"I think we fit well into this new world. And I'm not so anxious. I'm curious to see, actually, where it lands. But, as an independent bookseller, we're certainly staying in the conversation. And if 10% or 8% of the books are e-books, that's fine. There are still a lot of other books to sell, and we will--we will be selling both e-books through our websites and in our stores, and also we will be selling lots and lots of what I'm calling physical books, because that's really where the market still is the strongest."

 

 

The two-day BEA trade show experiment has been deemed a success. And next year the show will return to its usual three days of trade show, with a day preceding it with panels and seminars. As show director Steve Rosato wrote, "While people liked the two-day format, a lot of people genuinely need three days to meet their objectives at BEA. While our mantra has been quality versus quantity, there is a reality of what people can accomplish in two full days.... In the end, while many people liked BEA as a two-day show, more people need BEA to be a three-day show."

Next year the show takes place Monday-Thursday, May 23-26, in New York City.

---

One vote for the new two-day BEA exhibition floor schedule was registered by Todd Stocke, v-p, editorial director, at Sourcebooks. "We've been mobbed the whole show," he said, recalling that under the old format, "We used to run a little pool on day three for when we'd hear the first tape gun." 

---

Food for Thought

After warning the audience that "things could get awfully frisky in here," Daily Show host Jon Stewart got the Adult Book & Author Breakfast under way and kept the laughs going as he introduced a trio of authors. (His latest offering is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race, coming from Grand Central in September).

Now that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "can read the newspaper and not have to do anything about it," she had time to write Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (Crown/October). After having his looks and prolificacy extolled by Stewart, John Grisham (who said being a guest on the Daily Show was the most terrifying 15 minutes of his life) talked about the inspiration for his latest legal thriller, The Confession (Doubleday, October). Rounding out the line-up was Mary Roach (Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Norton, August), who entertained the audience with space toilet humor and then thanked booksellers for playing a part in allowing her to be a writer--making her “the happiest woman in the solar system.”
 

---

 

Sitting room only? The line formed early and comfortably for Thursday's Book and Author Luncheon. Some folks even brought chairs with them as they started the bookish queue more than a half-hour before the doors opened.

---

 

The new "flat is the new up." Some booksellers have reported that difficult times continue. One store owner said that when asked about business, he told others he was doing "fine." He defined "fine" to us as "keeping our nose just out of the water as it's rising around us."

---

 

Amazon's CreateSpace (formerly BookSurge) POD company succinctly advertised its advantages with these two buttons.

---

 

Among deals and announcements made at BEA:

Baker & Taylor and LibreDigital have expanded their e-book services for publishers and now offer a platform that spans all digital media--books, newspapers and magazines--and all devices and apps, including the iPad and B&T's own Blio. Publishers can store and secure digital content on LibreDigital and deliver it to any market or device.

---

 

Morning Joe in the Afternoon: Joe Scarborough joined his MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, signing copies of her memoir, All Things at Once (Weinstein Books), on Thursday.

---

 

The Singing Novelist

Algonquin author Joseph Skibell played a whimsical-yet-erudite two-minute song promoting himself and his third novel for a delighted group of librarians who gathered to hear him and his publisher-publicist duo--Elizabeth Charlotte and Michael Taeckens--discuss the route a book follows from inception to publication in a Thursday morning ALA-sponsored panel, "From Writer to Reader."

Skibell, whose debut novel, A Blessing on the Moon, had outstanding reviews but less-so sales, is bringing his third book to market with a stellar endorsement from Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. Algonquin is re-releasing his first novel in trade paperback to coincide with the September 2010 publication date of A Curable Romantic. A scholar and playwright, Skibell's novels flirt with post-modern magical realism while embracing themes of Jewish mysticism, love, exile, and the search for meaning in tales of modern displacement and yearning.

Skibell's instrument of choice is a backpacking guitar, and his song was set to a Gilbert & Sullivan tune. The title? "I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major Novelist."--Laurie Lico Albanese

 

---

 

Gretchen Rubin's still happy, and why not? She sold her second Happiness Project--Happier at Home--to Crown Archetype for $1 million last week. And then she signed books at BEA for a long line of happy fans.

---


It was all things Italian on the Downtown Stage with Buddy Valastro (center), star of TLC's Cake Boss and the author of Cake Boss: The Stories and Recipes from Mia Famiglia (Free Press/November), and Mark Rotella, whose new book is Amore: The Story of Italian American Song (FSG/September). They talked about food, music, family traditions, bickering relatives, Lady Gaga and Valestro's favorite Italian pastry (it's the Lobster Tail). The event was hosted by Michele Scicolone, author of The Italian Slow Cooker.

