The American Booksellers Association has begun to reorganize its staff, a process that has led to the creation of several new senior staff positions and the letting go of five people, according to Bookselling this Week. Among initial changes:

• Meg Smith is now the membership and marketing officer.
• Dan Cullen is the content officer, heading a newly created content department.
• Mark Nichols is the industry relations officer.
• Jill Perlstein is the meetings and plannings officer.

Len Vlahos continues as COO and Eleanor Chang as CFO. Details regarding other positions will be announced in the coming weeks.

"I was charged by the association's Board of Directors to make ABA both more efficient and better prepared to meet the new and myriad challenges facing independent booksellers," said ABA CEO Oren Teicher. "This reorganization, which is the result of many months of analysis and investigation, is the first step in that process."

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The 2009 holiday season was generally upbeat for independent bookstores as sales declines at some bookshops "were outnumbered by modest, and sometimes robust, gains at others. Booksellers from across the country reported that the Local First movement was bearing fruit, and several reaped the benefits of creative, homegrown marketing campaigns," Bookselling this Week reported.

"We had a nice increase over 2008," said Christine Onorati, owner of WORD, Brooklyn, N.Y., of the shop's year-end 30% gain. "We're pretty new, so I don't think we're typical. We're still not where we need to be, but we're getting there."

Like many other booksellers, Diane Patrick of Snowbound Books in Marquette, Mich., cited winter weather as a factor in her 10% jump in sales: "We got tons of snow, which puts people in the mood to read. Everything just gelled this year. People started buying early, around Thanksgiving. So we just kept ordering because if you don't have books, people can't buy them. We ordered mostly ones and twos, but also fives and tens of some of the bestsellers."

She also noted that the local newspaper "ran a really big Shop Local campaign, which a lot of small businesses tied into. Dozens of us did tiny ads and kept repeating them throughout the season. I thought this tied in nicely with the whole IndieBound ethic, and I think it really helped sales."

Beth Golay, marketing manager at Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, Kan., praised the Midwest Booksellers Association catalogue, which was distributed "through our local newspaper on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and that alone brought more new faces into the store than ever before. The publishers were well represented with great selections in the catalog this year, and the titles were flat-out fun to sell."

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Sales at Barnes & Noble during the nine weeks ended January 2 fell 5%,, to $1.1 billion and sales at stores open at least a year fell 5.4%. Sales at Barnes&Noble.com rose 17%, to $134 million, including nook e-reader sales.

The sales slip led the company to lower its expected earnings to a range of $1.20-$1.40 per share from a range of $1.30-$1.50. Shares of Barnes & Noble closed at $18.70, down 2.5%, on a day the Dow Jones was up 0.3%.

B&N CEO Steve Riggio said that orders for the nook "remained strong throughout the holiday season, and, in fact, accelerated after we announced that we had sold out our initial supply. Demand remains strong in the new year and greater than our supply, however, we expect production to catch up with demand and be fully stocked in our stores in the next few months."

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Borders Group's e-bookstore will be featured on the Alex, the e-reader from Spring Design that is being introduced in late February with a retail cost of $399. Borders's e-bookstore, which will be powered by Kobo (Shelf Awareness, December 15, 2009), will be available later this year.

Borders Group CEO Ron Marshall commented: "Our agreement with Spring Design represents another step in our digital strategy, which continues to focus on offering book lovers . . . high quality content on the device of their choosing."

The Alex e-reader will allow users to buy and read e-books from other sources and uses Google Android software, Reuters noted. Last November, Spring Design sued Barnes & Noble, charging that the nook e-reader copies Spring Design's dual screen design. The two companies had explored a partnership.

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Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books, Oxford, Miss., was interviewed by Poets & Writers magazine in the inaugural installment of a new column, Inside Indie Bookstores. Howorth spoke with Jeremiah Chamberlin about his initial vision for Square Books, how a bookstore can stay relevant in the 21st century and the future of independent bookselling. 
 
In reply to a question about the future of indie bookstores, Howorth said, "It's a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it's a difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money--by selling crap--would be trying to get into the book business."

Howorth also observed that in terms of the future of books, he is excited about "what's happened at Square Books, Jr. We're selling more children's books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens... if you go in there and hang around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a thing as a digital book."

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Books-A-Million is opening several more stores in the mid-Atlantic region: in the Park City Center in Lancaster, Pa., and in the Gallery at Market East in Philadelphia.

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Amicus Books, Maryville, Calif., will close March 1 after five years in business. The Appeal-Democrat reported that owners James and Kara Davis "admitted they could only fight the forces of technology and discounting for so long."

"Today, via the Internet, there is a mega-bookstore in virtually every home," James Davis observed. "The hope was that community members would see the value in having a literary arts center, and support that idea with their purchases and donations of books. Although many have responded to that hope positively, it has been a slow but inevitable decline."

