Sarah Bagby of Watermark Books, Wichita, Kan.; Steve Bercu of BookPeople, Austin, Tex.; and Tom Campbell of the Regulator Bookshop, Durham, N.C., have been elected to serve three-year terms on the board of the directors of the ABA, beginning June 2010, Bookselling This Week reported.

This is the second three-year term for Bercu and Campbell. Cathy Langer of Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, Colo., is ending a second term.

Michael Tucker of Books Inc., San Francisco, Calif., was ratified to serve a second one-year term as ABA president and Becky Anderson of Anderson's Bookshops, Naperville, Ill., to serve a second one-year term as v-p/secretary.

Continuing on the nine-member board are Betsy Burton of the King's English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah; Dan Chartrand of Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, N.H.; Beth Puffer of the Bank Street Bookstore, New York City; and Ken White of SFSU Bookstore, San Francisco. The board of directors transition will take place in conjunction with BEA in late May.

Crown Publishing Group is reorganizing its imprints within three major editorial areas: "general interest nonfiction and fiction; branded/category books; and four-color and lifestyle, encompassing our cookbook, design, style, and crafts and visual arts titles." In a memo to Random House staff, Crown's president and publisher Maya Mavjee outlined the resulting changes: 

Crown and Broadway Books will be united under a single head, who will to be determined after a search currently underway. The Shaye Areheart imprint has been discontinued and Areheart is stepping down from her current position, but will continue to work with her authors under the new title editor-at-large. Leaving the company are Diane Salvatore, v-p, publisher, Broadway Books; and senior editor Lorraine Glennon.

Tina Constable will now lead Crown Archetype, Harmony Books, Crown Forum and Crown Business--an imprint created by the merging of Crown and Broadway Business.

Philip Patrick has been appointed v-p, digital and marketing strategy, publisher, Crown Group Digital.

Effective June 7, Tina Pohlman will become v-p, publisher, Three Rivers Press and Broadway Paperbacks.

David Drake has been named senior v-p, executive director, publicity, heading up a newly combined publicity department. Katie Wainwright will leave the company now that her position has been eliminated as v-p, executive director, publicity, Crown Publishers, Harmony, Shaye Areheart Books, Clarkson Potter, Potter Craft, Potter Style and Watson-Guptill. 

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Amazon has continued its recent practice of selling some titles at e-book price points (Shelf Awareness, April 23, 2010). The Wall Street Journal reported the online retailer is "selling a number of new hardcover books published this month by Pearson PLC's Penguin Group (USA) for only $9.99 amid a dispute between the two companies over electronic books."

Penguin is the lone holdout among the five major publishing houses that reached agreements with Apple to reach an agreement with Amazon on the agency pricing model, and has not provided digital editions of new titles to Amazon since April 1, though they are available through numerous other retail outlets. 

The books involved include The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein, This Is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry, The Line by Olga Grushin, Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott and Lucid Intervals by Stuart Woods, the Journal noted.

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Bookselling This Week showcased the display space created by "a wall of windows that stretches the length of the storefront" at Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., where owner Kerry Slattery maximizes the high-visibility facade by partnering with local businesses "to create attention-grabbing displays."

"We've done displays with a clothing shop, record shop, print shop, and art supply store, all different kinds of businesses," she said. "They're thrilled because they don't have as prime a spot as we do."

Skylight also adds books to the presentations. "We always pick related books to be part of the display," Slattery said. "And we do sell a lot of books out of the window.... There are all kinds of ways for businesses to work together. And customers really appreciate learning about new businesses in the community. They say, 'It's so great you're doing this for the neighborhood!' "

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Going local is also key for Time Enough Books, Ilwaco, Wash., which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. "We would not survive without the support of our locals," co-owner Karla Nelson told BTW.

"We always planned for a storefront and the opportunity arose to be on the ground floor of a revitalization of an area that had been primarily a fishing port," she said. "We took a giant leap of faith and have watched this area blossom."

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Winning the Pulitzer has breathed substantial life into the sales figures for Paul Harding's Tinkers, which hit USA Today's bestseller list this week at number 64. Bellevue Literary Press has reprinted 80,000 copies of the paperback, with the phrase "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" on the cover.

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Hachette said that four of its books were among the top eight downloaded from Apple's iBookstore after the launch of the new iPad, AFP reported. The titles, published by Hachette U.S., are Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler, Outliers by Malcom Gladwell and Worst Case by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge.