 

Deaver. Jeffery Deaver. Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. has chosen the bestselling thriller author to write a new James Bond book. Currently operating undercover with the title Project X, the novel is scheduled to be released May 28, 2011, in honor of Ian Fleming's birthday. It will be published in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster and in the U.K. by Hodder & Stoughton.
 
"I can't describe the thrill I felt when first approached by Ian Fleming's estate to ask if I'd be interested in writing the next book in the James Bond series," said Deaver, who won the Crime Writers' Association's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award in 2004 for Garden of Beasts. "I began reading them when I was about nine or ten, ignorant of the Cold War politics they explored but enthralled by their sense of adventure and derring-do. I continued to read and reread them, which was fortunate because as a teen and adult I found, of course, nuances, that were invisible to a child."
 
Corinne Turner, managing director of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., said, "I'd always enjoyed Jeffery Deaver's thrillers, but I particularly liked Garden of Beasts. It demonstrated that he was not only a master of the contemporary American thriller but could also write compelling novels of period suspense within a European setting. I didn't know anything about the author himself and expected a fairly low key response from him when he received our award. I was surprised and delighted when he spoke very fondly of Ian and about the influence that the Bond books had had on his own writing career. It was at that point that I first thought that James Bond could have an interesting adventure in Jeffery Deaver's hands."
 
---

Barnes & Noble has launched a free BN eReader for iPad app, which uses B&N's LendMe technology, allowing customers to share eligible e-books with other readers using a Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and PC enabled with the free BN eReader software. Last page read, highlights, notes and bookmarks will also synch across BN eReader for iPad and PC, and in early summer, with iPhone and iPod touch with more to follow, the company said.

---

Andrew McKinley, owner of the Adobe Bookshop, San Francisco, Calif., said he is "thinking about closing. It may not be for a couple of months. But bookselling is not going so well these days. And when I'm losing money I definitely think about closing."

SFist sounded the alarm to local readers: "If you care for this very bohemian San Franciscan space, with the handwritten names of various artists and local personalities who have had some connection there circling the upper walls, and the eclectic selection of books which were once arranged in order of color (and NPR did a piece on it), please drop by and buy a book. It's sort of like the Mission's answer to City Lights, and at 20-plus years it's one of the oldest second-hand bookshops in the 'hood. Support one of the few of these institutions we still have left, or it may be gone soon."

---

Australia had a time zone advantage for today's international iPad launch, which the Sydney Morning Herald gave a mock-biblical spin: "The opening of an Apple store has always had the feel of a Pentecostal revival meeting. The passion. The conviction. The showmanship. All those within the travelling tent united in the unfaltering belief that the good word from the Book of Steve, and a generous cash donation, can heal their broken lives.

"Such jubilation reached fever pitch this morning at the grand opening of Sydney's new Bondi Junction Apple store, as it coincided with the launch of Apple's latest modern miracle--the iPad. Apple fanboys had queued in order to be first to bask in the glow of Cupertino's miraculous tablet. Drinking heavily of the Apple Kool Aid, they lifted their arms to the sky and gave thanks as they stepped over the threshold and joined the congregation within."

---

Game-based-on-book trailer of the day: The Guardian showcased a trailer for Lego Harry Potter, in which the "wizard kid visits Legoland."

---

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow alerted readers to a post at englishrussia.com of illustrations from the first Soviet edition of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit.

---

Effective June 1, Heather Doss is joining HarperCollins's children's division as national accounts manager, selling to Baker & Taylor and Brodart as well as helping grow overall school and library sales and coordinate sales and marketing.

As noted here last week, Doss has been children's merchandise manager at Bookazine for four years and earlier spent nine years managing a Barnes & Noble and then a Waldenbooks store.

 

Tomorrow on CBS Radio's Weekend Roundup: Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781439101193/1439101191).

---

Monday morning on the Today Show: Dave Hnida, author of Paradise General: Riding the Surge at a Combat Hospital in Iraq (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781416599579/1416599576).

---

Monday on the View: Sarah Silverman, author of The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee (Harper, $25.99, 9780061856433/0061856436).

 

Andrzej Bart is adapting his novel, The Flypaper Factory (Fabryka Mucholapek), for the big screen, and plans are to begin filming next year. Variety reported that the novel is about "an invalid working for a wealthy Jewish family whose fates are about to be transformed by war and genocide."

