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BEA Bytes and Bits

 

 

As part of New York Book Week, coinciding with BEA, authors (l.-r.) David Baldacci (The 6th Man), Brad Meltzer (The Inner Circle) and Michael Koryta (The Ridge) appeared at the Apple store in SoHo Tuesday night.

 

 

 

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The host of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon got up pretty early in the morning to greet a long line of fans and sign copies of Thank You Notes (Grand Central), based on the popular segment on his program.

 

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"Dork This Way!" Just in case you get lost this week searching for booth 3653, featuring Rachel Renee Russell's Dork Diaries (Aladdin), you can always follow the grand stairway to dorkdom at the Javits Center.

 

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Ron Hogan (2nd from left), SF reviewer for Shelf Awareness, moderated a panel featuring Tor authors on the Midtown Stage yesterday. Vernor Vinge, whose latest book, Children of the Sky, is the long-awaited sequel to his classic Fire Upon the Deep, noted that it's particularly hard to write near-future SF, as real-life events so often overtake the imaginary ones. John Scalzi's newest book, Fuzzy Nation, reboots the 1950s work by H. Beam Piper (and even inspired a power ballad). And Vaughn talked about how she uses the short stories collected in Kitty's Greatest Hits to expand on her popular series character. 

 

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For part of yesterday afternoon, a large slice of the Little, Brown booth was dedicated to James Patterson, his forthcoming Christmas Wedding and celebratory cake.

 

 

 

 

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Fantasy dominated the Middle-Grade Editors' Buzz, from Lisa A. Sandell, editor of Icefall by Matthew Kirby (Scholastic); Lisa Von Drasek, moderator and librarian, Bank Street College of Education; Jim Thomas, editor of The Ashtown Burials #1: The Dragon's Tooth by N.D. Wilson (Random House); Lisa Abrams, editor of The Unwanteds by Lisa McMann, (S&S); Jennifer Besser, editor of Apothecary by Maile Meloy (Putnam/Penguin); and Donna Bray, editor of Wildwood by Colin Meloy, (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins).

 

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Sharing insights about the current state of the publishing industry (as well as a few laughs) on the show floor yesterday were Cursor' s Richard Nash and Mark Warholak, bookending Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, Calif.

 

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Fans were thrilled to have Christopher Paolini sign posters of Inheritance, the much-anticipated conclusion to his Inheritance Cycle, begun with Eragon.

 

 

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Star Jones (Satan's Sisters, Brilliance) hosted yesterday's Audiobook and Author Tea, sponsored by the Audio Publishers Association. The event featured Tony Horwitz (Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, Macmillan Audio, October), Karin Slaughter (Fallen, AudioGO, June) and Brad Meltzer (The Inner Circle, Hachette Audio).

One of many highlights during the conversation among the four about their audiobook experiences occurred when the topic of working with narrators came up. "I have my audiobook narrator with me," said Meltzer, introducing Scott Brick, who stepped up to the podium and delivered the opening lines of The Inner Circle, after which Meltzer quipped, "Now does that make me sound tough or what?"

(Pictured l. to r.: Tony Horwitz, Karin Slaughter, Star Jones and Brad Meltzer)

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Graphic designer Michael Fusco, author Emma Straub (Other People We Married), author Jennifer Gilmore (Something Red) and Algonquin v-p of online marketing Michael Taeckens enjoying a few minutes of social time in the Algonquin Booth.

 

 

 

 

BEA: Print Keeps the Lights On

Amazon may be selling 105 Kindle editions for every 100 print books, but that trend isn't universal across publishing. "We're selling five trade paperbacks for every e-book we sell at Algonquin," Workman group publisher Bob Miller announced Wednesday morning in a panel called "The Report of My Death Was Exaggerated: The Printed Book." Miller, along with Lonely Planet executive vice president John Boris and Chronicle Books v-p of sales and marketing Tyrell Mahoney, emphasized that their core business had not changed. "The market [for travel books] may have declined," Boris admitted, "but it's far from dead." Mahoney agreed: "Everyone knows that print is what keeps the lights on."

The day before, at "You Bought Your E-Book Where?", SIMBA senior analyst Michael Norris offered a blunt proposition for negotiating the tensions between the print and digital markets. "I think this industry owes it to itself to make both sectors grow without letting one just pillage consumers from the other," he argued. Instead of overstating the influence of new gadgets, publishers and booksellers both need to take advantage of the interconnected paths of book discovery linking print and e-book consumers--and to remember that they shouldn't be tailoring content to any particular device's technical limitations, but rather to the reader's needs.

