For a special issue November 9 focused on Indies First/Small Business Saturday (November 28), Shelf Awareness is seeking information from booksellers about plans for the day. Tell us about your related displays, events, promotions, passport programs, collaborations with other independent businesses, and more. Please send information to extra@shelf-awareness.com. Thank you!

Total net book sales in August in the U.S. rose 8.9%, to $1.2 billion, compared to August 2025, representing sales of 1,411 publishers and distributed clients as reported to the Association of American Publishers. For the first eight months of the year, net book sales rose 5.9%, to $7.9 billion.

Overall trade sales in August rose 12.5%, to $904.7 million. In terms of physical format, hardback revenues rose 13.8%, to $320.2 million; paperbacks were up 17.6%, to $333.3 million; mass market dropped 14.6%, to $6.2 million; and special bindings were up 3.7%, to $20.4 million.

Sales by category for August 2026:

Heart Swell Books, "a cozy, warmly lit romance bookstore and bar," is hosting its grand opening party today, October 16, at 2700 N. Campbell Avenue, Suite 100, in Tucson, Ariz., Tucson Weekly reported. "We want people to take off work," said co-owner Shelbie Webb. "It's an all-day event, an all-day affair with tons of different activities and things going on." 

She added that the bookstore's location "has been fantastic for us, even though we've only been open a week. We've got our die-hards that did come to several of our events that have been waiting for this moment of our brick-and-mortar opening, and then a lot of people either going to Luna or Prep and Pastry, or just kind of driving on the side of the road and seeing that we exist." 

Although the storefront is new, the Heart Swell concept dates to summer 2024, when Webb, co-founder Chelsea Blue, and two friends decided to open a romance books pop-up called Friends to Lovers, which debuted at Slow Body Beer Co. and then began showing up at events all over town.

"It was incredible, the response we got with no marketing done at all," Webb said. "We quickly learned that romance readers, and just this community in general in Tucson, were really looking for this type of thing."

The selection at Heart Swell Books "runs the gamut of subgenres and content, including historical, fantasy, paranormal, young adult and an expansive LGTBQ+ selection. The variety attracts a broad customer base, consisting of mostly women but also men of all ages," Tucson Weekly noted.

Webb said that contemporary romance novels, which occupy the store's largest shelf, are its most popular picks: "Those are probably our bestsellers, and there's something in there for everybody too."

To build community, the owners have outfitted the space with tables and chairs, a sofa, a record player, and a bar menu offering beer, cider, wine, mimosas, canned cold brew, and several spritz options. "We want to be more than a bookstore," Webb said. "That's the exact quote we use all the time. The hope is that people come and hang out in the store, instead of just coming in and buying a book and leaving."

Between the Sips Romance Bookstore and Tea Room has opened at 481 W Highway 105 G in Monument, Colo. The Denver Gazette reported that owner Sheena LaBadie credits her second daughter, who has epilepsy, as the inspiration for the bookstore-tearoom concept.

"I wanted somewhere that I could keep a watch on her as she entered the workforce. And she's a big reader and writer," LaBadie said. "She and I go to high tea for her birthday every year, which is where the idea to create a tearoom within a romance bookstore began.... Everyone does coffee and books, but no one thinks about tea and books for those who don't like coffee. I wanted something unique and creative that we can have fun with as we grow."

The concept seems to be working, according to LaBadie, who noted: "A couple of ladies dropped in when we first opened for business. One of them looked around and said, 'Finally, something fun has opened in Monument.' "

Between the Sips is located in a strip mall, where "lacy curtains frame the windows, while the front of the store is devoted to shelves of Harlequin-style romance novels. The tearoom is to the left of the entrance, divided by a screen," the Gazette wrote.

New York University has announced programming for the Advanced Publishing Institute in January, which will focus on innovation, audience, and analytics, and will include a morning workshop on the latest strategies to enhance publishing workflow and business practices through thoughtful, strategic use of AI. Among key speakers are Simon & Schuster CEO Greg Greeley; restaurateur, business leader, and author Danny Meyer; and Sanyu Dillon, president, Random House Publishing Group.

The Advanced Publishing Institute, to be held January 6-7, 2027, is aimed at mid-to-senior level publishing executives, and an early bird discount is available until October 23. For details, click here.