 

Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales was named Audiobook of the Year by the Audio Publishers Association at its annual awards ceremony, held to recognize distinction in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. You can find a complete list of winners and finalists in all categories here.


Finalists for the for the £20,000 (US$29,163) BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction include Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick, Blood Knots by Luke Jennings, Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, A Gambling Man by Jenny Uglow and Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. The winner will be honored at a ceremony in London July 1.

 

A Nightmare's Prayer: A Marine Corps Harrier Pilot's War in Afghanistan by Michael Franzak (Threshold Editions, $26, 9781439194980/143919498X, June 15, 2010)

Opening lines of a book we want to read:

They say there are no atheists in foxholes and to a certain degree I can affirm that, though my religious convictions are tepid at best. I don't remember when I began to question God but I know it was a long time ago. My parents are least to blame. They took us to church regularly. But as I grew older and introspective I came to question things, especially God. My church visits dimmed and nightly prayers became monologues in darkness. I wondered if my brother in the twin bunk below or my sister in the adjoining room were praying. Was anyone listening? I wasn't sure, so I stopped.

As years passed I prayed sporadically without much thought, more on whim when I felt obliged to thank someone or something for the beauty of all, but I refrained from asking anything--ever. And then one day I prayed very hard and I asked for something. I wasn't in a foxhole. I was above it. I was safe and comfortable in my sheltered cocoon 20,000 feet over the Hindu Kush. But I prayed. I prayed when I heard the muted cries of men who at last understood their fate.--Selected by Marilyn Dahl

Charlie Smith is the author of six novels and seven books of poetry. Three of his works have been named New York Times Notable Books. His new novel is Three Delays, published by Harper Perennial on May 18, 2010. He's received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Aga Khan Prize. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Nation and numerous other magazines and journals. He lives in New York City and Key West.

On your nightstand now:

Currently that would be The Marquise of O and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist and Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 3, by Javier Marias, along with Tolstoy's War and Peace and Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road. Revisiting the latter two gives me a lot of pleasure right now, especially Tolstoy. The way he orchestrates his story over vast stretches time and space and yet keeps you engaged on the most human level is what interests me the most.
 
Favorite book when you were a child:

The Pogo cartoons. This may not qualify as a book, but I loved reading those cartoons alongside my father; they set us both off rolling with laughter. As for reading on my own, my town had one of those wonderful Carnegie libraries and as a small boy I devoured a series of brief biographies the library stocked. Mostly they were biographies of sports figures, explorers and frontiersmen, like Daniel Boone. Just the kind of stories that fill a young boy's heart with dreams.
 
Your top five authors:

This list continues to shift, but right now I'd say: Tolstoy, Proust, Beckett, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy.
 
Book you've faked reading:

Surely a few back in college lit classes, but I couldn't tell you the titles.
 
Book you're an evangelist for:

I don't really consider myself an evangelist for any particular book, but my wife thinks I am--for The Dog of the South by Charles Portis, so I guess that's what it'll have to be. (If you haven't read, you're in for a treat.)
 
Book you've bought for the cover:

Art books, and plenty of them.
 
Book that changed your life:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. It's one of these books that came along at just the right time for me.
 
Favorite line from a book:

I'm a poet, not just a novelist, and there is such a profusion of beautiful lines written in the English language, I'd be hard pressed to choose. But here's one I'm particularly fond of, from John Donne's "Air and Angels": "For, nor in nothing, nor in things/ Extreme and scattering bright, can love inhere."
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:

One that comes to mind is Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. I envy those who haven't read it yet.

 
The extraordinary success of Stieg Larsson's novels (as well as those by Henning Mankell and others) is testimony to the growing popularity in the U.S. of the type of Swedish crime writing that is characterized by darkness--both literal and figurative--and psychological complexity. Making her U.S. debut with The Ice Princess, Camilla Läckberg--"the most profitable native author in Swedish history"--hopes to find as welcoming an audience. While employing the same blend of chilly, stark external and internal landscapes found in other Scandinavian novels, Läckberg's tone is distinctly lighter and may garner an entirely new set of readers.
 
The Ice Princess is the first of seven novels that Läckberg has set in her home, Fjällbacka, a small tourist town on Sweden's southern coast. Here, as in any small town, the neighbors gossip, secrets surface and family skeletons have a way of falling out of the closet. Nobody knows this better than Erica Falck, a successful author of biographies who has come home to settle her deceased parents' affairs and work on her next book. Erica's troubles, which include an abusive brother-in-law, an overdue manuscript and a string of failed relationships, turn truly grim when she discovers the body of her best childhood friend, Alexandra, in an iced-over bathtub--an apparent suicide. Alex's grief-stricken parents ask Erica to write an article about their daughter, which leads Erica to start digging into Alex's past. It soon becomes evident that Alex was murdered and that almost everyone in tiny Fjällbacka could be a suspect. Included here are the dead woman's mysterious lover; Anders, the town drunk and tortured artist; the menacing scion of Fjällbacka's canning-magnate family; and Alex's ugly duckling younger sister.
 
