Hachette Book Group has launched holiday shipping initiatives designed to support independent booksellers during the holiday season that are now in effect and will extend through the end of the year, executive v-p, group sales director Lauren Monaco said in an announcement outlining the initiatives.

A part of continuing enhancements is removing a day in the current order process time for indies. Orders placed by indies that meet requirements and are made before 3 p.m. during the week will ship the following business day. In addition, to ensure rapid replenishment for indie accounts, Hachette is moving to a guaranteed 2-day shipping window. The company has also reduced its threshold for minimum orders to $75 from $150.

Hachette is looking forward, it continued, to "reviewing the results of our customer survey so that we can continue to improve service to independent bookstores."

Speaking at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, Hachette Book Group CEO David Shelley said he wanted Hachette in the U.S. and the U.K. to be more efficient and reduce the time it takes for books to get to market. "If we could shave 24 hours off delivery time in the U.S., which is our aim, that would be revolutionary for us," he said.

"The top three actions are paper, paper, and shipping," said EJ Hurst, sales manager of Canada's New Society Publishers, during a panel on climate science and climate action at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week.

Ralf Seppelt, author and professor of landscape ecology and renewable resource economics, and Sevani Matos, president of the Brazilian Book Chamber, rounded out the panel, while author Arne Molfenter moderated.

If publishers switched their paper from virgin forest paper to 100% post-consumer recycled paper, Hurst continued, "you will reduce your emissions by 50%-60%." She cautioned against thinking that forest-certified paper is the answer, as it tends to come from tree farms, and tree farms do nearly nothing for biodiversity.

(from left) Ralf Seppelt, Sevani Matos, EJ Hurst, and Arne Molfenter.

She noted that for various reasons, "we can't all everywhere turn to recycled paper," and called for the industry to invest in "next-generation paper alternatives." These alternatives include paper made from "what is currently agricultural waste," such as oat straw in Canada or sugar cane fiber in Brazil. These do not contain wood fiber and do not rely on cutting down trees. Hurst urged large publishers to "enter into offtake agreements" with these alternative paper mills, and said small publishers can join consortiums supporting these mills.

It is also essential, Hurst said, to "make your shipping distances as short as possible." Print-on-demand has "great environmental promise," she remarked, but pointed out that a POD run by itself does not mean a sustainable print run. She recalled an "very unfortunate experience" involving a POD print run that was printed on virgin paper in the U.S. and then "air freighted to Europe." That, she emphasized, "is not the print-on-demand revolution we are seeking," and she told publishers to pay close attention to distribution from those POD printers. "All is not always as it may seem."

Asked about the connection between biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, Seppelt said the "key message" at this point is that the two are so "highly interlinked," that they amount to "one big crisis" to deal with. For example, with higher diversity in agricultural landscapes, farmers can "get along with less energy input" and with less pesticides. And in Germany, forests are "really under pressure," and for the first time have "flipped" from carbon sinks to carbon sources, due to dying trees. It means that "whatever we do to protect the climate" is also "good for biodiversity," and doing "good things for biodiversity" is good for the climate.

Seppelt also brought up the role of publishers in communicating information about the climate crisis, and wondered how best to convey these things to the public. He mentioned a book to which he contributed that theorized what life would look like with a "unfortunate but likely +3 degrees scenario," noting that it was well written "but not really motivating at the end." That book, and many of the others on his bookshelf, were "really doomsday-ish," and he pointed to a lack of narratives that are positive and hopeful without "neglecting what's ahead of us."

Matos reported that the Brazilian Book Chamber has developed a guide about climate change and ESG (environmental, social, and governance), which she said was the first of its kind in South America. It encourages the publishing sector to incorporate sustainable practices in paper consumption and to "minimize material waste." The guide is being distributed to all publishers and book chains in Brazil, with Matos hoping it leads to some productive conversations.

She said there is a "long way to go" in Brazil when it comes to things like paper recycling, but publishers can start "disseminating knowledge" immediately. They can also immediately begin educating their own teams and making sure there is buy-in from their employees.

Hurst further advocated for the switch to "triple bottom-line accounting," which includes impacts to society and the environment. "It's time for people and planet to have a place on the P&L." --Alex Mutter

Alison Goff, Group CEO of the Quarto Group, is stepping down at the end of the year for personal reasons, the company announced. She will remain as an advisor to the board. CK Lau, president of the Quarto Group and executive director of Lion Rock Group and OPUS Group will become interim CEO, effective November 1.