Elise Burns, former head of sales at the Laurence King imprint of Hachette, died July 22, the Bookseller reported. She had more than 25 years of experience in the industry, across children's and adults' books, and was a trustee of the Book Trade Charity and a mentor for the Society of Young Publishers' Spare Zoom Project. Most recently she had been a "courageous and formidable" campaigner for Dignity in Dying and the assisted dying law.

Burns began her career in special sales at Walker Books, eventually becoming custom publishing director, before joining Pan Macmillan, where she was adult nonfiction sales director. Burns later moved to Bloomsbury as U.K. sales director, responsible for adult and children's trade and education sales; then Bonnier Books UK as group sales, marketing, and publicity director; and eventually to Hachette in October 2023.

"She was already well known to many at Hachette from her time at Walker Books, Macmillan, Bloomsbury and Bonnier, and it was wonderful to have her join us," said David Murphy, Orion sales director. "As anyone who met her would know, Elise brought amazing energy, expertise, humor, and passion to everything that she did. She made a hugely positive impact at Laurence King and was a hugely respected and loved colleague.... She will be hugely missed by so many people at Hachette, and across the entire publishing industry."

Anna Bond, managing director, Bonnier Books UK Children's Group, noted that she admired Burns's "energy and brilliant account relationships.... She was smart and direct and she rose to the new challenge of nonfiction as well as keeping her sense of humor when working with the demands of such huge accounts."

Henryk Wesolowski, former sales and marketing director at Walker Books, said Burns "had a real talent for developing new markets for our children's books by working closely with the editorial and art departments in Walker Books. She was, and remains, one of the most creative and effective sales people I have ever worked with and will be sorely missed by her colleagues and many friends in the publishing industry." 

This week, Shelf Awareness sent our Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast to nearly 360,000 of the country's best book readers. The e-blast went to 358,983 customers of 88 participating independent bookstores.

The mailing features four upcoming titles selected by Shelf Awareness editors and three advertised titles, one of which is a sponsored feature. Customers can buy these books via "pre-order" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on each sending store's website. A key feature is that bookstore partners can easily change title selections to best reflect the tastes of their customers and can customize the mailing with links, images, and promotional copy of their own.

The pre-order e-blasts are sent the second Wednesday of each month; the next will go out on Wednesday, November 11. This is a free service for indies. Stores interested in learning more can visit our program registration page or contact our partner program team via e-mail.

Ad spots are also available in the Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast. For more information contact sales@shelf-awareness.com for details.

For a sample of the October Kids & YA Pre-Order E-Blast, see this one from Towpath Books, Morris, Ill.

The titles highlighted in the pre-order e-blast were:

Get Rich Quick: A Legendary Swindle, a Crooked Age and the Art of the Confidence Game by Nicholas Day, illus. by Brett Helquist (Random House Studio)
Will They, Won't They by Maulik Pancholy (Kokila)
Buffalo Fluffalo and the Very Big Scruffalo by Bess Kalb and Erin Kraan (Random House Studio)
Darkness of Dragons by Tui T. Sutherland, illus. by Mike Holmes (Graphix)

Byrd's Books, Bethel, Conn., hosted famed baker Rose Levy Beranbaum for a discussion of her new memoir, Ma Vie En Rose (83Press), with food writer David Leite (Leite's Culinaria). Alice Hutchinson, owner of Byrd's Books, reported that some attendees even baked from the book especially for the event. Pictured: (from left) Beranbaum's husband, food writer Woody Wolston; Rose Levy Beranbaum; David Leite; Alice Hutchinson; food writer and photographer Zoë François.

The Women's National Book Association has chosen 15 titles for its 2025-2026 Great Group Reads selections. The titles are evaluated "not only for their literary merit but also for their ability to spark meaningful conversations in book clubs and reading groups."

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau)
The Only Way Out Is Through by Tara Weinstein (Blair Publishing)
Inharmonious by Tammye Huf (Blackstone Publishing)
The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman (Catapult)
Murder Most Delicious by Danielle Postel-Vinay (Harper Perennial)
The Birthing Tree by Amanda Peters (Catapult)
A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna (Dzanc Books)
The Good Parts by Evann Nomandin (Grand Central)
We're So Lucky to Live Here by Rachel Pastan (Delphinium Books)
Underlake by Erin L. McCoy (Doubleday)
The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush by Susan Gilmore (Blair Publishing)
Purgatoire by Liz Prato (Forest Avenue Press)
Backstitich by Marian Mitchell Donahue (Galiot Press)
Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer (Tor)
Good People by Patmeena Sabit (Crown and Currency)

Mysterious Galaxy Books in San Diego, Calif., shared a video offering a not-so-autumnly solution to the challenge presented "when You Live in San Diego... but you want cozy fall reading weather." The bookstore added: "It's so much easier when the leaves just fall from the trees, but that won't stop us from trying."

