Cheryl McKeon of Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Wash., wrote in response to our recent series on the pleasures and perils of reading in public.

I know I missed the February 13 story, which I enjoyed very much, but I have to share a life-altering reading-in-public experience. I seldom travel, so I gauge a flight by the number of pages (or sometimes, entire books!) I can enjoy between here and there. On a flight from Seattle to New York, I was all set and had my spare book in my bag (what if there's an unscheduled layover?). Unfortunately my seatmate was nervous. And chatty. And noted that she had rushed from her house without her book. I went into bookseller mode and handed her my spare (Too Close to the Falls). We coexisted peacefully all the way to Minneapolis, where she carefully wrote down the title and promised to buy a copy at an independent bookstore.

Moral: Always carry extra books!

 

This spring, the American Booksellers Association will launch the Indies Choice Book Awards, the successor to ABA's Book Sense Book of the Year Awards. According to Bookselling This Week, Indies Choice winners "will be selected by indie booksellers in seven categories highlighting the type of books that indie booksellers champion best. . . . Finalists, to be selected by an all-bookseller jury, will be put to a vote by ABA member booksellers in the coming weeks."

Categories for the inaugural Indies Choice Book Awards, which will be presented at BookExpo America in May, are:

• Best Indie Buzz Book (fiction)
• Best Conversation Starter (nonfiction)
• Best Author Discovery (debut)
• Best Read-Aloud Book
• Best YA Buzz Book
• Most Engaging Author
• The Read-Aloud Hall of Fame

Finalists in the first five categories will be selected by an all-bookseller jury from titles appearing on the 2008 Indie Next Lists. Most Engaging Author award finalists will be chosen "for not only being engaging at in-store appearances, but for also having a strong sense of the importance of independent booksellers to their communities at large." The Read-Aloud Hall of Fame will recognize up to three great backlist titles this year, with no restriction on publication date for nominees.

ABA board member Cathy Langer of Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, Colo., chairs the finalists selection jury, which includes Carla Jimenez of Inkwood Books, Tampa, Fla.; Mitch Kaplan of Books & Books, with stores in Florida and the Cayman Islands; Arsen Kashkashian of Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo.; Valerie Koehler of Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, Tex.; Collette Morgan of Wild Rumpus, Minneapolis, Minn.; and Matt Norcross of McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, Mich.

An announcement of the finalists and an online ballot will appear in an upcoming issue of BTW, and a print ballot will be sent to stores in the IndieBound movement with the March Red Box.

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Vermont's independent bookstores are "community-focused, inventive and guided by a human touch," observed Vermont Life magazine in an article praising bookshops that "are pillars of civic literacy, cherished places to browse and ennobling anchors on Main Street."

Montpelier, the state's capital, boasts a quartet of indies in a town of only 8,000 people. "Four bookstores--I'm not really sure how we do it," said Claire Benedict, owner of Bear Pond Books. "We have a very literate crowd and a community that understands buying local. . . . We really try to make ourselves a part of the community. That's something the chains and the Internet are never going to do."

Liza Bernard, co-owner of the Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, said, "We are very, very involved in our community. We have a rewards program where we give 1% of what they spend to one of five nonprofits, and they get to choose which nonprofit. . . . We do community service in the name of books. We don't just sit behind the counter and wait for someone to come get a book."

At the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, "the core of what we do is focusing on our customers, and we have excellent people on staff--both our buyers and our booksellers," said general manager Chris Morrow. "And we've worked hard over the years to create an ambience that is appealing to customers. So when people come here, they have an experience, it's not just a transaction."

Matthew Gibbs, co-owner of Briggs Carriage Bookstore, Brandon, concluded, "We love what we do, and we can and do make it work. I have a love for books. There's something inexplicable about finding just the right book for just the right person at just the right time."

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Cool idea of the day: Peddling meets pedaling with Harvard Book Store's "new green delivery service," which conveys orders right to the doorstep of local residents. Wicked Local Cambridge reported that the "bicycle service is provided by Somerville-based Metro Pedal Power, a local business that delivers agricultural products."

Heather Gain, Harvard's marketing manager, said the bookshop "wants to make sure it has a good green practice in the community, and it's a great way to work with a great local business, MetroPed, to dually service the community. . . . We're hoping to see other businesses adopt green delivery and green practices. I think it's goodwill for us in the community, not only looking after book interests but some of our holistic community interests."

