Sugar and Spice Books, a romance-focused bookstore, opened in Boulder, Colo., on February 7, per Boulder Reporting Lab.

Located at 1901 9th St., Unit 125, the bookstore carries an assortment of romance sub-genres from both traditionally published and self-published authors. Colorado authors are emphasized, and the store's event plans include book clubs, author signings, tattoo pop-ups, craft nights, and more. 

Prior to opening Sugar and Spice Books, owner Hannah Morgan was a clinical laboratory scientist for 12 years. In 2024 she launched Fated Mates Books, an online store specializing in deluxe editions of romance novels. Eventually, the online store's success led her to leave her science career and open a bricks-and-mortar romance store. 

Morgan told Boulder Reporting Lab that finding a suitable space proved difficult. Not only were rents expensive, but one location rejected her "because they were worried about the optics of a romance bookstore." Nevertheless, she was able to find a suitable space.

"Boulder has a great demographic for romance readers because of the college," Morgan noted. "It's definitely a niche that needs to be filled."

According to Boulder Reporting Lab, it is the second romance bookstore to open in Colorado.

After nine years in business, Literarity Book Shop in El Paso, Tex., will close later this year, the El Paso Times reported.

In a message to customers, owners Bill and Mary Anna Clark said they will be wrapping up the store's last chapter over the next three months and thanked all those who have visited and shopped at the store since it opened in 2017.

"You've helped to make the last nine years possible," they wrote. "To those of you with whom we've developed true friendships, we feel blessed. We've met some remarkably smart, kind, interesting, and generous folks over the past nine years."

While they did not provide specifics, the Clarks said they will "plot a sequel to our literary adventure in the coming weeks as we reflect on the past, contemplate the future, and visit with friends. We'll continue to put some great books and special volumes in the hands of readers, but in different ways and perhaps a different location."

Over the coming weeks, Literarity will be offering discounts on new and used books as well as some collectible editions. The Clarks encouraged anyone with a Literarity gift card to use it soon, and to support other local booksellers in the El Paso area.

"We've worked to make Literarity Book Shop a platform for doing good and giving back to our community," they wrote. "We've attempted in our own small way to improve the quality of life in our El Paso community by creating a space for curious people to share ideas and forge new friendships."

Ingram Content Group is launching Covered, a website designed to enable publishers to share catalogues and digital review copies (DRCs) with booksellers, librarians, and influencers. The site will debut in Fall 2026.

Covered will offer free access to comprehensive title information--including marketing plans, events, comps, sales and inventory data, marketing assets, and more--alongside a galley program available in print, e-book, or audiobook format for bookstore and library buyers, Ingram noted.

"Covered represents a natural next step in our digital toolkit for the industry," said Margaret Harrison, v-p of digital services at ICG. "We are creating a unified, accessible space where every publisher--trade, independent, academic, and beyond--could showcase every new book to every bookseller and librarian. Ingram's mission is to reach more readers and Covered will do just that."

Plans call for Covered to expand to the broader industry in 2027, when Ingram introduces competitive pricing for publishers. For more information on Covered, click here. The Covered team is also at Winter Institute in Pittsburgh this week to share a first look at the website with booksellers and publishers.

Barnes & Noble has introduced the Nook Reading Tablet 8.7, built in collaboration with Lenovo. The new reading device, which is available for preorder in stores and online for $149.99, will be released in mid-March. 

The tablet features an 8.7" color display, front and rear cameras, 64 GB of storage (up to 128 GB with microSD card purchased separately), and a battery life of more than 16 hours, B&N said. It is available in Luna Gray and Seafoam Green.
 
"I'm thrilled to introduce the newest addition to our family of Nook devices, the Nook Reading Tablet 8.7," said Bill Castle, director of Nook & media. "Our ongoing partnership with Lenovo allows us to offer the Nook experience in a great value priced, optimally sized tablet designed specifically for readers."

Tiffany Schultz

As we've done for many years, Shelf Awareness recently hosted a webinar reviewing some of the best ads of 2025. This year, we doubled our celebration and awarded two marketing professionals for their excellence.

Congratulations to Tiffany Schultz, whose eBlast offering a Bookish Bundle was the most clicked ad of 2025. She is shown here with our new award, and sharp-eyed readers will remember and notice Tiffany's award in the background for her Most Clicked ad in 2022.

Stephen Bedford and Joe Monti

Congratulations for our inaugural Marketing Campaign of the Year go to Stephen Bedford and the team at Saga Books for their work turning The Strength of the Few into an instant bestseller and massive success. This campaign was selected over many worthy entries, and we look forward to continuing this accolade each year.

