For Golem Song, Marc Estrin's third novel, which is due out in traditional form in early November, publisher Unbridled Books is adopting an unusual approach to reach "new, and different, readers and at the same . . . creating new literary communities," as editor and publisher Fred Ramey put it in an announcement.

Beginning next Monday the first three chapters of the book will be posted on the Unbridled's Web site. Each Monday thereafter, another chapter will be posted until pub date, when the entire novel will be available online. At the same, a podcast of Estrin reading from the novel will be available on his Web site.

The podcast is free. Subscriptions to read the chapters will cost $8. If readers want a signed copy of the finished book in addition to access to the chapters online, the fee is $15.95.

Unbridled Books hopes that the "multiple formats [will] create the opportunity for Estrin to find his greatest readership and also to interact with those readers--to develop a dialogue, which we believe will only further interest in all his work," Ramey added.

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Loriene Roy, professor at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Information, has been elected president of the American Library Association for the 2007-2008 term, according to the ALA. She beat William Crowe, director of the University of Kansas's Kenneth Spencer Research Library, by a vote of 8,898-4,702, and becomes president-elect in July, after the ALA annual conference in Washington, D.C.

She has served on a variety of library association committees and is past president of the American Indian Library Association. In 1999, she founded "If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything," a national reading club for Native children. She also directs "Honoring Generations," a scholarship program for indigenous students funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Roy is widely published, including a festschrift in honor of Marvin Scilken. She serves on several advisory boards/steering committees, including El día de los niños/El día de los libros, the Sequoyah Research Center and WebJunction. She is Anishinabe (Ojibwe), enrolled on the White Earth Reservation, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.

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Saying the corporation had set unreasonable conditions, Tim Waterstone has dropped his 280 million pound effort to buy from HMV the bookstore chain he founded, according to Reuters. The conditions include "having to complete an examination of the book store's finances within 14 working days and agreeing not to make a fresh bid approach for 12 months if talks failed," Reuters said. If conditions are eased, Waterstone would be interested, he added. The move is expected to help HMV's bid to buy Ottakar's.

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Oh no, not more. Today's New York Times says that "at least three portions" of Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life "bear striking similarities" to parts of Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret?

The copying, if that, is in the last third of Viswanathan's novel and "does not seem to be as extensive as" the borrowing from Megan McCafferty's books, the paper said.

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This past Saturday Karibu Books celebrated the grand opening of its new store in Pentagon City in Arlington, Va. Karibu, which as five stores in Maryland and specializes in African-American titles, had had a kiosk in Pentagon City. Last December it opened a store in Baltimore.

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Congratulations!

When she returns from a sabbatical in Mexico next week, Lisa Baudoin, who has been manager and buyer of Main Street Books in Pella, Iowa, will take a new position--general manager of the Book Vault in Oskaloosa, Iowa, which opened late last year (Shelf Awareness, January 5). In a historic bank building, the 2,500-sq.-ft. store is owned by Nancy Simpson, retired director of the Oskaloosa Public Library, and Julie Hansen, director of the William Penn University Library. Baudoin will continue as a member of the board of the Midwest Booksellers Association and the ABA's Booksellers Advisory Council.

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Cool idea of the day: to commemorate its move in late June to the Lowenstein Theater, the Tattered Cover, Denver, Colo., is holding a contest open to all customers to design a T-shirt for the occasion. The T-shirt will be given to the staff and volunteers who help in the move and will be available for sale when the new store opens on June 26. The winner of the contest receives a $250 Tattered Cover gift card and 10 free copies of the T-shirt. The store will hold a party for the designer and T-shirt on June 24, the last day the store is open before the move. Tattered Cover is encouraging designs that are "creative, original, classic, funny, interesting, wacky, distinguished, kooky, whatever you want."

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Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press on Starbucks' plan to sell books, as noted here yesterday:

"And then Starbucks will form an alliance with Amazon, Bill Gates will buy both companies, and Seattle will become the Death Star from Star Wars . . . "

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Noting that the store's booksellers "aren't just the rockstars of the bookselling world," Diesel, which has bookstores in Oakland and Malibu, Calif., is celebrating Trevor Calvert, a poet and small press publisher who works in the Oakland store. Several of Calvert's poems are included in the forthcoming Bay Poetics edited by Stephanie Young (Faux Press, $29, 097652113X). At nearly 500 pages, the book includes poems, essays, lists, short fiction, walking tour reports, manifestoes, "and all points inbetween."

