Wow.

Less than two weeks after AMS filed for bankruptcy, one of the largest publishers distributed by its PGW subsidiary, Avalon Publishing Group, is being bought by Perseus Book Group, which has its own distribution company, Perseus Distribution, and owns Consortium. The companies signed a letter of intent; the deal is expected to close soon. Today's Wall Street Journal estimated Avalon's annual sales at $40 million.

Perseus indicated it is making overtures to other PGW publishers. Avalon chairman and CEO Charlie Winton, who founded PGW and sold it to AMS, and Perseus Group president and CEO David Steinberger are "working together on a proposal to AMS, PGW and PGW clients, all of whom are facing a very challenging situation," Steinberger said in a statement. "We have talked to a number of clients and we are in discussions with AMS."

For his part, Winton said, "We think a path can be found that would benefit all parties. Because of its two distribution lines--Consortium and Perseus Distribution--Perseus is ideally positioned to lead this initiative."

Winton will continue to head Avalon for a transition period, then advise Perseus Books on publishing and strategic issues, in particular developing Perseus's client services business providing sales and distribution services to independent publishers.

At press time, the status of Avalon inventory at PGW and AMS warehouses and monies owed to Avalon were unclear. It is much more clear now that PGW, if it survives, will be a significantly smaller entity than the one the industry is familiar with. In addition, Perseus, which entered the distribution business only two years ago when it bought CDS, continues to grow at a fast clip.

Avalon imprints include Carroll & Graf, Marlowe, Nation Books, Seal Press, Shoemaker & Hoard and Thunder's Mouth; Avalon also has an extensive travel book line. Perseus and Consortium distribute some 150 presses, including, through Perseus, Abbeville, Distributed Arts Publishers, Harvard Business School Press, Planeta, Regnery, Taschen and the University of Michigan Press, and through Consortium, City Lights, Copper Canyon, the Feminist Press, New Society Publishers, Ocean Press, Seven Stories and Soho Press. PGW distributes some 150 publishers, among them Grove/Atlantic, McSweeney's, Amber Allen, Canongate, Hugh Lauter Levin, Milkweed, North Atlantic Books, Pomegranate Press, Sasquatch and Soft Skull.

A combination tribute/history/obituary for PGW on the blog RadioFreePGW ends this way:

"One of the great contradictions about PGW since Charlie [Winton] sold it to Satan of San Diego in 2002 is that for many of us, PGW has never been better. Many of us had our best year ever in 2006. Much of the credit for that goes to new PGW president Richard Freese. He was able to take the torch from Charlie and energize an already productive PGW crew. Unfortunately, the sins of AMS would eventually be visited on PGW.

"We join all PGW publishers in offering the staff of PGW our deepest thanks and in wishing you well. You made PGW a home for those of us with our funky and anything-but-mainstream presses. You made it possible for us to have a voice and a presence in an industry that is dominated by huge publishers.

"In an upcoming Radio Free PGW we will take a look at the AMS part of the equation. For now, we say goodbye to the best friend that a small press could ever have."

The Coloradoan profiles Reader's Cove, the 6,600-sq.-ft. store with 33,000 titles that opened November 22 in Fort Collins, Colo. Through no fault of its own, Reader's Cove had a difficult inaugural holiday season: the area was overwhelmed by a series of snowstorms.

Nonetheless intrepid owners Charles and Karey Kaine intend to add a mezzanine this spring and stock another 20,000 titles. In 2008 or 2009, they plan to open a second, smaller Reader's Cove downtown. Charles said the couple's goal is "to be the Tattered Cover of Northern Colorado.

"Our biggest challenge is making sure people break their habits and start shopping for new books here, at a locally owned store," he continued. "We want people to come here because they like it better, not because they hate chains."

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Bookstore customer available.

In a story about the closing of Waldenbooks, the last bookstore in Needham, Mass., the Needham Times quoted Bette Gosule, a customer since the store's opening in 1981, as being disappointed by the news. "When you go walking through town, it's nice to go into a local place," she told the paper. "People who are there know the customers. It makes it more welcoming."

Gosule said she may stop buying books for a while and doesn't like ordering titles online. "I like going someplace and browsing. Where I'm going to end up, I don't know."

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Cool idea of the day: Book Passage, which has stores in Corte Madera and San Francisco, Calif., has introduced a column for book club advice that will be a regular feature in the store's News & Reviews newsletter as well as on its Web site. In the first edition of Ask Miss Paige Turner, "Frustrated in Fairfax" complains about the behavior of some of her fellow club members, who sometimes arrive unprepared or are absent without leave. Another problem: book discussions sometimes last only 10 or 15 minutes before socializing begins.

(By the way, in response, Miss Paige Turner recommended a "re-organizational meeting" for an honest discussion about the group and gave detailed suggestions of what to cover.)

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Days after the Sobol Award program collapsed, Simon & Schuster's Touchstone imprint and Gather.com, which just e-inked an agreement with Borders for a book chat room, are setting up First Chapters, a prize for unpublished writers, today's New York Times reported. Under the program, aspiring authors post chapters of their works on Gather.com, and its members vote in several rounds for their favorites. (Unlike the Sobol Award, there are no entry fees, and winners aren't forced to sign a contract with an agent.) Finalists are judged by a panel that includes S&S's Carolyn Reidy and George Jones, CEO of Borders. The brass ring is the same as the Sobol Award: a publishing contract with Touchstone. The winner also receives $5,000 from gather.com.