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Book trailer of the day: The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin (Harper).

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Congratulations to our friend Chris Kahn, who has joined the Independent Book Publishers Association, where he will manage vendor relations, advertising, sponsorship and media partnership opportunities. He replaces Andrea Nathan, who is leaving IBPA at the end of the month, and he continues in his sales and marketing role at earlyword.com.

Kahn was formerly Western advertising director for Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and School Library Journal. He also worked at NuvoMedia, which created the Rocket eBook.

He may be reached at 925-284-3542 or 415-806-5980 or chris@ibpa-online.org.

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Davida Breier has been appointed manager of fulfillment services at Johns Hopkins University Press. She was formerly marketing director at National Book Network, where she oversaw NBN Fusion. Earlier she was sales and marketing director for Biblio Distribution. She is also a published author and photographer.

Breier replaces Bill Bishop, who is retiring.

Hopkins Fulfillment Services has 14 clients, including the University of Washington Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Georgetown University Press, Brookings Institution Press, University Press of Kentucky, Catholic University of America Press and University of Massachusetts Press.

 

In December, general retail sales exceeded expectations, rising 2.9% compared to the same month in 2008, according to Thomson Reuters, and several retailers raised their earnings forecasts "after reporting healthy December sales gains, the fourth month in a row of year-over-year sales increases," the Wall Street Journal reported.

"It's a story of the turning of the corner for the retail industry. We are probably now outside of the recession, and getting the first slow recovery," said Michael Niemira, chief economist for the International Council of Shopping Centers, which projected that "annual sales will increase 3% to 3.5%, the biggest jump since 2006," the Journal wrote.

The New York Times reported that "retailers, by keeping tight control over their inventories, were able to avoid deep discounting. And many consumers finally surrendered, buying what they needed in a last-minute sales surge right before Christmas... some 75% of retailers beat analysts’ estimates--the most companies to do so since March, 2007."

"The consumer blinked first," said Bill Dreher, a senior research analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities.

"The window shoppers are turning into spenders," Jharonne Martis, director of consumer research for Thomson Reuters, added while also offering a note of caution: "Until the unemployment number heals, we’re not going to see consumers come back. That is the one economic indicator that all consumers understand."

 

The Book Industry Study Group is sponsoring two webcasts in the next month:

Understanding BookServer: The Power to Find, Buy or Borrow Any Digital Book in Any Format at Any Time will be held on Tuesday, January 19, at 1 p.m. in New York City. Presenters are Peter Brantley, director of the BookServer Project, and Keith Fahlgren, publishing technology consultant at Threepress Consulting.

BISG described the webcast this way: "As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have. In answer to this, BookServer has been developed as an open system for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. During this presentation, two of the those closest to the BookServer project will explain its genesis and vision, discuss the components of the BookServer architecture and highlight opportunities across the supply chain."

Digital Book Printing: What Can Digital Do (Or Not Do) For You? will be held Thursday, January 28, at 2 p.m. in New York City. Presenters are Kurt Biedler, senior manager, POD vendor management, Amazon.com; Sara Davis, manager of distributed books and inventory, Harvard University Press; and Lynn Terhune, global digital print administrator, Wiley.

About this webcast: "Much has been written about the benefits of print on demand and ultra short run printing, including reduced inventory investment, increased speed to market and the end of out-of-print titles. Although certainly valuable for these reasons, taking advantage of print on demand technology is a significant business decision that must be made on a title-by-title basis. So how do you decide if the move to digital printing is right for you and your company?"

For more information, go to bisg.org.

Dan Cotler, a retired Berkley Publishing Group and Tower Books veteran, died on December 29 of cancer. He is survived by his wife, Heidi Cotler, longtime v-p of books and magazines at Tower Books; two children, Nate and Aaron; and his first grandchild, expected later this year.

Friends will celebrate Cotler's life with a Hawaiian luau on Saturday, January 16, at the Benicia Veteran's Memorial Hall, 1150 First St., Benicia, Calif. 94510, 3-7 p.m.

Please send any remembrances to the National Cancer Society, ALS Association, the MS Society, NPR or the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Notes may be sent to Mr. & Mrs. Daniel Cotler, 1550 Karen Dr., Benicia, Calif. 94510.

 

Bethanne Patrick (aka the Book Maven, standing far right) presides over the first gathering of the Virtuous Circle, a kinder, modern-day version of the famed Algonquin Round Table. The group--book folk all active on Twitter--didn't solve all of publishing's problems, but they did enjoy lunch yesterday at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel, and are planning future gatherings.