We love celebrating excellence in marketing, and invite you to begin competing for the awards right now: please reach out to sales@shelf-awareness.com and Matt and Jess will help you create a fantastic campaign.

To view our presentation of the best ads, click here.

Susan Sheehan, a Pulitzer-winning writer "whose meticulously built-up portraits of individuals trying to endure on the margins of society originally appeared in the New Yorker, and often were published later as books," died February 17, the New York Times reported. She was 88.

Sheehan published eight books. Her 1983 Pulitzer Prize general nonfiction winner Is There No Place on Earth for Me? was "about a woman's struggle with schizophrenia as she moves between her parents' home, a supervised apartment and a mental hospital," the Times noted. The project started in 1981 as a four-part New Yorker series called "The Patient," which drew 500 reader letters and was credited with raising awareness of the 1.5 million people treated in psychiatric facilities yearly.

"I think it's our obligation to tell of the horror and the ludicrousness of the situation in these hospitals," Sheehan told Times in 1982.

Describing her reporting style as "third person invisible," Sheehan published immersive accounts of a welfare mother in Queens; a prisoner at a maximum-security prison; and a teenager ensnared in the child welfare system, the Times wrote. These later became the books A Welfare Mother (1976), A Prison and a Prisoner (1978), and Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (1993).

Vince Aletti wrote in the Village Voice that "Sheehan's scrupulous, vivid case histories are constructed bit by bit, fine webs of evidence and observation dense with fact but charged with feeling."

Sheehan and her husband, Times correspondent Neil Sheehan, both reported from Saigon during the Vietnam War and shared a professional partnership. In 1971, Neil Sheehan secured what would become known as the Pentagon Papers, with Susan Sheehan accompanying him to Cambridge, Mass., in 1971 to examine 7,000 pages of government records leaked to him by Daniel Ellsberg. "She helped photocopy the trove of documents under the suspicious eye of a copy shop owner who was nervous about the classified markings," the Times wrote.

Neil Sheehan ultimately spent 16 years writing a reckoning of the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), which won a National Book Award for nonfiction and Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Susan Sheehan typed and helped edit the multiple drafts. 

She also wrote articles for the Times, the Atlantic, and Harper's. Her other books include A Missing Plane (1986), about the discovery in New Guinea of a B-24 bomber lost during World War II with 22 men aboard.

Observing the freedom and editorial support she received as a New Yorker writer, Sheehan told the Washington Post in 1982: " 'I want to write about an insane asylum,' and he says, 'fine,' and you come back a year and a half later with over 100,000 words, and he prints them."

Indie bookseller spirit: Yesterday, Kira Wizner, owner of Merritt Bookstore in Millbrook, N.Y., shared an Instagram video of her "first bookstore stop in Pittsburgh for @americanbooksellers #Wi2026." At City Books, Wizner noted that she had been looking forward to meeting owner Arlan Hess "for ages! She's been a bookstore owner a year more than me and it's so good to be at her shop! Thank you!"

"What is Winter Institute and why is it important?" In an Instagram post, Tessa Cannon, owner of the Wandering Shelf mobile bookstore, Arlington, Va., shared her response: "I first joined as a prospective member, and it was the best decision I've made for the store. Almost every indie bookstore is a member, their resources feel endless! Winter Institute is an annual conference hosted by ABA where booksellers, publishers, and authors + can join incredible workshops and network. Why I'm here:

1. Go to a financial reporting book camp! (Woooo!).
2. Learn improved ways curate inventory selections for customers.
3. Learn how the store can be an incubator for greater social change.
4. Meet new publishers and vendors that I can partner with.
5. Identify questions about topics that I didn't even know I had because there is soooooo much knowledge at these conferences. I don't know what I don't know!"

Posted on Facebook yesterday from Wi2026 in Pittsburgh, Pa., by Inkwood Books, Haddonfield, N.J.: "Thanks to Inkwood Spouse who helped dig me out of 18 inches of snow, and the amazing army of public works folks who cleared roads from Haddonfield to Pittsburgh, I made it to #winterinstitute2026! This is the aptly named American Booksellers Association annual conference. I'll be here most of the week getting the scoop on industry trends, meeting tons of fellow booksellers, publishers, authors and industry folks, and trying to bring back ideas and information to our booksellers and you all. After the snow day today the store will be open regular hours while I'm away. Go grab some books after you've shoveled out."

Before We Wake by Sophia Glock (Little, Brown Ink).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Becky Kennedy, author of Leave Me Alone!: A Good Inside Story About Deeply Feeling Kids (Feiwel & Friends, $19.99, 9781250413116).