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Inside bookselling. The Boswellians blog from Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, Wis., offered 10 lessons learned by Greg since he switched from the sales floor to the shipping/receiving room, including "books are heavy" and "even the messiest individuals become rather organized when doing this job."

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Author Tayari Jones canceled her upcoming appearance at the Pima Summer Writers Conference in Tucson this summer in protest of Arizona's new immigrant legislation, the Guardian reported.

"Yesterday, I spoke with a dear friend who is an American citizen of Mexican descent who said that he would not feel safe in Arizona, although he (like me) used to call the state home," she wrote in a letter to conference organizers. "That people should be legally required to show proof of citizenship is similar to the antebellum mandate that black people produce 'free papers' proving themselves not to be slaves. It recalls the pass system under South Africa's apartheid. Sadly, visiting Arizona for a conference or a vacation without fear has become an ostentatious display of privilege. As much as I was looking forward to participating in the Pima Writers Conference, travelling to Arizona would be tantamount [to] endorsing these draconian policies."

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Random House has created an intricate and interactive website, Find Subject Zero, to promote Justin Cronin's The Passage, scheduled for June 8 release.

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Jay Gatsby and P Diddy? Mr. Darcy and George Clooney? Flavorwire.com explored the possible combinations of "Literary Characters and Their Modern-Day Tabloid Counterparts."

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Book trailer of the day: Feathers of Hope: Pete Dubacher, the Berkshire Bird Paradise, and the Human Connection with Birds by Barbara Chepaitis (SUNY Press).

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After 43 years in the book industry, Tom Carney is retiring today. Carney managed a bookstore in Denver for 22 years, then sold for John Wiley & Sons's trade sales department throughout most of the western U.S for 21 years. His new contact information is tcarney37@gmail.com or 303-423-4111.

 

Horrid Henry recently met 120 third- and fourth-graders at a Chicago public school, where all read a story and had their books signed by the costume character. The Horrid Henry series is published here by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky.

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow morning on the Early Show: Anna Quindlen, author of Every Last One (Random House, $26, 9781400065745/1400065747).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Weekend Edition: Jonathan Eig, author of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781416580591/141658059X).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Studio 360: Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (Little, Brown, $29.99, 9780316004091/031600409X).

 

Ang Lee is the latest name to be mentioned as a possible director for the film version of Yann Martel's Life of Pi. Thompson on Hollywood chronicled the lineup changes since the novel was acquired seven years ago by Fox 2000’s Elizabeth Gabler: "M. Night Shyamalan fell out. So did Alfonso Cuaron and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Finally, it may get made thanks to Ang Lee--and 3-D."

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The on-again, off-again tale of a film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit is on. Warner Bros. has scheduled Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro’s two-part adaptation for December 2012 and December 2013 releases, according to the Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog, which noted that a "2013 is two years later than the 2011 release date that New Line and MGM targeted for the first installment when the two companies originally announced the movies in December 2007. However, 2011 proved not to be a realistic date and instead served more as a guideline, according to insiders, because when it was first announced, no scripts were written, nor schedules or budgets drawn up."

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Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village, Lady in the Water) has been added to a cast that includes Emma Stone and Viola Davis in the film adaptation of The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Shooting is scheduled to begin this July in Mississippi, Entertainment Weekly reported.

Here are the winners of the 2010 Edgar Awards, who were honored last night at the Mystery Writers of America banquet in New York City: 

Best novel: The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur)
Best first novel: In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur)
Best paperback original: Body Blows by Marc Strange (Dundurn Press/Castle Street Mysteries)
Best critical/biographical: The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives edited by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown)
Best fact crime: Columbine by Dave Cullen (Twelve)
Best short story: "Amapola" by Luis Alberto Urrea in Phoenix Noir (Akashic)
Best young adult: Reality Check by Peter Abrahams (HarperTeen)
Best juvenile: Closed for the Season by Mary Downing Hahn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children's Books)
Best TV episode teleplay: "Place of Execution" by Patrick Harbinson (PBS/WGBH Boston)
Robert L. Fish Memorial Award: "A Dreadful Day" by Dan Warthman in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
S&S/Mary Higgins Clark Award: Awakening by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur)
Grand Master: Dorothy Gilman
Raven Awards: Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Oakmont, Pa.; Zev Buffman, International Mystery Writers' Festival
Ellery Queen Award: Poisoned Pen Press (Barbara Peters & Robert Rosenwald)