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Best of Cleveland series featured the "coziest area book stores to get out and page away the winter blues":

• Mac's Backs, "the center of the local writing and poetry scene, with weekly events and a great selection of local voices."
• Visible Voice, a "bibliophile's dream [that] is more hip than quaint, with an amazing selection of fiction, local authors, music and movie and pop culture ephemera and children's books."
• The Learned Owl Book Shop, which "offers superb, personalized service and holds frequent author appearances. Their staff recommendations are also top-notch."
• Fireside Book Shop, "a quaint throwback to a long-gone era. And it is from another era--Fireside recently marked 45 years in business."
• Loganberry Books, "what a book store is supposed to look like. It's warm, slightly cluttered and completely inviting, and there's even a friendly house-cat named Otis."
• Appletree Books, "an island of calm in an urban setting."
• Crooked River Reading Club, where you can "browse local tomes from DIY poetry chapbooks to the latest from area authors ranging from Big Chuck to Mary Doria Russell."

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HarperCollins has acquired the rights to a biography of the late John Updike, which is expected to be published in 2011. The New York Times reported that Adam Begley, books editor of The New York Observer, will write the book. Begley's father, novelist Louis Begley, and Updike were classmates at Harvard.

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"If you could spend one unbridled night with any fictional character in the world, who would it be?" The Washington Post's Short Stack blog asked several writers this question. Two of our favorite replies:

Janet Evanovich: "Uncle Scrooge, from Carl Barks's Disney comics. He's always going on adventures, he pushes his money around with a bulldozer, and he wears a top hat but no pants. Does it get any better than that?"

Lisa Scottoline: "I would spend the night with the Three Musketeers from Dumas's classic novel. My motto is 'One for all, all for me.'" 

 

Borders Group has made another round of major cuts, laying off 136 people in corporate positions, most of which are in the headquarters office in Ann Arbor, Mich. The cuts follow the firing of 16 v-p's and directors earlier this month (Shelf Awareness, February 3, 2009) and 274 corporate jobs last June. Altogether the corporate cuts represent about 30% of Borders's corporate staff as of last May.

Yesterday's cuts were made in a variety of departments, from marketing and human resources to field management and corporate sales, and in a variety of levels, from entry level to middle management.

In a statement, CEO Ron Marshall, said, "While reducing payroll is never easy and we respect the impact it has on employees and their families, it is one of the necessary steps we must take along with other non-payroll expense reductions to help get this company back on track financially."

At the same time, Borders, which said the buying group "remains virtually intact," has notified accounts that beginning this week, the company is "moving to more frequent replenishment order cycles--about three times faster than in the past--and with a far greater level of automated ordering. This will mean fewer out-of-stocks, faster response to sales trends and more predictable order flow. Not only will this change help us drive sales, but it will also improve inventory productivity and reduce returns, driving efficiencies for both our company and yours."

"In response to customer demand," Borders is also creating a biography section in stores, beginning in July.

 

Shooting will begin later in 2009 on Pride and Predator, which, according to Variety, "veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about."

Executive producer Elton John's Rocket Pictures will make the film, with Steve Hamilton Shaw and David Furnish producing and Will Clark directing.

"It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect," Furnish said.

 

Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago Books), and For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu (New Directions), have won the 2009 Best Translated Book Awards for fiction and poetry respectively.

The winners were announced during an awards party hosted by author and critic Francisco Goldman at Melville House Books in Brooklyn, N.Y. Organized by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award honors works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the past year.

"Whittling down the 25-title longlist to 10 finalists, and then choosing a single title to receive the award was a pretty difficult process," said Chad W. Post, panelist and director of Three Percent and Open Letter Books. "There were a number of titles that the panelists felt could win. In particular, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya were two fantastic works of fiction that deserve special recognition. And in terms of poetry, You Are the Business by Caroline Dubois, Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos, and As it Turned Out by Dmitry Golynko were all loved by the panelists as well."

 

A National Book Award Finalist for We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History, Phillip Hoose brings to light a little-known major player in the civil rights movement with his Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Kroupa/FSG, $19.95, 9780374313227/0374313229, ages 10-up), released on February 2. Colvin risked everything not once, by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white rider, but a second time when she served as key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, a milestone in the journey toward desegregation in Montgomery, Ala. Hoose's The Race to Save the Lord God Bird won a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction. Hoose is also the author of Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me, an autobiographical account of how Don Larsen's perfect game on October 8, 1956--the only perfect game in World Series history--changed Hoose's nine-year-old life.

On your nightstand now:

Chronicles by Bob Dylan, The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman, We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.