Norris, too, pooh-poohed the notion that print was on its last legs: "This industry has always had its share of Harold Campings, if you know what I mean," he said, drawing appreciative laughter from an audience that had survived the prophesied Rapture of the previous weekend. Not that there aren't bad omens to be observed: Quoting a recent survey, he warned that nearly 105 million Americans simply didn't buy any books at all in 2010. "That number is growing," he added, "and that concerns me." (At least, he conceded during the q&a segment, that stark statistic didn't take into account the possibility that those non-buyers might still be reading books they received as gifts or borrowed from their local public library.)--Ron Hogan

 

BEA: The Big Books

In this business, we all hope that there's a book for every reader--and a reader for every book. However, each year at BEA there are a few books that capture the attention of many readers at once. While there's plenty of preshow buzz about which titles will hit it big, it's not until everyone hits the floor that clear frontrunners emerge. Here at Shelf Awareness, we turned to our most reliable sources--booksellers--about which spines to crack first.

When it comes to debut novels, one of the most talked-about titles is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Random House), a fantastical tale of dueling magicians. "It's totally different, totally sexy, totally smart," said Calvin Crosby, manager at the Books Inc. in Berkeley, Calif. Betsy Burton, owner of the King's English in Salt Lake City, Utah, admitted she doesn't usually like books with fantastic elements, but "I opened it up, and all of a sudden it's morning." However, Sheryl Cotleur, head buyer for Book Passage in Corte Madera and San Francisco, cautioned, "I don't want people to think it's a romance. It's imaginative beyond belief. I haven't read a book in years that is this imaginative and completely plausible." (At right, Morgenstern signs a copy for Denise Bethiaume of Books & Books, Westhampton Beach, N.Y.)

Another debut Burton loves is Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante (Grove), which benefited from some early bookseller buzz during Winter Institute. Burton raved, "It's the best book I have read all year. You can't put it down. It's brilliant." LaPlante has entwined the story of a retired surgeon's progressive dementia--told in the first person--with the murder of that women's best friend, in which Dr. Jennifer White becomes the prime suspect.

Cotleur's rave is for We the Animals by Justin Torres (HMH): "It's a very moving, very powerful book. It's about three brothers who love each other and show it by hitting each other like mad. Not only is there fierce love in this family, but how it plays out is gorgeous and painful."

And we heard plenty of chatter about some upcoming books from previously published authors, including Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeeper (Scribner). As head book buyer of the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colo., Cathy Langer has no lack of books to choose from, and this year, she made Hoffman's latest her on-the-plane reading. She loved that it takes place in the Masada Fortress built by King Herod. "I'm halfway through," Langer said. "It's amazing; an historical novel with great characters."

Langer alerted Chuck Robinson, co-owner of Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., to Hillary Jordan's sophomore novel, When She Woke (Workman); Langer had sent a letter to bookseller colleagues saying it was not to be missed. "I read the first chapter, and it's pretty compelling," said Robinson. Cotleur, who read the novel in manuscript, said, "It's a takeoff of The Scarlet Letter, loosely set in 2020. It's not far out in terms of the possibility of people elected to office insisting that their beliefs be the only way, and the people that bump up against that."

Other much-anticipated fiction included The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin's Press), Colson Whitehead's Zone One (Doubleday), Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos (Morrow) and Ed King by David Guterson (Knopf). A couple more debuts worth mentioning, both from Little, Brown: Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and Ayad Akhtar's American Dervish.

When it comes to nonfiction, Robinson and Cotleur did not hesitate. Karl Marlantes's What It Is Like to Go to War (Grove) may not be available yet, but it's on their lists. Robinson said the author's Matterhorn was one of his top two favorite books of 2010, so saying he is eager to read this is "putting it mildly." Cotleur said of the book (20 years in the making): "Boy, is he ever the right person to write this book. He's really done the homework and examined his own life, too. It's a culture changer--we hope."

Many readers are excited about Susan Orlean's Rin Tin Tin (Simon & Schuster), and we would just like to say that Shelf Awareness editors Marilyn Dahl and Bethanne Patrick give it a "double woof." (At left: Orlean signing copies at the S&S booth.) Another much-anticipated, but unavailable, book is Hyperion's Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, with a foreword by Caroline Kennedy. The volume of never-before-heard 1964 interviews Arthur Schlesinger had with the young widowed First Lady will be accompanied by a set of CDs with the full interviews on them.

Michael Moore's upcoming memoir from Grand Central is sure to pique the interest of his admirers and pester the consciences of his detractors, as might Dr. Justin Frank's Obama on the Couch (Free Press), in which the noted D.C. psychoanalyst and academician takes on the nation's First Patient. Two other, much earlier U.S. presidents with BEA buzz cred: Ulysses S. Grant, in Grant's Final Victory by Charles Bracelen Flood (Da Capo) and James Garfield, in Candace Millard's detail-packed Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (Doubleday).

