Shelf Awareness for Thursday, January 4, 2007


Quarry Books: Yes, Boys Can!: Inspiring Stories of Men Who Changed the World - He Can H.E.A.L. by Richard V Reeves and Jonathan Juravich, illustrated by Chris King

Simon & Schuster: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Nightweaver by RM Gray

G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers: The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman

Overlook Press: Hotel Lucky Seven (Assassins) by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Brian Bergstrom

News

Notes: Downloadable-Only Audios; New Association Head

Downloadable-only audiobooks continue to grow in popularity and some of the hottest titles, so to speak, are erotica, today's New York Times reported. At Audible.com, seven of the top 10 downloadable-only titles are erotica. "We started it not necessarily because we wanted to be in the erotica business, but because it seemed like a niche that wasn't being filled," publisher Beth Anderson told the paper. Erotica titles are increasingly geared to women, as, for example, the Herotica series by Susie Bright.

Downloadable audiobooks are often a third less expensive than CD versions and represented 9% of audiobook sales in 2005, according to the Audio Publishers Association. In mainstream genres, the decision to publish in downloadable-only or downloadable and CD is based on projected hardcover sales; sometimes a downloadable-only title is later published in CD, too, when the book breaks out or has significant publicity breaks.

---

Jim Sheppard has been named executive director of the Used Textbook Association, which was formed last year "to advocate the role and value of used textbooks in the marketplace and in turn, increase the supply of used textbooks available to students" (Shelf Awareness, October 31, 2006). Sheppard recently retired after a 27-year career at Michigan State University and was director of the MSU Union, with responsibility over the bookstore as well as other operations.

In addition, the association appointed Tom Ebert, New Jersey Books, as vice president. He replaces Dan Schuppan of MBS Textbook Exchange, owned by Barnes & Noble. Schuppan resigned as vice president and a board member last November.

---

The Waldenbooks in Main Place Mall, Buffalo, N.Y., is closing later this month, and is the last seller of "new books and periodicals" downtown, according to the Buffalo News. The store had been open nearly 40 years. Another Walden in nearby Blasdell will close when a Borders opens this spring at Quaker Crossing in Orchard Park.

---

The Palisadian-Post, Pacific Palisades, Calif., celebrated Katie O'Laughlin's decision to renew for three years the lease on Village Books, her 1,000-sq.-ft. store that marks its 10th anniversary this summer. (A lease renewal may seem not so significant, but Pacific Palisades is quite the high-rent district!) She commented: "I'm anxious as to what the future holds, but I still love doing this and I'm going to give it my best shot."

The store received a great review from Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, a local resident, who told the paper, "I can't imagine life in the Palisades without Village Books. It's such a blessing to have this kind of sophisticated and friendly store right in the heart of the Village. They have become real experts at getting books quickly if they don't have it on the shelf."

O'Laughlin recently added a Web site and has revised her loyalty program by instituting a six-month expiration date on the credit slips. She told the paper that the biggest competition is "still the Internet, more than Barnes & Noble and Borders. Also, you see books being sold everywhere--Target, Costco, grocery stores, specialty stores, Restoration Hardware--and they all nick away at our sales. People say, 'Your store seems busy,' but you have to sell a lot of $10 to $30 books just to break even."

---

On the occasion of the publication next week of the last of the Traveling Pants novels--Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood (Delacorte, $18.99, 9780385729369)-- today's New York Times tours the Manhattan townhouse that author Ann Brashares shares with her husband, painter Jacob Collins, and their three children.

The piles of money from the series--which has seven million copies in print in North America--came after the couple had bought and renovated the house. "I remember thinking: I wish I'd know the book would succeed, because I would have tiled our bathroom," she said.


BINC: Your donation can help rebuild lives and businesses in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and beyond. Donate Today!


Chelsea Green Aims to Be Green Giant

Chelsea Green, the White River Junction, Vt., publisher that has specialized in publishing and distributing ecologically friendly titles for more than 23 years--and lately some progressive political titles as well--has added three executives and opened its first office outside Vermont. In connection with the changes, Chelsea Green is revising its sales and marketing strategies and handling sales itself.

The company has hired Mike Dyer as director of marketing and business development. He was formerly vice-president of Fulcrum Publishing in Golden, Colo., where he had worked for two years and was in charge of sales and marketing. Before that, he was director of operations at National Geographic Maps Technology Division. At Chelsea Green, Dyer will be responsible in part for strengthening the company's "position as the preeminent publisher of books on sustainable living" and for keeping the company "at the forefront of 'green' cultural change."

Constance Creed has joined the company as publicity director. For some 20 years, she was publicity director of Trafalgar Square Publishing, the distributor of U.K. publishers that was sold late last year to Independent Publishers Group.

And Darrell Koerner has been hired as Rocky Mountain and Midwest regional sales manager for Chelsea Green. Like Dyer, he formerly worked at Fulcrum, as Rocky Mountain sales manager, and earlier worked at Four Winds Trading Co. He will strengthen Chelsea Green's relationships with booksellers in the central U.S. and help develop retail partnerships in a variety of markets.

The company is also opening a Western U.S. office in downtown Golden, Colo., which Dyer described as "a highly progressive city that has a proven and growing focus on sustainability and the environment."

Chelsea Green is now handling all trade and special sales with an in-house sales team headed by Peg O'Donnell, the director of sales, who joined the company last year. Chelsea Green has phased out the rep groups it was using, and now has three regional sales managers, including Darrell Koerner. O'Donnell has been in the business 28 years, most recently as marketing director/children's specialist at NBN.