"Nothing haunts us like the books we haven't read...." That was the sidewalk chalkboard message in front of Main Street Books in St. Charles, Mo., which noted: "All these books haunting our shelves, waiting to be read.... Our biggest nightmares are our untouched TBRs. You can't spell 'books' without BOO, after all."

At Zando:

Brittany Leddy has joined the company as senior marketing manager. She was most recently at Flatiron.

Audree Damiba has joined the company as marketing manager. She was most recently at Phaidon Press.

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Ríoghnach Robinson, author of Bad Words: A Novel (St. Martin's Press, $30, 9781250431295).

Avatar Entertainment has acquired rights to Spanish journalist Vicente Vallés's novel La Caza del Ejecutor (Hunting the Executioner), attaching screenwriters Borja Moreno and Pablo Riquelme Cuartero to adapt the book into an eight-part TV show, Deadline reported. Avatar founder Larry Robinson is executive producing the project. 

Hunting the Executioner "follows a handsome American CIA agent who partners with a beautiful Spanish secret agent as they travel the world trying to identify and neutralize a mysterious assassin killing Western spies throughout the world," Deadline noted.

Robinson, who spoke with Deadline in Cannes at MIPCOM, said: "I am excited to work with the legendary Vicente Vallés, Pablo Riquelme Cuartero, and Borja Moreno to develop this exciting book into a super premium action thriller series that could air around the world."

PEN International and Fondazione Feltrinelli have announced the 2026 PEN-Inge Feltrinelli Writing as Resistance Award shortlist, which "highlights the many ways in which literature can resist repression, preserve cultural identity and give voice to marginalized communities." The recipient will be named during BookCity Milano in November. The shortlisted writers are:

Aziz Isa Elkun (Uyghur, China): poet, writer, translator, and editor 
Samay Hamed (Afghanistan): poet, writer, publisher, composer, and filmmaker
Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua): poet, novelist, and essayist
Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Cúmez (Maya Kaqchikel, Guatemala): poet, translator, editor, and cultural organizer
Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine): writer, journalist, and screenwriter
Yavuz Ekinci (Türkiye): author
Zukiswa Wanner (South Africa): novelist, editor, publisher, and activist
Leila Guerriero (Argentina): journalist, writer, and editor
Group nomination--Amanuel Asrat, Dawit Isaak, Idris Said "Abu Are," and Fessehaye "Joshua" Yohannes (Eritrea): among the 12 journalists and authors arbitrarily arrested by the Eritrean authorities and held incommunicado since September 2001. 

Joe R. Lansdale (photo: Karen Lansdale)

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of 50 novels and 400 shorter works, including stories, essays, reviews, film and TV scripts, stage plays, introductions and magazine articles, as well as a book of poetry. His work has been made into films, animation, comics, and he has won numerous awards, including an Edgar, the Raymond Chandler lifetime achievement award, numerous Bram Stoker Awards, Lifetime Horror Award, and the Spur Award. Petrified Dreams (Little, Brown, October 6, 2026) is the 15th installment and the conclusion of the series following the dynamic detective duo Hap and Leonard. Women are going missing across the Deep South, and Hap and Leonard zero in on a horrific, chimerical villain protected and abetted by Texas's most powerful figures.

Handsell readers your book:

Petrified Dreams is the last in my long-running Hap and Leonard series. They've earned a rest. First book, Savage Season, first appeared in 1990 and was not planned to be a series. I started this novel about a guy named Hap Collins, and this other guy, Leonard Pine, showed up, and I found I didn't want to let him go. They became a duo. Leonard was Black, gay, and macho as a horse whip. Hap was straight, and in his mind, a bit of a player, but one that often got played. He and Leonard were political opposites, with Leonard being conservative and Hap being idealistic with a semi-hippy past. They were also as close as brothers. They clicked for me. I thought it was one and done, but years later I wrote the second, and along with other novels I've written, these guys kept showing up and readers were as glad to see them as I was. The latest, Petrified Dreams, is the end of the ride, and it's a dark, funny, and quirky one. It reaches into you and tugs at bones and soul. Or so I hope. I was glad to end on this unusual note.