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Winners of the Publishing Triangle's 22nd annual Triangle Awards for best LGBT fiction, poetry and nonfiction were announced at the New School yesterday. The complete list of finalists is available here, and the winning authors are:

Lesbian nonfiction: American Romances by Rebecca Brown (City Lights)
Gay nonfiction: The Greeks and Greek Love by James Davidson (Random House)
Lesbian poetry: Zero at the Bone by Stacie Cassarino (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
Gay poetry: Poems of the Black Object by Ronaldo V. Wilson (Futurepoem Books)
Debut fiction: The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund (University of Georgia Press)
LGBT fiction: The Hour Between by Sebastian Stuart (Alyson Books)

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Pietro Grossi won the 2010 Campiello Europe Prize for his novel Fists (Pushkin Press), and will be honored at a ceremony in London attended by the Italian ambassador May 15. Fists is also on the shortlist for the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

 

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant won the 2010 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, which was co-sponsored by Quill & Quire. She topped a shortlist that included Bryden's No Place Strange by Diana Fitzgerald, The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, Goya's Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky, Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic and Daniel O'Thunder by Ian Weir.

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Winners of the 2010 BC Book Prizes, awarded recently in Vancouver, were:

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Finalists have been named for the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Awards, which was first presented in 1976 to Mordecai Richler’s Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, Quill & Quire reported.

Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of many broadcasting honors, including five Peabody Awards and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. He is the author/editor of four books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, including two StoryCorps books: Listening Is an Act of Love and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps, published by the Penguin Press on April 15.

On your nightstand now:

Walkin' the Dog by Walter Mosley sits on my nightstand, and I carry it everywhere I go. Read my first Mosley book a couple of weeks ago--I'm addicted.

Favorite book when you were a child:

This Is New York by Miroslav Sasek was magical to me--I was particularly obsessed with the smoke rings blowing out of the Camel ad in Times Square.

Your top five authors:

Jennifer Gonnerman #1 with a bullet (my wife); Joseph Mitchell; A.J. Liebling; Raymond Carver; Flannery O'Connor. Old school, I know.

Book you've faked reading:

Not sure if I've ever done that, but if I don't like a book I'm reading, instead of putting it down I'll fly through it at a rate of about a second per page. There have been quite a few of those.

Book you're an evangelist for at the moment:

Dwayne Betts's A Question of Freedom, the memoir of a young man who served time in Virginia as a juvenile and young adult--a great book; In the Place of Justice is the autobiography of the legendary prison journalist Wilbert Rideau, recently released after serving a 44-year sentence at the Louisiana State Penitentiary--one of the most (if not the most) important prison memoirs ever written.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I'm too cheap to do that.

Book that changed your life:

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell--shook me to my core and I've yet to recover.

Favorite line from a book:

"Bird Leg loved dogs. And for that reason, Lafayette loved Bird Leg."--From There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz. A perfect line from the best work of nonfiction journalism of the 20th century.

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

Cheap Novelties by Ben Katchor--this first collection of the cartoonist's work is heartstoppingly beautiful and profound. Every page is simply perfection.

Beneath 17-year-old Sascha's defiant intelligence hides a scarred and broken girl who witnessed the shooting death of her mother and her mother's boyfriend. She's a young Russian emigrant trying to make a new life for herself in Berlin, under the guardianship of plump cousin Maria, in the Emerald, a concrete German ghetto tower packed with other Russians. To survive, she has made herself fearless, tough enough to take on any situation, and is determined to protect her little sister and disturbed, withdrawn little brother.

What a literary creation! No wonder this book was such a sensation in Europe. Sascha is alternately endearing and exasperating, compassionate and chillingly cold-blooded, always ready to use her budding sexuality as a weapon, never quite admitting even to herself what she's looking for with such avidity and violence. When she flips out and begins hurling rocks through her neighbors' windows, you realize how tenuous her grip on sanity might really be. She's frighteningly bright, adapts quickly, effortlessly achieves great grades at an exclusive Catholic girls' school. But she has no sense of personal safety and makes reckless decisions, like jogging at night through the dangerous teenage sex-and-drugs hangout called Broken Glass Park.