Good Morning America: Michael Lynton and Joshua L. Steiner, author of From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You (Avid Reader Press, $30, 9781668080221).

Kelly Clarkson Show: Bunnie Xo, author of Stripped Down: Unfiltered and Unapologetic (Dey Street, $29.99, 9780063445192).

Watch What Happens Live: Lisa Rinna, author of You Better Believe I'm Gonna Talk About It (Dey Street, $29.99, 9780063425330).

Tom Hanks will play Abraham Lincoln in Starburns Industries' live-action/stop-motion animation hybrid movie Lincoln in the Bardo, based on the 2017 Booker Prize-winning novel by George Saunders, Deadline reported. 

Hanks is also producing through his Playtone label with partner Gary Goetzman. Production will take place in London. Saunders is adapting his novel with filmmaker Duke Johnson (Anomalisa), who will direct and produce.

Lincoln in the Bardo "will employ a unique blend of stop-motion animation and live action to explore one of the most intimate moments of Lincoln's life, centering on his relationship with his recently deceased 11-year-old son," Deadline wrote. "The movie will explore themes of love, empathy and human capacity in the face of grief as the story unfolds through an ensemble of characters, both living and dead, historical and invented."

Category winners have been named for the Aurealis Awards, which recognize the achievements of Australian science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers. The winners were honored at a recent ceremony in Brisbane as part of GenreCon. Check out the complete list of Aurealis category winners here.

Devi S. Laskar's absorbing Midnight, at the War spotlights an international reporter facing personal, professional, and global conflicts. Former journalist Laskar credits real-life icons "Christiane Amanpour & Sylvia Poggioli, their tenacity is in part the spark for this novel."

In April 2001, Elena Keppler--at least according to her press badge--lands at her unnamed, predominantly Arabic-speaking destination, only ever referred to as "[--------]." Rather than perpetuating her white father's lineage, she calls herself Rita Das, combining a since-birth nickname with her Bengali mother's surname. Her recent marriage hasn't stopped her from taking far-flung assignments to devastated zones where she reports on "numbers stories"--accounts of deaths, soldiers, women and children, cost of living during wars--all the while sneaking in "more human interest stories" amid functional tallies.

Time with her husband, Sebastian, hardly seems a priority; Rita still regularly seeks out her philandering former lover. She neglects even her most beloved bond, that with her mother: they have "an arrangement" that despite the return of her breast cancer, Mom "will not die until she becomes a grandmother"--although Rita isn't planning motherhood for another five years. But when 9/11 happens just before she's scheduled to fly back to New York, Rita misses her opportunity to say goodbye to Mom because she's compelled to assist local colleagues under fatal threat. When Rita arrives at the hospital, Mom is dead, and that loss further fractures an already tenuous relationship with her father. "I am an orphan," she tells her older brother, dismissing his protestations otherwise.

Tragedies multiply within her intimate circle: her best friend's last appointment was at the World Trade Center and a pair of journalist colleagues are kidnapped and tortured. For a while, domestic assignments keep Rita closer to home until she becomes pregnant, unsure who the father is. She desperately claims an opportunity to escape to [--------] where distance, surrounded by danger and decimation, might finally offer Rita some semblance of clarity.

Throughout her multilayered narrative, Laskar (Atlas of Reds and Blues; Circa) adroitly teases the disturbing early origins for Rita's career choice: "the India trip" at age 11. She deftly dovetails Rita's complicated backstory of race, culture, disconnects, and dysfunction, with the worldwide "perpetual déjà vu of assassinations... hijackings and accidents, Israeli annexations of Palestinian lands, bombings... hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes"--relentlessly unceasing headlines that have undoubtedly left the public numb. Through the tumult happening on the pages, Laskar distills an impressive novel filled with empathy, inspiration, and ultimately hope. --Terry Hong

Shelf Talker: Devi S. Laskar's dynamic Midnight, at the War impressively captures a journalist more capable of reporting on global crises than confronting her own personal chaos.

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Wicked Onyx by Debbie Cassidy
2. Money and Meaning by Christopher F. Poch
3. Face Off by Chelsea Curto
4. The Poison Daughter by Sheila Masterson
5. Sweet Surrender by Bella Matthews
6. Vengeful Gods by Elliott Rose
7. Almost Ravaged by Abby Millsaps
8. Daggermouth by H.M. Wolfe
9. Dungeon Crawler Carl: Book 1 by Matt Dinniman
10. Forever Undone by J. Saman

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]