Tonight BookPeople, Austin, Tex., which has events almost every day,
will host one that is unusual even for it: Wine Tasting 101, which aims
to help participants develop a vocabulary and ability to describe wine.
It's not the delicious subject of the workshop that's unusual. Instead
it's the fertile idea behind it--suitable for grafting to other
books--that's exceptional.
Workshop leader Jane A. Nickles, a wine expert from the Texas Culinary
Institute, proposed Wine Tasting 101 in response to the store's call
for customers to come up with an event idea that would meet the
challenge of the store's June Top Shelf pick,
You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grownup Girls, an April title by the late Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas (Chronicle, $24.95, 0811846350).
Grandcolas had started
You Can Do It! in 2000, and after her
death in the September 11 attacks, her sisters finished the book,
intended to help women of all ages realize their dreams. The 60 "merit
badge" possibilities include public speaking, travel--and learning to
taste wine rather than just drink it.
Normally BookPeople has one Top Shelf pick a month--a book that is
promoted throughout the store and on its Web site, in all departments,
with displays and other promotions, with one staff member coordinating
the effort. This time the store went a step farther and skipped a July
pick to make an extra push for the You Can Do It workshop idea.
The store focused on proposals that would create some "buzz in the community," events coordinator Adam Rice told
Shelf Awareness.
"We wanted the person to be able to promote it to friends and family
and to have a solid idea of what they wanted to present." In the case
of Wine Tasting 101, the event may be a piece of cake, so to speak. As
Rice put it: "Anytime wine's involved, a surprising amount of people
show up."
The contest also inspired one BookPeople staffer so much that he, too,
has put on a You Can Do It event: the Art of Media, basics of dealing
with the media intended for activists (although all were welcome).
August Top Shelf Pick
BookPeople is now gearing up for its August Top Shelf Pick:
The Lightning Thief
by Rick Riordan (Miramax, $17.95, 0786856297), published a month ago,
the first of a five-part series for young teens called Percy Jackson
and the Olympians that retells tales from Greek mythology. Besides the
usual Top Shelf promotions, the children's staff will wear Lightning
Thief T-shirts, story times have been scheduled and several book groups
may center on the book.
Riordan has written some mysteries (most recently
Mission Road,
Bantam, $24, 0553801856), lives in San Antonio, Tex., and "loves coming
here," Rice said. "This is a completely different perspective and is
quality stuff rivaling Harry Potter."
Bookworld Companies, the Sarasota, Fla., distributor with a warehouse
in LaVergne, Tenn., has formed a Spanish sales division that will call
on Spanish-language accounts. Many of Bookworld's more than 100
publishers have Spanish titles; the company also will represent to some
of its Spanish-language accounts some of the lists of such major houses
as HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, Houghton Mifflin and Wiley. (As chairman
Ron Smith put it to Shelf Awareness: "Essentially we can
sell to anyone they are not reaching with their own--generally quite
good--sales forces.") The new division is headed by Francisco Longoria,
promoted from the company's direct sales operations; division headquarters
is in Brownsville, Tex. 
Books-a-Million's month-long modified Dutch auction tender offer, under
which the company might have bought back as many as four million shares
of its stock--about a quarter of shares outstanding--for as much as $10
each, ended last Thursday with only 57,223 shares on the block.