For the first time, BookExpo America is making parts of its special events and educational speeches and panels available as podcasts. The BEA Podcast will be produced and published by BurstMarketing, publisher of the Authors on Tour--Live weekly podcast, a partnership with the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colo.

In a statement, Lance Fensterman, BEA show director, said that the podcast program "will not only be a valuable service for booksellers, retailers, educators, publishers and other industry professionals who will be able to listen to events they may have missed at BEA, but it also makes our programming available for the first time to consumers and book lovers everywhere."

In addition to regular BEA programming, the podcast will include material from a roving reporter who will conduct one-minute interviews with attendees and industry experts. The BEA Podcast will consist of approximately 20 episodes, each lasting about 30 minutes, and will be distributed over a period of two months after BEA. It will be hosted by a companion site www.bookexpocast.com, where people can subscribe free of charge to the podcasts in advance of BEA.

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Olsson's Books & Records, the Perseus Books Group and Capital Books invite readers of Shelf Awareness to lobby with "DC's Book People," including authors, booksellers and buyers and publishers. The party will be held Thursday, May 18, 7-9 p.m., at Olsson's--The Landsburgh, 418 Seventh St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004.

Please RSVP to Perseus's Anita Perala at Anita.Perala@perseusbooks.com or Capital Books's Jean Westcott at Jean.Westcott@booksintl.com.

The Early Show revs up up with race car driver Danica Patrick, author of Danica: Crossing the Line (Fireside, $23.95, 0743298144).

Also on the Early Show (no @#$@!): Stanley Bing, author of 100 Bullshit Jobs . . . And How to Get Them (HarperBusiness, $19.95, 0060734795).

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This morning on Today Show, New York Times reporter Bill Carter talks about Desperate Networks (Doubleday, $26.95, 0385514409), about how networks have changed in the past few years. He's also on the Charlie Rose Show tonight.

Also on the Today Show: Augusten Burroughs, whose new book is Possible Side Effects (St. Martin's, $23.95, 0312315961).

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This morning on Good Morning America: Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whose new book is The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (HarperCollins, $25.95, 0060892579). Madame Secretary is also on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight.

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Today Oprah talks with Teri Hatcher, the Desperate Housewife whose new memoir is Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life (Hyperion, $24.95, 1401302629).

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Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show: Todd Tucker, author of The Great Starvation Experiment: The Heroic Men Who Starved So That Millions Could Live (Free Press, $26, 0743270304).

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Katrina Firlik, author of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside (Random House, $24.95, 1400063205).

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Tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman: Naked Chef Jamie Oliver.

The Los Angeles Times Book Awards were presented on Friday in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, which continues to grow in popularity. The winners were:

• Biography: Hilary Spurling for Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 (Knopf)
  
• Current Interest: Anthony Shadid for Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (Holt)
• Fiction: Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Memories of My Melancholy Whores, translated by Edith Grossman (Knopf)
• Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts of No Nation: A Novel (HarperCollins)
• History: Adam Hochschild for Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)
  
• Mystery/Thriller: Robert Littell for Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation (Overlook Press)
• Poetry: Jack Gilbert for Refusing Heaven: Poems (Knopf)
• Science and Technology: Diana Preston for Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Walker)
• Young Adult Fiction: Per Nilsson for You & You & You translated by Tara Chace (Front Street/Boyds Mills Press)

In addition, Joan Didion, whose most recent book is The Year of Magical Thinking, won the Robert Kirsch Award, which honors "the body of work by an author who resides in and/or whose work focuses on the Western United States and whose contributions to American letters merit body-of-work recognition."

New fiction titles whose laydown date is next Tuesday, May 9:

Second Sight by Amanda Quick (Putnam, $24.95, 0399153527). Another Jayne Ann Krentz Victorian tale, which stars photographer Venetia Milton.

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Theft by Peter Carey (Knopf, $24, 0307263711). The two-time Booker winner weaves a sordid, satiric tale involving Australian painter Butcher Boone.

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The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart by Willie Nelson with Turk Pipkin (Gotham, $20, 159240197X). More autobiographical tales and lessons from the country music god.

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The Pro: Lessons From My Father About Golf and Life by Claude "Butch" Harmon, Jr. (Crown, $24.95, 0307338037). From one of the foremost golf instructors in the world, a family and golf memoir.

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Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking, $29.95, 0670037605). From the author of In the Heart of the Sea, a widely praised narrative of the first settlement in New England, whose reality is more intriguing than the long-accepted legends.