Favorite book when you were a child:  

The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf.  

Your top five authors:  

Mark Harris, E.B. White, Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe, Leo Tolstoy.

Book you've faked reading:

Much of the Bible.
 
Book you're an evangelist for:  

The Southpaw by Mark Harris.

Book you've bought for the cover:  

We Are the Ship (but when I opened the cover, everything else was just as good).

Book that changed your life:  

Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman.

Favorite line from a book:  

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."--E.B. White in Charlotte's Web.

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

If I could read it with my daughter, I would wolf down the entire Calvin and Hobbes series. If I couldn't, Anna Karenina.

Without books, would your life have been immeasurably less rich?

You bet.

Why?

Because I grew up in a pretty flat atmosphere. Our family didn't discuss ideas, and original thought wasn't encouraged in our little midwestern town. But books took me everywhere. When vivid writers combined their imaginations with mine, the whole universe was at my doorstep.   

 

Shelf Awareness is very happy to introduce Namastechnology. This new monthly column aims to bring bookselling and technology into greater balance with one another and is written by Stephanie Anderson, manager of WORD bookstore in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, N.Y. You can read more of her thoughts on books and bookselling at bookavore.com.

Asana: Twitter

There are two reasons to use Twitter.  

1. It's good for you.
2. It's good for your store.

You'll feel almost instantly how good Twitter is for you. There are dozens upon dozens of booksellers, sales reps, publishers, reviewers and authors on Twitter. You know that sort of glowy buzz you get after a bookseller convention, when you feel like your mind is expanding and you've met some cool new people and you have the greatest job in the world? That's what Twitter can be like. I think it's the best daily tool for professional growth for booksellers right now.

In addition, it's a great tool for your store. This might seem obvious for stores with a younger demographic, but it's not just college students using Twitter. Some 31% of users are between 35-49. It's free PR. It's easier than blogging. And it connects you with customers who care enough about your store to want to hear about it on a regular basis.

This column will imitate a yoga class approach by introducing three levels of practice for each skill or tool: modified, basic and variations. Keeping in mind the philosophy of my yoga teacher--"do whatever feels right for you on this day"--let's look at the ways you can use Twitter.

Modified: Sign up and follow.

Signing up for Twitter is as easy as signing up for anything else on the Internet—you need a username, a password, an e-mail address, and that's about it.  You can decide whether to sign up as yourself or as your store. If you think it'll be more of a professional development thing, sign up as yourself. If you think many of your customers are already on Twitter and want to reach out to them, sign up as the store. As with anything else online, it's good to take a few minutes and think about what your boundaries are for this. For example, when I post as myself, under @bookavore, any sort of book-related thing will go up there, and sometimes just random life stuff. But as @wordbrooklyn, Christine Onorati and I limit ourselves to store events, new releases and fun book links. Set up a profile so people will know who you are, and make sure to include a picture.

After you sign up, the next thing you'll want to do is follow people. Following someone means that when you sign into Twitter, their tweets will show up in your personal timeline--the first page you see when you log in. As people tweet, the tweets show up in order of posting. If you've never dealt with Twitter before, your first experience can be sort of like arriving late at a raucous cocktail party when you don't know any of the guests. It's hard to know where to start. To this end, using Twitter to ask, I've compiled a list of book people who don't mind being followed.  

• @bookavore: me.
• @wordbrooklyn: my store, WORD.
• @AnnKingman: sales rep for Random House.
• @WendyHudson: owner of Nantucket BookWorks.
• @halseanderson: teen/children's author Laurie Halse Anderson.
• @PhilBildner: children's author Phil Bildner.
• @IndieRob: manager of Clinton Book Shop, Clinton, N.J.
• @Bookdwarf: buyer at Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass.
• @ami_with_an_i: digital marketing manager for Macmillan.
• @vertigobooks: independent bookstore in College Park, Md.
• @AaronsBooks: independent bookstore in Lititz, Pa.
• @readandbreathe: events coordinator at RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth, N.H.
• @AlgonquinBooks: independent publisher of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction.
• @guinevere23: an assistant manager at Vroman's, Pasadena, Calif., and an SCIBA staff member.

(Also check out the ABA's guide to Twitter, which has many more potentially interesting people to follow.)

Everything posted by these people or anyone else you follow (from Neil Gaiman to Britney Spears) will show up in your public timeline. There are three things you'll notice early on that might be confusing:

Messages that begin with @: this means that the person tweeting is replying to a tweet by @whoever.  This is a great way to find more interesting people. Click on the name to see their Twitter feed; maybe you'll want to follow them too. Also, you might see people using the @ symbol the way I've used it in this article by putting it in front of a username to make it clear that it's a username and not some random noun.