 

 

This week we're reprinting pieces from 110/110 (Shelf Awareness, January 4, 2010), the book that contains 110-word contributions from 110 authors, poets and graphic novelists on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of University Book Store, Seattle, Wash., which falls this Sunday, January 10. Our fifth and last excerpt is the piece by Jim Lynch, whose first novel, The Highest Tide, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. He lives with his wife and their daughter in Olympia, Wash.

 

University Book Store helped fix the writing fantasy in my mind during my first and favorite year of college. I prowled the Ave for used records and books, skipped classes to read novels, and crashed every party I could find as this crazed notion of being a novelist bloomed. I copied down my favorite sentences by Kesey, Fitzgerald, Chandler, Didion, and Robbins, hoping the brilliance would rub off, then stood in a line that spilled onto the sidewalk to meet the whacko-genius himself, Tom Robbins, smiling beneath his mustache inside this book store, signing copies of his rowdy novels for beautiful giggling women. Nothing looked more fun than being him.

 

 

Sunday on CBS Sunday Morning: Walter Isaacson, author of American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane (Simon & Schuster, $25.99, 9781439180648/1439180644).

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Sunday on Sunday Today in New York: Gabrielle Bernstein, author of Add More ~ing to Your Life: A Hip Guide to Happiness (QNY/Langenscheidt, $14.99, 9780843716559/084371655X).

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Sunday on NBC's Weekend Today: Ron Insana, author of How to Make a Fortune from the Biggest Bailout in U.S. History: A Guide to the 7 Greatest Bargains from Main Street to Wall Street (Avery, $26, 9781583333648/1583333649).

The Storm in the Barn, written and illustrated by Matt Phelan, won the 2010 Scott O’Dell award. The story of a boy growing up in Dust Bowl America, published by Candlewick Press, was honored with the $5,000 prize given annually for a distinguished work of historical fiction for young people; published by a U.S. publisher; set in South, Central or North America; and written by a U.S. citizen.

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Three Percent named its 25-title fiction longlist for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award. The complete longlist, featuring "authors from 24 different countries, writing in 17 different languages, and published by 15 different publishers," can be found here.

 

Steve Hamilton's first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author; since then, he has either won or been nominated for every other major award in the mystery business. His ninth and newest novel, The Lock Artist, being published by Minotaur this month, is the story of a young man named Michael who was traumatized at the age of eight and who hasn't uttered a word since then. But he does have one special, unforgivable talent--a talent that will draw him into a world from which he may never escape.
 
On your nightstand now:
 
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. I haven't gotten to the really bad stuff yet. I have a feeling this book is going to keep me up at night.
 
Favorite book when you were a child:
 
Any of the Hardy Boys mysteries. Or any book with Alfred Hitchcock on the cover. (The Three Detectives series or those paperback anthologies with stories from the magazine.) I just ate those up. Those books made me want to be a mystery writer when I grew up.
 
Your top five authors:
 
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Chandler, Denis Johnson, Richard Russo. (I was a fan of Russo since his first book! I feel like somebody who was into an obscure rock group before they made it big.)
 
Book you've faked reading:
 
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I literally faked reading this for days at a time in junior high school. It was more about the horrible time I was having in that penitentiary of a school than the book itself. I should go back and actually read the damned thing.
 
Book you're an evangelist for:
 
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. More mind-blowing than any piece of fiction.
 
Book you've bought for the cover:
 
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson. This was a long time ago, but I seriously didn't know anything about Thompson until I picked up that book. How can you resist that crazy Ralph Steadman drawing on the cover?
 
Book that changed your life:
 
I've got to mention two: Dancing Bear by James Crumley and When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block. I can't overstate how much these two books made me want to write a hardboiled novel of my own. I'm just glad I got to thank both authors in person.
 
Favorite line from a book:

"Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you."   --From Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.

(It's just my favorite line from this week, mind you. Next week, it will change again.)
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
 
A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Imagine picking up that book and having no idea what you're about to experience.
 

Elias Khoury begins his most recent novel by listing all the characters on page one. The list continues over onto page two, the sentence ending by informing the reader that all of these people are dead.

That's not Khoury's only deviation from standard storytelling. Each of the seven chapters of this short novel begins the same way, announcing the death of the shoeshine man, with paragraphs repeating themselves and only the language varying a little. Little Gandhi, the shoe shiner outside the American University in Beirut, has been shot and has fallen dead over his shoeshine box. From this starting point, each chapter opens up in widening ripples to include a variety of other characters and stories-within-stories--in fact, the 194-page novel names more than 100 characters or almost a new character every two pages. That's a lot of characters.

Khoury's point, which he repeats in a refrain, is that the story is the characters. One incident reminds the unnamed narrator of another and yet another, beginning one here, ending one there, most of them first told to him by Alice, a 60-something prostitute in Beirut whose life has repeatedly crisscrossed through the shoeshine man's. However, Alice tells lies. There are holes in her story. You believe what you choose.

