Notes: Store News; Sales and Marketing Changes

John Gaylord, the onetime Little Professor franchisee and co-owner of the old Gaylord Companies, is expanding his current bookselling venture. In mid to late October, he will open a Liberty Books & News store in Rocky River, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. The store will resemble the other two stores he has opened in the past two years: Empire Books & News in Huntington, W.V., and Liberty Books & News in Columbus, Ohio. The new store will have 10,000 square feet of space, stock about 70,000 book titles and carry some 8,000 periodicals. The 300 feet of magazines are the store's "hallmark," as Gaylord put it.

For trademark reasons, Gaylord will use the Liberty name on all future stores. He told Shelf Awareness he has "no specific plans" to expand, but that "as opportunities present themselves, we'll evaluate them."

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BookZeller, Naperville, Ill., which stocks some 40,000 "gently loved, discounted books . . . neatly crammed into every nook and cranny," will close its storefront around November 1 and sell solely on the Internet, according to the Chicago Daily Herald.

Manager Ellen Bales said rising rents were a key reason for shutting down the 12-year-old store, commenting, "When overhead and profits are too close together, it becomes a business decision." The online operation, called BookZone, is located in an industrial park in Naperville. Local customers may pick up purchases there rather than having them shipped.

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Simon & Schuster is reorganizing its sales force so that the field group's responsibilities will include specialty accounts in addition to independent booksellers, according to Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly. Also, the sales force, which had been divided between adult and children's titles, will merge and sell all titles, and the company will no longer use commissioned rep groups to sell to specialty accounts.

S&S said that the specialty market is its fastest-growing sales retail channel and that the consolidation will help the company be able to continue to call on independent bookstores.

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George Carroll, aka Redsides Publishing Services, has ended his 20-year sales representation of Chronicle Books. He is adding Northern California, Colorado and Utah to his present Pacific Northwest territory for Oxford University Press. He's now representing Continuum in the same territory as Oxford. He'll continue to represent his other publishers in the Northwest.

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Ali Kokmen has been named manga marketing manager for the Del Rey imprint at Random House, a new position. He formerly was director of book sales at CPM Press, the graphic novel division of Central Park Media. Before that he was sales and marketing manager for a line of illustrated art, design, pop culture, comics and manga titles at Collins Design.

Kim Hovey, v-p, associate publisher and director of marketing, Ballantine, to whom Kokmen reports, commented: "In 2007, Del Rey will be publishing 150 manga titles and Ali's vast expertise and knowledge will help us to effectively market our titles and become even more profitable in the year ahead."

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