Alison Goff

Goff commented, "I've very much enjoyed my three years at Quarto, and I hope I have been a catalyst for change."

Lau said, "I've enjoyed working with Alison; her dedication to her work and care for staff were greatly valued."

Quarto Group said that during Goff's tenure, "she led a full corporate rebrand project with award winning design group Pentagram, and introduced several new imprints to the group, including Carnival, a cooking and wellness imprint. Under Alison's leadership, both the U.K. and the U.S. saw several New York Times and Sunday Times bestsellers--including Little People BIG DREAMS: Taylor Swift and The Ultimate Air Fryer Cookbook. Additional achievements include the perennial bestselling Beautiful Boards series from Meagan Brown and the category bestseller How to Draw Super Cute Things with Bobbie Goods. Quarto's custom division also saw continued growth under Alison's tenure. In addition, during her time as Group CEO, Quarto successfully implemented an in-house enterprise relationship program, Quest, making it one of the few indie publishers to create a fully independent in-house publishing workflow solution."

Yesterday President Biden presented the 2022 and 2023 National Humanities Medals, in conjunction with the National Medals of Arts, in a private ceremony at the White House. The recipients included:

2022:
Joy Harjo, poet
Juan Felipe Herrera, writer
Jon Meacham, writer and historian
Pauline Yu, scholar of Chinese literature

2023:
Anthony Bourdain (posthumous), chef and author
LeVar Burton, actor and literacy advocate
Roz Chast, cartoonist and author
Nicolás Kanellos, scholar and publisher of Hispanic literature
Robin Wall Kimmerer, scholar and author
Aaron Sorkin, playwright, screenwriter, and director
Darren Walker, social justice philanthropist
Rosita Worl, anthropologist and cultural leader

Anne Byrn (r.), author of Baking in the American South (Harper Celebrate), joined Sandra Gutierrez for a conversation and book signing at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, N.C.

Book No Further, Roanoke, Va., shared a photo of the bookshop's "Making Poe-Choices" Halloween sales floor display, which includes a Poe sticker free with every "Poe-chase," or for 50¢.

"Love was in the air last Friday night!!" Story on the Square, McDonough, Ga., noted in sharing pics from a wedding celebration at the bookshop. "We want to extend the warmest congratulations to Beth and Paul for officially tying the knot! We've been seeing this couple every Friday night for over a year or two now, but last Friday was one we'll never forget!!

"Family, friends, and members of the community joined Beth and Paul at our Rough Draft Bar to give a special toast to the newlyweds! It's moments like these--filled with love and shared with our wonderful community--that are the heart and soul of why we're here. Wishing this beautiful couple a lifetime of joy, love, and fun-filled Friday Nights!" 

Thelonia Saunders has joined the integrated Candlewick, Holiday House, and Peachtree sales/marketing team as trade marketing coordinator. Saunders's previous position was office manager/Klopotek specialist for Holiday House.

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At Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing:

Elizabeth Huang has been promoted to marketing coordinator, digital marketing (kids). She was most recently a marketing assistant.

Trey Glickman has been promoted to senior designer, animator, creator, digital marketing. He was most recently a graphic designer.

Anna Elling has been promoted to senior publicist. She was most recently a publicist.

Lindsey Ferris has been promoted to publicist. She was most recently an associate publicist.

Maryam Ahmad has been promoted to associate publicist. She was most recently a publicity assistant.

Thad Whittier has been promoted to associate publicist. He was most recently a publicity assistant.

The Prelude by William Wordsworth, edited by James Engell and Michael D. Raymond (Brandeis University Press).

Today:
Today Show: Tom Parker Bowles (Queen Camilla's son), author of Cooking and the Crown: Royal Recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III (Ten Speed Press, $35, 9780593835555).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Nancy Redd, author of The Real Body Manual: Your Visual Guide to Health & Wellness (Avery, $28, 9780593541401).

Today Show: Justine Doiron, author of Justine Cooks: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, $35, 9780593582305).

Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Matty Matheson, author of Matty Matheson: Soups, Salads, Sandwiches (Ten Speed Press, $35, 9781984862150).

Jimmy Kimmel Live repeat: Trevor Noah, author of Into the Uncut Grass (One World, $26, 9780593729960).

A trailer has been released for Goosebumps: The Vanishing, the eight-episode second season of the series based on R.L. Stine's popular book series. Deadline reported that Stine's fans "will recognize elements from Stay Out of the Basement, The Haunted Car, Monster Blood, The Girl Who Cried Monster, The Ghost Next Door, and Welcome to Camp Nightmare, all of which served as inspiration for the sophomore season."