By the way, we gather Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace has been spending too much time in front of computer screens and not enough time in bookstores. The Times wrote that Gerace said social-networking sites like his are "sometimes filling in for independent bookstores, which have generally decreased the frequency of in-store events in the last few years. 'Increasingly, as book readings are becoming more rare,' he said, 'people are turning to social media to make those introductions.' "
 

Linda Grana, manager of the Lafayette Bookstore, Lafayette, Calif., and the staff have showered attention on a November novel, Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon (Unbridled Books, $24.95, 9781932961249), and made it into a store bestseller. Booksellers at the "fairly small" store handsold the title during December and displayed it at the register with a talker that said, "This is sooooo good!" (The staff gift-wrapped copies in advance "knowing they'd sell and to save wrapping time," Grana said.) In three weeks, Lafayette Bookstore sold 55 copies of the Rain Village, making it the #1 fiction title, tied with Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier.

When it rains, it pours: Rain Village is getting several more boosts at Lafayette. For one, the book has been chosen by several of the store's book clubs (some 160 clubs are registered there). Moroever, after New Year's Day, Grana has a tradition of choosing her personal top pick for the previous year--and promoting it to customers. Out of the 175 books Grana read in 2006, she chose Rain Village. "We will soon be sending out an e-mail telling customers (who didn't hear of it at Christmas) about this little 'hidden gem' we've found," she stated.

Rain Village is, Grana said, "a compelling coming of age story about a young girl in Kansas. Unhappy with her life on a farm, she befriends a gypsy woman working at the library, who tells her tales of life and love in the circus. When Tessa decides to run away and join the circus as a trapeze artist, she begins a magical and bittersweet journey, to discover herself and the meaning of friends and family."

Shelf Awareness is happy to team up with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill to launch a bookseller sweepstakes. Called the South Awareness tour, the contest celebrates the release of Larry Brown's forthcoming novel, A Miracle of Catfish. The three winning booksellers will travel to Oxford, Miss., for the official launch of the book during the Oxford Conference for the Book March 22-24.

The three-night trip includes:

• Airfare and accommodations
• A night in Memphis, Tenn., whose main course is a gastronomical tour of the city led by John T. Edge, author of Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South (to be served up on June 29)
• Attendance at the conference, which is dedicated this year to Larry Brown and includes readings, panel discussions and music
• A guided tour of Larry Brown's writing cabin as well as fishing at the author's pond, which is the setting for A Miracle of Catfish
• A "back-door" tour of William Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak
• A stop at the Taylor Grocery for fried catfish and hush puppies.

Contest entry rules are tough: booksellers need to send their name, store address and phone number and a request for a galley of A Miracle of Catfish to southawareness@algonquin.com. There is a limit of one entry per bookseller. Deadline is February 6. The contest is open to U.S. residents 21 years of age or older who are actively employed at a retail bookstore during the period of sweepstakes entry. For complete rules visit algonquin.com/giveaway/.

Craig Popelars, Algonquin's marketing director, called the South Awareness tour "a way of saying thank you to the many booksellers who have supported Larry's work over the years." In addition, "instead of bringing the Larry Brown experience to bookstores, we wanted to bring booksellers to the Larry Brown experience."

Popelars said he expects interest from booksellers across the country. "While Southern to the bone, there is something about Larry's sense of place and character that transcends borders. He has been able to reach a wide audience."
 

Today on the Martha Stewart Show: tips from Jana Klauer, M.D., author of How the Rich Get Thin: Park Avenue's Top Diet Doctor Reveals the Secrets to Losing Weight and Feeling Great (St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95, 9780312340391).

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Today the Diane Rehm Show is about Calvin Trillin, author of About Alice (Random House, $14.95, 9781400066155).

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Today on KCRW's Booksworm: Anne Carson, translator of Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York Review Books, $19.95, 9781590171806). As the show described the hateful segment: "Anne Carson's translations of four plays by Euripides are dynamic, intense and were written to be performed. The only problem is that, as she translated, Carson realized she hates Euripides. In this interview, she focuses on those aspects of Euripides that inspire her hatred."

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Tonight on Hardball with Chris Matthews: Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas and author of From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 STOPS to Restoring America's Greatness (Center Street, $19.99, 9781599957043). Huckabee is also scheduled to appear on Fox & Friends today.

Starbucks has picked A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah as the second title it will sell in the bookselling program it unveiled last year, the AP (via the San Francisco Chronicle) reported. The first book in the program, Mitch Albom's For One More Day, has sold 92,000 copies.

A Long Way Gone recounts Beah's years as a child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Now 26, Beah emigrated to the U.S. in 1998 and graduated from Oberlin College in 2004. Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux said that Beah tells "how at the age of 12, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By 13, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts."

Beah will tour Starbucks stores in 10 cities, and Starbucks will donate $2 to UNICEF from the sale of each copy of A Long Way Gone, with a minimum donation of $100,000. "UNICEF played a key role in the rehabilitation of Beah," Starbucks Entertainment president Ken Lombard said.

 

The movie Freedom Writers on the Rise, which opened last week, has led to rising sales of the book on which the Hillary Swank film is based. The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them by Erin Gruwell (Broadway Books, $13.95, 9780767924900) was in the hourly top 100 over the weekend at Barnes&Noble.com and rose as high as 10 on Monday. Gruwell is the teacher who encouraged her Long Beach, Calif., students to keep a joint diary of their inner-city upbringings.

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Rhonda Ryrne's The Secret (Beyond Words, $23.95, 9781582701707), based on the movie about the power of attraction, reached No. 15 on Tuesday and yesterday on B&N.com. The book, which came out in November, received attention late last year from Larry King and Ellen DeGeneres and has been written up in the mainstream press in the past months. The movie, which came out last spring, is being available in the U.S. only online or via DVDs, sold mainly at New Age bookstores, where the film has become so popular it is a misnomer.