Chelsea Green continues to handle its own distribution and fulfillment from a warehouse in Brattleboro, Vt., and distributes 35 publishers whose programs, like Chelsea Green's, focus on renewable energy, green building, organic growing and sustainable agriculture, eco-cuisine and slow food and inspirational environmental titles.


GLOW: Berkley Books: The Seven O'Clock Club by Amelia Ireland


Musings on Micawber's

Our quotation of the day yesterday, taken from a New York Times interview with Logan Fox, who is closing Micawber's Books in March (after selling it to Princeton University), elicited a variety of e-mails. Several readers found Fox's comments about a culture too busy to allow for browsing hours on end in a bookstore depressing. But others had different takes on the matter.

For example, Valerie Ryan of Cannon Beach Book Co., Cannon Beach, Ore., wrote: "Lest you be cast into the slough of despond by the lament of Logan Fox regarding browsers: be it known to all here present that in this little store at the edge of the world, what we see is what Logan Fox wants to see more of. People who have time and disposable income spend both here, bless their hearts. It often happens that a person, even a MALE person, will walk in, tell us how glad they are to be back and start collecting.  Then, s/he repairs to the back to sit down, browse and select. They even put the rejects back! So, all is not lost . . . "

Another Princeton bookseller gave a local point of view.

Deb Hunter said that when she opened Glen Echo Books in Princeton last year, she had no idea that Micawber's would sell its operations to the university and that, as part of the deal, Labyrinth, which has stores near Columbia University and Yale University, would open in Princeton. Although her store is "extremely small and our selection is limited," Glen Echo is "filling the void for local book buyers until the dust settles and all of the moves are made. . . . We are handling the special orders of the local shoppers as well as doing 'buy backs,' basically filling in where needed during the transformation. We are rising to the challenge!"

She continued: "We are saddened that Micawber's is closing. After all, they have been a Princeton staple for many years." She added that she had regularly sent customers to Micawber's when she couldn't find what they wanted and Micawber's had done the same. "I am sure that Labyrinth Books will be an awesome addition to our little corner of the world. We look forward to this exciting change and hope to have a close relationship with Labyrinth in the coming years."

And finally Hans Weyandt of Micawber's Books in St. Paul, Minn., noted that his store is not closing and the two stores have never been connected--except in one amusing way. "We're saddened by the news of their closing, and I already miss those times when a box of theirs would end up in St. Paul or vice versa," he wrote. "If a box of ours hadn't arrived on time we often were fairly certain where to check first."


Media and Movies

This Weekend on Book TV: P.J. O'Rourke in Depth

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, January 6

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In this first of a two-part segment that originally aired in 2001, New York Times senior writer Kurt Eichenwald talks about his book The Informant: A True Story (Broadway, $16.95, 9780767903271). The book is an account of the FBI and the Justice Department's collaboration with an executive at Archer Daniels Midland who implicated the firm in an illegal scheme. The investigation hit a snag when the government discovered that the executive was involved in his own illegal scheme.

9 p.m. After Words. A novelist who became a war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, George Weller was the first American reporter to enter Nagasaki after the dropping of the atomic bomb, but his reports from Japan were censored and never published. In 2003, a year after Weller's death, his son Anthony, a guitarist and novelist, found the missing dispatches and assembled them into the book, First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and its Prisoners of War (Crown, $25, 9780307342010). During the program, Norman Hatch, a Marine combat cinematographer and photographic officer who arrived in Nagasaki when Weller was leaving, interviews Anthony Weller. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

Sunday, January 7

12-3 p.m. In Depth: P.J. O'Rourke, who has worked for National Lampoon and Rolling Stone, is a fellow at the Cato Institute and a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and has written more than a dozen books, the most recent of which is On the Wealth of Nations (Books That Changed the World) (Atlantic Monthly, $21.95, 9780871139498). Viewers may join this discussion by calling in during the program or by e-mailing questions to booktv@c-span.org. (Re-airs Monday at 12 a.m. and Saturday, January 13, at 9 a.m.)


Media Heat: Exercising, Baking, and Playing Games

Today Imus in the Morning shapes up with Denise Austin, whose latest fitness tome is Tone Your Tummy Type: Flatten Your Belly and Shrink Your Waist in 4 Weeks (Rodale, $24.95, 9781594864728).

---

This morning on the Early Show, Dr. Laura Schlessinger expounds on The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage (HarperCollins, $25.95, 9780061142840).

---

This morning on the Today Show: Anne Fletcher, author of Weight Loss Confidential: How Teens Lose Weight and Keep It Off--And What They Wish Parents Knew (Houghton Mifflin, $26, 9780618433667).

---

Today on NPR's Morning Edition: Vikram Chandra offers up Sacred Games (HarperCollins, $27.95, 9780061130359).

---

Today WAMU's Diane Rehm Show has a cheerful conversation with David Elkind, author of The Power of Play: How Spontaneous, Imaginative Activities Lead to Happier, Healthier Children (DaCapo, $24, 9780738210537).

---

Today on KCRW's Bookworm: Philip Levine, author of Breath: Poems (Knopf, $15, 9780375710780). As the show put it: "Philip Levine reminisces about his childhood--about how a working class boy came to poetry. He explores the convergence of his political beliefs and the essentially lyric impulses of his poetics."

---

On the Martha Stewart Show, Amy Sedaris shares a recipe for Lady Baltimore Cake from I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence (Warner, $27.99, 9780446578844).

---

Today on the Oprah Winfrey Show: A rebroadcast of a show featuring Dr. Phillip Tierno, author of The Secret Life of Germs: What They Are, Why We Need Them, and How We Can Protect Ourselves Against Them (Atria, $14, 9780743421881).


Powered by: Xtenit