The series stars David Schwimmer, Jayden Bartels, Sam McCarthy, Ana Ortiz, Elijah M. Cooper, Galilea La Salvia, Francesca Noel, and Stony Blyden.

Developed by Nicholas Stoller and Rob Letterman, the project's showrunner is Hilary Winston. They serve as exec producers with Neal H. Moritz, Scholastic Entertainment's Iole Lucchese and Caitlin Friedman, Pavun Shetty, Conor Welch, Erin O'Malley, Karl Frankenfield, and James Eagan.

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken (New Directions) has won the $25,000 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation and given to a writer for a single book-length work of imaginative fiction. The prize is intended to recognize writers Le Guin spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech: realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.

The judges called It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over "a work of quietly detonative imagination. Written in the guise of a zombie novel, it quickly reveals itself to be a deeply felt meditation on the many afterlives of memory, the strange disorienting space where our pasts go to disintegrate. As the heroine wanders a shattered world, clutching a dead crow that is still muttering away, she becomes an incarnation of grief--its numbness and regrets and heartbreaks--and of the inevitability of our decline: we are what we lose. Haunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken's book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human."

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Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult) has won the $5,000 2024 Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award, which recognizes recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing. (See our review here.)

Finalists Carrie Sun, author of Private Equity: A Memoir (Penguin Press), and Alex Espinoza, author of The Sons of El Rey (Simon & Schuster), were each awarded $1,000.

The judges said, "With disarming humor, Shanaz Habib in Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel challenges the presupposition that people from the Global South 'don't travel, they immigrate.' Through essays, both personal and well-researched, she tackles a wide range of travel-related topics from the history of passports to forests, carousels, and pickles. The realities she uncovers in the process are often as startling as they are eye-opening and reshape our sense of what it means to travel as a person from the Third World across disparate geographies, from the streets of Brooklyn to those of Istanbul. A captivating, beautifully written work that will spark many conversations."

The award is sponsored by Fall for the Book at George Mason University and the Institute for Immigration Research.

Any marriage that makes it past 30 years could reach a point where a few surprises might be welcomed; however, Eliza Kratke does not relish the unexpected on that February day when her husband, Robert, collapses in the driveway, the first of many world-shattering surprises in Eliza's life. Eliza's candid voice and indomitable spirit are the drivers of Sweet Vidalia by Lisa Sandlin (The Bird Boys), a well-paced novel that puts readers in the position of benevolent neighborhood gossip, privy to the details of a good woman's unraveling. Eliza does not unravel, however, and though some of the circumstances may seem unbelievable, her transformation feels both inspiring and true. In the moments after Robert's death, Eliza wishes herself back to the "ordinary times lived over and over," but she knows that is impossible; instead, she lingers, knowing that "[t]o leave this hospital room was to leave him behind. Leave her marriage behind. On the other side of its threshold, she was a widow."

Having no other choices, Eliza does exactly that. As a woman alone in the 1960s, she must contend with the common experiences of grief and loss as well as the thoroughly uncommon ones, those born out of the many and catastrophic secrets Robert kept from her in the later years of their marriage. Though these revelations threaten to capsize Eliza, she gradually emerges from the fog and charts a course she never would have imagined without this complete upheaval of her life. Losing Robert, it turns out, would require crossing a greater threshold than she could realize in those first moments. Forced to rent the house she desperately needs to sell, Eliza moves into the Sweet Vidalia Residence Inn, across town in Bayard, Tex. And it is from there that she discovers the woman she never knew she could be.

Though Eliza's Southern dialect can feel somewhat out-of-sync with the voice built in the close third-person narration, readers will marvel at Sandlin's descriptions, as seen in Eliza's tears over "the grooves worn in the downturned corners of her father's mouth, for his mind emptied in the last, bespattered-shirt years." Similarly, they will celebrate every unlikely success Eliza manages, with fans of Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café hearing the echo of "Towanda!" in this empowering story of one woman's midlife coming-of-age. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Shelf Talker: Sweet Vidalia is perfect for fans of Southern fiction where a woman left with nothing but her wits and spirit manages to conquer every obstacle and find strength in unexpected places.

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden
2. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
3. Where's Molly by H.D. Carlton
4. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
5. Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
6. Monarch by Sophie Lark
7. Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver
8. Slap Shot Surprise by Melanie Harlow
9. The Inmate by Freida McFadden
10. Just Between Us by Lena Hendrix

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]