At BISG's Making Information Pay seminar last Thursday, Mark Suchomel, president of Independent Publishers Group, outlined "best practices for publishing and distributing midlist books," a smart, effective approach sometimes overlooked in the blockbuster, bet-all-on-a-handful-of-accounts publishing era.

IPG distributes 400 small and medium-sized publishers, including Chicago Review Press, ECW, Interweave, BenBella Books, Amherst Media and Allen & Unwin. Most of its sales are of trade paperback nonfiction midlist titles that have well-defined audiences.

When publishing new titles, the company prefers to start small. Some 80% of its titles have first printings of 5,000-10,000 copies, enough to "cover initial orders plus the first small wave of reorders, which is enough to generate initial sell-through data," Suchomel said. "We try to achieve economies of second or third printings rather than first printings." He added that he would prefer to have a first and second print run of 5,000 and 10,000 rather than 10,000, then 3,000.

The company promotes its titles to a wide and deep audience, both in terms of sales and publicity. There are "lots of media hits on initial printings of 5,000 and 10,000 because the media doesn't care how many you print," he noted.

IPG tries to take advantage of every sales opportunity, "no matter how small the account or old the title," Suchomel continued. This isn't just lip service: "We judge reps more on the number of accounts they sell to rather than the number of units they sell," he said, stating proudly that in 20 years, the company has never given reps quotas for advance sales. "The emphasis is on coverage and title availability."

The distributor makes sure accounts take a proper number. "If a chain wants 4,000 copies, we look into it," he said. IPG will encourage national accounts to take a lower number almost as often as it encourages them to take more.

Over time, the company "keeps titles alive in large accounts by closely monitoring sales performance data," relying on information supplied by the Idea Logical Company, Mike Shatzkin's consulting company that has a data management service for the supply chain. The Supply Chain Tracker includes data about titles on hand, titles sold this week and last week, sales on a percentage basis, etc.

"Often major accounts have 200 copies, which is not enough for the book to surface as a bestseller and get the attention of buyers," Suchomel commented. Besides, "buyers cannot and aren't paid to monitor these sales. We're doing our job by showing them what's selling and moving through.

"Most of us have ideas of how many we can sell of a title, but there is no information that is better than the response of the market," he said. And to judge that, "data is absolutely essential." Suchomel compared the IPG's overall publishing approach with "scattering birdseed as much as possible and seeing where it disappears. I'd rather start conservatively and work up and be aggressive on reorders than oversell a book and suffer the consequences of high returns."

In fact, IPG's returns are low by industry standards, averaging about 20% since 2000--ranging between a low of 18.2% in 2002 to a high of 21% in 2001.

IPG also has "a strong program" to sell titles outside traditional markets, which spreads out risk, in part because many of the sales are nonreturnable. Three people work fulltime on special sales and have opened 115 new accounts in the first quarter.

"Often we can sell more copies outside the trade as the book gets older than inside the trade because the accounts are much more specialized," Suchomel said. In many cases, the company sells to the nontraditional accounts after the second printing. For example, museum stores (IPG has 1,200 museum accounts) typically want to see a title after it's been published to evaluate and determine if it fits the museum's mission.

Typically sales to these accounts are small; they may take just five copies of a book. "Selling 50 copies a year of a title may not seem cost effective," he said, "but all of that added up makes it worthwhile." In some cases, the company has "rescued" books from POD and sold 2,000-3,000 copies.

Just as the company aggressively looks for nontraditional outlets, it also finds all kinds of media outlets that serve small groups of potential readers for IPG titles. Among examples: Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly; Bubblegum Slut, a glamrock/punk magazine; Divorce Talk, a radio show; Maine Organic Farmer and Gardener; and the Lindbergh Foundation Newsletter.

The company also continues publicity, including reviews, on titles longer than most other publishers do. "If the books are still relevant," Suchomel said, "reviews are still relevant." This is all the more true in the Internet age--the company is putting reviews from the past 10 years in an electronic database.

IPG's slow but steady and aggressive approach appears to be working: in all but two of the past 20 years, IPG's growth has been in double digits. Moreover, it's not unusual for IPG to sell 30,000-50,000 copies of titles and occasionally in the range of 200,000-300,000. Many of the company's titles are on a variety of BookScan's top-50 category bestsellers. And in case anyone thinks the company's approach limits its hot sellers to those category lists, IPG distributes the No. 1 paperback nonfiction title on this week's New York Times list: The Covenant with Black America edited by Tavis Smiley (Third World Press, $12, 0883782774).