She's an angry force of nature and just as unpredictable. But life has a few surprises in store for Sascha. She's about to grow up, whether she wants to or not. Her impetuous decisions are starting to have consequences. First-time author Bronsky--herself a Russian emigrant to Germany--brings to life a ghetto full of perpetually surprising characters, plus some intruders from outside who the reader soon cares about passionately, as the plot hurtles into an opaque future full of left turns and unexpected consequences. Bronsky's lean writing style--rich in character comedy, with well-translated, rapid-fire dialogue--propels the reader from page to page, watching open-mouthed as Sascha bashes and smashes her way into adulthood.--Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A literary sensation in Europe, this novel about a young Russian emigrant in Germany is an unpredictable journey filled with rich characters, rapid-fire dialogue and an unforgettable heroine.

Today we wave goodbye to another National Poetry Month. To mark its passage, I'll read some poems and remember a few lines that moved me, like these from Terese Svoboda's "Woman with Navel Showing":

It's a matter of words and words matter. As NPM comes to an end, I wondered what poetry publishers and poets were thinking. Since I couldn't ask all of them, I opted for one of each.

"National Poetry Month is a great idea (thank you Academy of American Poets) and many good things are done to support it, but I can’t really say we’ve seen a significant growth in our sales of poetry books during April. We’ll sell more poetry books when more people are reading poetry books," observed Tom Lavoie, director of marketing and sales at the University of Arkansas Press, which was founded in 1980 and this year launched the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, named for its first director.

Lavoie acknowledged that a relatively small group of poets--Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, for example--have a substantial readership, but "as we know, the 'general' audience for poetry is still small. Why don’t more people read poetry; why isn't the audience for poetry larger? Eternal questions and the same old answers. Poor teaching of poetry in schools really does impact future readership. Also, there are a number of poets whose work is just too difficult for 'general readers.' This is why poets like Collins and Oliver appeal to a wide audience; their work 'invites' any reader into the piece to share that poetic experience. And because of this, they also have the greater opportunities to continue to build upon this audience. Performance helps too. More poets who can 'touch' readers with a strong voice, enthusiasm for the poem, a presentation that engages, and poems that people can grasp, understand, and enjoy can help expand the audience. Where are today’s Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Edna St. Vincent Millay? And there is a cultural element. I’ve read about huge audiences for poets in foreign countries; go into almost any Irish pub and there will be a number of patrons who can recite a Yeats poem on the spot."

What can poets do to shift that momentum a bit more in their favor? "The most important things a poet can do to help get sales and publicity for their book are to do readings, contribute to blogs and websites and network," Lavoie suggested. "We can’t do everything, so we really appreciate a poet who is 'out there' connecting. We always see a clear distinction in sales between the poets who do this and those who tend to be reclusive and 'quiet.' The press has a very nice blog and we post all kinds of publicity material we get from our poets. Video trailers can also be a great way to publicize a collection and we’re seeing more authors doing this. Shelf Awareness put up Terese Svoboda’s trailer for her Weapons Grade collection, which we published last year. Publishing a book should be an active partnership between the press and the author, and we welcome their involvement."

Svoboda agreed, citing "a great editor, more input regarding the cover and big enthusiasm" as benefits of working with a small publisher. She also noted that to get the word out about their work, poets must do "everything possible. Big presses, small presses--it's all about publicity. A small press may have a devoted following which can be counted on to spread the word, something that is harder for a big press to cultivate. To some extent, the Internet has leveled the marketing for both sized presses, but there will always be hierarchies of blogs, twitters, reviews. A friend of mine offered to do a reading in the nude for his first book."

When asked about poetry readers, Svoboda replied, "Poetry audiences know to look for releases from small/university presses. It's a small group but passionate. I would say they're like the protectors of endangered species, but poetry will never be endangered. When I was a producer in a TV series about poetry and talking it up, I discovered that passion everywhere. The cabbie who picked me up kept a sheaf of poems in his glove box; the grandmother of the director owned a first edition of Whitman; my therapist revealed a whole bookshelf of poetry beside his textbooks. Poetry is natural to the condition of being human."

Among her audience she numbers "readers against war, pro-female readers, readers who don't mind exploring sex, death, and the stealthily placed pun."

I'm reading Weapons Grade now. I'll read it again this weekend. And I think I'll celebrate the end of National Poetry Month with a pledge to write about poetry later this year in a month that isn't April.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)