RT: This is short for retweet (abbreviations abound when you've got to keep messages under 140 characters) and means the person is, well, retweeting someone else's tweet to bring it to wider attention.

#: this symbol, called hash marks or hashtags, is put in front of an abbreviation so that you can look at all posts with that symbol. Often used for big events. For example, you can go back and look at all posts with #Wi4 on them, and see several people's tweets from this year's Winter Institute (which I highly recommend both for the content and for finding more book people to follow).

Twitter can be this simple. You'll hear a lot of people echo the sentiment that Twitter works best (like any communication) when it is just as much about following and listening as it is about being followed and being listened to, so don't feel that you have to tweet anything right away.

Basic: Tweet

But once you've got the hang of it--let's stretch the cocktail party metaphor a bit further and say you've had a beer and found a group of people you know vaguely from work to talk to--you will inevitably want to jump in.

The basics of tweeting: you have 140 characters (which includes space, punctuation and so on), the same number as in a text message, to say something, reply to someone, say what you thought of a book, remind people about an event or whatever. Some thoughts just can't be squeezed into 140 characters, but most can, and it can be fun to fiddle with a tweet a bit to make it fit. If you want to post a link to something, often the URL will be too long to fit in--use one of many URL shorteners to make it fit. Remember that anything you post will be visible by anybody--and people often search Twitter to see if anybody is talking about them. (By the same token, though, you can search Twitter to see if anyone is talking about you or your store.) The one exception to this is "direct messaging," which is in the right-hand side toolbar. DMs can only be seen by the person you send them too, like a very short e-mail or text message.

I found it easier to get my feet wet by replying to other people's questions and ideas, and then as I got more comfortable with what I wanted to say and who was listening, I started tweeting all sorts of things. But do whatever you are going to be most comfortable with!

Variations:

Once you're tweeting with ease, you can step it up in a few ways. Depending on your schedule, you can easily follow more people. Since @replies are a great way to discover more people, a simple way to expand your timeline is this: in the settings section, click on the "notices" tab, and where it says @Replies, change the selection to "all @ replies." This means you'll see all @replies that the people you follow write, not just @replies to other people you follow.

If you start following a lot of people, it can be overwhelming to catch up with if you get to the computer only a few times a day. If you have a smartphone, there are free applications you can download to use Twitter on your phone, so you can keep up wherever you are. There are also a ton of applications for use on the computer. This post lists some of the most popular. If you look closely at your timeline, under each tweet it will say when the tweet was posted and "from web," "from Twidroid" or another application. Feel free to tweet any questions you have about which app might be best for your use.

You can change your background to be a picture of anything, which is a great idea especially for store accounts. If you look at @wordbrooklyn's page, you'll see that the background is a picture of the store.  Check out what other people have done when clicking through to their page.

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I'm sure there are things I'm missing. If you have any other cool Twitter variations to share, your experiences with Twitter, good, bad or ugly, or any great Twitter bookselling stories, e-mail me at stephanie AT wordbrooklyn DOT com and I'll share them in the next column.

 

The following were the bestselling titles at Chicago area bookstores during the week ended Sunday, February 16 (with an extended hardcover fiction list):

Hardcover Fiction
 
1. The Women by T.C. Boyle
2. Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
3. Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon
4. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
5. The Associate by John Grisham
6. Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani
7. Fool by Christopher Moore
8. Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun
9. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
10. The Red Convertible by Louise Erdrich
 
Hardcover Nonfiction
 
1. The Inaugural Address 2009 by Barack Obama
2. Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson
3. Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik
4. Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi
5. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
 
Paperback Fiction
 
1. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
2. The Shack by William P. Young
3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
4. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
5. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini
 
Paperback Nonfiction
 
1. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
2. Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh
3. Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama
4. Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander
5. The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan
 
Children's
 
1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Last Straw by Jeff Kinney
2. Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed by Mo Willems
3. Coraline by Neil Gaiman
4. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
5. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

Reporting bookstores: Anderson's, Naperville and Downers Grove; Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock; the Book Cellar, Lincoln Square; Lake Forest Books, Lake Forest; the Bookstall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka; 57th St. Books; Seminary Co-op; Unabridged Books; Women and Children First, Chicago.

[Many thanks to Carl Lennertz!]