Joining forces with local cop Patrik Hedström, with whom she also begins a sizzling romance, Erica discovers some horrifying truths about her hometown and its inhabitants that have been hushed up for decades under layers of deceit. As she and Patrik edge closer to finding Alex's killer, the prime suspect turns up dead and Erica's sister finds herself in dire straits.
 
Although Läckberg's weightier themes--domestic violence and child abuse--are given short shrift in the service of her many subplots, the writing is highly atmospheric and the pacing keeps the pages turning. Fjällbacka itself is a compelling presence in the narrative, an ideal setting for this small-town murder mystery.--Debra Ginsberg
 
Shelf Talker: The U.S. debut of an atmospheric murder mystery set in the small tourist town of Fjällbacka by Sweden's bestselling crime writer.

 

"There will always be books. There will always be conversations about books. The way that conversation happens is what will continue to evolve."--Rick Joyce, chief marketing director, Perseus Books Group, speaking at BookExpo America in New York City this week.

BEA is all about the conversations. Some of them occur formally in scheduled meetings, but most just happen naturally as we meet old friends or make new ones. So words always matter here, whether they are air-, print- or digitally-borne. For all of us in this business, the need to talk about books and the book trade ranks a very close second to our collective obsession with reading books.

You already know that.

I'm writing this while still in my New York hotel. The show has just ended. Over the next week, it will be dissected by experts worldwide analyzing the switch to midweek, the change to two floor days and an almost infinite number of other issues. For a few precious moments tonight, however, it's a pleasant blur of fresh memories. Call it BEA afterglow.

I'm still trying to filter the dozens of conversations I had during the past few days, but for now I'll share a first impression I found particularly striking. It has to do with my completely unscientific measurement of tone in the voices of the booksellers I spoke with, ranging from industry veterans like Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Books, San Francisco, Calif.--who is celebrating his 40th year with the store--to Sarah Carr, who opened Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C., with Jamie Fiocco and Land Arnold less than a year ago.

I heard it again and again in quick chats with great booksellers like Roger Doeren of Rainy Day Books, Fairway, Kan.; Neil Strandberg of the Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, Colo.; Susan Novotny of the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.; Betsy Burton of the King's English Bookstore, Salt Lake City, Utah; Susan Fox of Red Fox Books, Glens Falls, N.Y., and so many others.

That tone was a distinct blend of curiosity and fighting spirit, reflecting a passion to adapt and innovate rather than merely survive. It sounded good to me.

I was a bookseller during the golden age of whining that began, or at least flourished, during the rise of the chains and Amazon, and has gradually diminished over time as the bookstores that made it through that perilous gauntlet found ways to stay the course. The book business hasn't gotten any easier for indies. Times are tough. Our industry morphs hourly; the future is a bully threatening to punch indie booksellers in the mouth every day and stealing their lunch money.

But I heard something else in their tone of voice here. I heard the sound of booksellers talking primarily about their vision for the future, exploring possibilities, working hard to figure out what diverse pieces of the changing book environment--digital options, community partnerships, in-store POD sales, shop local movements, etc.--they might be able to thread together to make indie bookselling a business with a viable future; to make the bully use his own damn lunch money for a change.

Adaptation and innovation.

At an ABA Day of Education session called "The New Reality: Alternative Bookstore Models," Chris Morrow of the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vt., offered the following concise bit of advice about innovation: "Anything you do like this is an experiment and you have to adjust as you go."

I'll write more about that session next week, but the tone of voice filled that room, too. Morrow, Chuck Robinson of Village Books, Bellingham, Wash.; and Carol Horne of the Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, Mass., were saying "This is the kind of stuff we're trying to make our businesses better. These solutions aren't everybody's answer. You'll figure that part out yourself for your bookstore, your community. Don't do what we do. Do what you do best and enhance it with some of the new opportunities available. Standing pat is no longer an option."

Meeting the challenge requires not just a willingness to experiment, but an eagerness to do so; maybe even a downright pleasure in punching the future, bully that it is, right in the nose.

And that's what I heard in the voices, the words, the casual conversations and formal observations of indie booksellers at BEA 2010.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)