direct control over backlist ordering, but run herd on their buyers to make sure key titles are always on the shelves.

Factoring in the passion and dedication of indie booksellers for handselling backlist gems, shame can be a good thing indeed. So, what's on your list?--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)