Why exactly is Abd al-Karim nicknamed Little Gandhi? It's never disclosed. As the well-meaning, heartful little man at the center of the multi-branching tale, Gandhi tries to solve the problem of the professor's dog (who dies) and his own mentally troubled daughter (who runs away) while trying to keep food on the table. His hands have become as black as the shoes he shines.

The cumulative effect of this kind of storytelling is powerful, and the interacting characters evolve to almost mythic proportions by the final sequences. Unfortunately, the last sentence of the novel is incomprehensible, and since it gives away no plot points, it is reprinted here: "When we knew the names, the story began, and when the names were extinguished, the story began." Though his philosophical underpinnings may be a bit bewildering, Khoury's depiction of a war-torn Beirut teeming with unforgettable characters makes unique, compelling fiction.--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A character-filled, compelling novel about the life and death of a shoeshine man in Beirut.

Forecasting publishing industry trends for the new year and the new decade is an irresistible and ubiquitous exercise these days. Perhaps it's only natural, then, that I honor my habit of glancing out the back window of the digital express caboose (Shelf Awareness, June 19, 2009) and offer, courtesy of the archives at Harper's magazine, my own list of a half-dozen publishing trends of futures past:

1. January 1850 Harper's featured an excerpt from the North British Review on a "common complaint that the publishers make large fortunes and leave the authors to starve--that they are, in fact, a kind of moral vampire, sucking the best blood of genius, and destroying others to support themselves."

2. May 1883 George William Curtis observed that "one-half of the books published each year in the United States fail to return their cost, and that one-half of the remainder bring no profit, leaving the cost of supporting the publishing machinery of the country to be borne by the publishers' share of the profits of one-fourth of the books issued."

3. June 1948 In "The Book Club Controversy," Merle Miller wrote about the recent appearance of "a smoothly designed advertisement announcing the formation of still another book club" even though were already "more than fifty clubs" in competition. This particular organization, however, was called the Blue Sky Book Club and hoped to lure members with an offer that may sound familiar to e-book enthusiasts: "You may now receive all the books published... over 10,000 a year FREE." These books weren't the only lure, however, because members would also receive "in compact digest form, the synopses, plot analyses, and YOUR OWN OPINION of these books." It was, of course, a gag with satiric bite.

4. October 1959 The anonymous author of a "Letter to a Young Man About to Enter Publishing" cautioned that even though "you want to go into publishing because you love good books and would like to help produce them... the first thing you should know about is the curious attitude of the American reader."

Strong evidence was then presented, including Edward Weeks, writing in the Atlantic Monthly's that there were about a million "discriminating readers" in the U.S., and "this number has not increased with the population; it has not increased appreciably since 1920." The London Economist suggested "even before television, Americans had not acquired the habit of reading good books. It has been estimated that since 1946, spending on books and maps has declined from 15 to only 10% of total outlays on recreation." And Dan Lacy of the American Book Publishers Council observed that the "basic nature of the trade-book audience is well known; it is largely urban; somewhat more women than men buy books; a dominant proportion of the reading public is in the higher professional and economic brackets; perhaps about 2% of the people account for a vital percentage of trade-book purchases."

5. July 1963 An article noted that Geoffrey Wagner, a British novelist living in the U.S., believed American publishing had become big business and this was a "calamity," since "most small publishers of interest... are being swallowed up by a few big firms. The survivors, he claims, are adopting a 'blockbuster technique' which has 'resulted in astronomical pre-publication deals, movie tie-ins, etc.'"

6. August 1985 Harper's offered a forum--"Will the Book Survive?"--based on a discussion that had been held at the ABA convention in San Francisco, and noted that in the previous year, American publishers had released "40,000 new titles, the vast majority of them, ignored by the great spotlight of publicity, were seen by almost nobody but the author and his twelve closest friends."

One of the panelists, William P. Edwards, v-p for new business development at B. Dalton Bookseller, observed: "Today there are new customers out there--the baby boomers, who fueled the dramatic growth of the bookstore chains and the large trade publishing houses. These younger customers have different views about format. They grew up with paperbacks; they give them as gifts. It's inevitable that during the next ten years bookstores will extend their franchise. Sure, we sell information and education; but the vast majority of books are bought as entertainment. Virtually the whole mass-market industry is devoted to entertainment. We are going to see bookstores moving heavily into audio cassettes--in effect, books one can 'read' while riding a bike or driving a car--and into videotapes as well, exercise 'books,' 'cookbooks,' whatever. It's already happening. After all, in buying a book, people are making an entertainment choice, and if we ignore that and stubbornly deny that these other forms belong in bookstores, we're going to drive away the younger customers. Diversity in format is important, and these products belong in bookstores."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)