On your nightstand now:

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. Never read it, never saw the show, and I decided to give it a try. It's charming and fun, if of its time, but that adds to it, warts and all. Nice writing. Also reading a large collection of Tarzan comics and rereading a collection of Rudyard Kipling short stories.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs was my favorite, and is still my sentimental favorite. I also loved Edgar Allan Poe's short story collection; the Iliad and the Odyssey; and The Jungle Book by Kipling. Late teens I found an unabridged Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird became my favorite novel, and still is. But the others I love as well. Also Ernest Hemingway's short stories, everything by Flannery O'Connor, the first 20 years of Ray Bradbury especially. Raymond Chandler's books, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain. I was also a comic book fanatic, and they were my first love and taught me to read and how to blend genres when I begin writing. Batman would be the most influential, and I got to write in the Batman universe for Batman: The Animated Series, as well as some prose stories. And lots of other comics.

Your top five authors:

This varies. But, Flannery O'Connor, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury. Another day the list might change. I read and reread these authors, and others constantly.

Current authors would be S.A. Cosby, Joe Hill, and Owen King. Gabino Iglesias. Anything from Kathleen Kent. Really enjoying May Cobb's work A Likable Woman, and a big fan of Ace Atkins, specifically Don't Let the Devil Ride and Everybody Wants to Rule the World. I also really enjoyed Freida McFadden's The Tenant but haven't read any of the others. It's tough to pick favorites and again, it varies day to day and based on my mood. But these are all people I know I can pick up the book and have a great time with it, whatever it is.

Book you've faked reading:

There aren't any.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Flannery O'Connor's collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Big fan of Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Most Ace double science fiction novels.

Book you hid from your parents:

Never hid any. They were okay with me reading.

Book that changed your life:

To Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn helped me understand prejudice. Their world was my Southern world, and I got what they were saying. People who want to remove these books from libraries because they tell harsh truths are idiots. Those are exactly the books we need.

Favorite line from a book:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." That's the last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I had to look it up to be exact, but it is for me the most beautiful line in literature. There are some other good ones, but that one I adore.

Five books you'll never part with:

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler; The October Country by Ray Bradbury; A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and to cheat, I'll add Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Victoria Hannan's I Love the Whole World! is a wild, exuberant, deeply felt adventure. It is a novel with plenty of sadness but at least as much curiosity and openness to joy.

Hannan introduces Leslie McDonald in a moment of upheaval. Her husband of 24 years recently left her for his Alexander technique instructor, Kimberly. "The divorce was neither a surprise, nor not a surprise to Leslie," who "had let her life become so small that she couldn't see past the tediously flat, grid-like streets of her neighborhood" in Melbourne, Australia. She begins entering prize competitions and consequently finds herself booked on an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas for two people--but her best friend backs out. And so, in this novel's first 10 pages, Leslie flies to Las Vegas alone.

Leslie's extremely funny internal monologue is captivating; she tries mightily not to think of her ex-husband ("thinking about Dennis was like going to the dentist to get a filling"), considers all the different Leslies she could have been or might still become, and examines the United States with bemusement and, often, admiration. Even as she gradually allows herself to mourn the long years of her marriage in which she shrank herself, left off telling jokes, and abandoned her passion for art history, Leslie greets the unknown with earnestness and an endearing, childlike sense of wonder. She admires the desert and the Denver omelet, she sees the Grand Canyon and some of the land art she studied back in her university days, and she reconnects with an old friend, who says, "I've never met anyone with such an enormous capacity for delight.... It suits you."

Despite the pathos, Leslie makes wise and hilarious observations on perimenopause, societal expectations, Dennis's trajectory, and the prevalence of churches in small towns in the western U.S. "She wanted to know everything [about the tumbleweed]: its species, its origins. And where do they all go? Where were they tumbling to? Where was she tumbling to?" She suspends her skepticism and sincerely enjoys a magic show. Out of a life of quiet disappointment and passivity, she launches at first uncertainly and then with gusto into willful enjoyment for its own sake. In the glittery, neon, heavily themed Las Vegas strip, Leslie discovers whimsy, desire, and authenticity. "She felt joy fizzing through her veins as if her blood had been replaced with sherbet." By the end of I Love the Whole World!, enthusiasm for this astonishing novel will run to exclamation points too! --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: A recent divorcée wins an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas and embarks upon a hesitant and then delightful journey of self-discovery in this comical, inspirational novel.