Last and not least, though lesser known, are a couple of outliers: a historical novel set in 1938 New York, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (Viking), which Diesel co-owner John Evans called "masterfully written" and "a richly pleasurable read," and Bonnie Nadzam's debut novel, Lamb (Other Press). Calvin Crosby of Books Inc. said, "I like a lot of what Other Press is doing."--Bethanne Patrick and Bridget Kinsella

 

Notes: Outwrite Reaches Out for Help

In an open e-mail letter to the community, Philip Rafshoon, owner of Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse, Atlanta, Ga., said that the store's sales "have not been immune to the downturn in the economy and the impact technology has on how people buy and read books." The store is "in jeopardy," he said, but "to ensure a successful future, we're doing a lot of work: we're realigning our business model, refocusing our products and services, and upgrading the store to meet the changing needs of our customers and the community."

But he asked customers to help buy "as many of your books, CDs and DVDs from Outwrite as possible"; buy e-books from the store online; visit the coffeehouse; use the coffeehouse lounge for free for meetings of companies, businesses or organizations; volunteer to help the store in web design, bookkeeping, finance, banking, retail management, retail sales, collections and legal services; and tell others about the store.

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Amazon responded to B&N's launch of the Nook Simple Touch Reader (Shelf Awareness, May 25, 2011) "with a new ad-supported version of the Kindle 3G for $164," Cnet News reported, adding that the device, "like its $114 Wi-Fi-only counterpart, is called the Kindle 3G With Special Offers. It costs $25 less than the standard Kindle 3G."

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The Onion A.V. Club paid a visit and its respects to City Lights bookstore, San Francisco, Calif., noting that it "might be the most respected bookstore in the world.... We stopped by for a quick history lesson courtesy of City Lights' events director [Peter Maravelis], and we even corralled local hero Daniel Handler--better known as Lemony Snicket--into talking with us about his experiences as a customer."

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As you prepare for the imminent deluge of summer beach read lists, take a moment to savor Jessica Gelt's Los Angeles Times piece, "A deep sense of kinship with Virginia Woolf." She recalls her first encounter--in Tucson, Ariz.--with A Room of One's Own, noting that "in the summer, reading took on a particularly heroic quality--it provided escape from the searing misery of triple-digit heat. And in August 1991, when I turned 15, it changed the person I was becoming with a revelatory flash--the first, but certainly not the last, time literature would affect me like that.... So, as I tiptoed into Woolf's solitary room each day, leaving the sidewalks of Tucson radiating heat in waves and the pungent scent of dry creosote for the grassy lawns of early 20th Century Oxford, upon which Woolf, and women in general, were not allowed to tread, I began to feel something I hadn't before.

"It was a deep sense of kinship--the delicate, magical string that a good book can sew through the human experience. Pulled tight enough, that string can draw the whole of history around your shoulders to make you realize that you are not alone."

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New York Press suggested an alternative to summer book lists by showcasing the city's numerous reading series: "Put your tawdry beach reads back on the shelf--these reading series will keep your summer wordy, nerdy and hot."

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The Telegraph featured the five all-time biggest selling books adapted for film.  

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The arrival of a new James Bond novel is a military operation in England. The Guardian reported that "abseiling marines delivered the first copies of Jeffery Deaver's new James Bond book to the author today, in a scene straight out of a 007 novel." Carte Blanche, which "updates Bond for the 21st century," was authorized by the Fleming family.

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Stephen Kelman, author of Pigeon English, selected his top 10 outsiders' stories for the Guardian. Kelman observed: "For both reader and writer, the outsider is an instrument that allows us to see the world in an unfamiliar way, and that for me is one of the prime aspirations of literature.

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Book trailer of the day (because BEA brought the sun back to New York this week): Shine by Lauren Myracle (Abrams).

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Antoinette de Alteriis has joined Pelican Publishing Company as promotion director. She was formerly general manager of Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum in New Orleans and earlier was a business consultant, taught school and worked for Waldenbooks for 13 years. And very coolly, she is also costume historian and consultant for the Krewe de Jeanne d'Arc.

 

BEA: Evergreen Book Marketing

Shelf Awareness's own editor-in-chief, John Mutter, opened the evergreen marketing session by mentioning Calvin Trillin's famous estimation that the shelf life of a book is "somewhere between milk and yogurt." In the Internet age and with 24-hour a day news cycles, the more applicable quotation, he said, might be Andy Warhol's comment that "in the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame." This is also the age of the long tail," Mutter continued, as he introduced the panel of publicists and marketing experts who are doing things outside the usual publishing marketing and publicity tool kit.

Rachel Chou, chief marketing officer at Open Road Integrated Media, talked about the difference between "planned vs. real-time marketing." With the dramatic shift online, she said, publishers and authors are no longer tied to the customary eight-week out-of-the-publishing gate time limit on publicity.

"The industry talks to itself," pointed out M.J. Rose, thriller writer, founder of Author Buzz and co-founder of Paroozal.com. "They have absolutely no idea what a new book is. They have a whole different trajectory of they discover books." Rose said publishers do "publishing" marketing, where no one lets authors talk. Rose aims to empower authors to engage their readers instead of waiting for readers to find them.

Gretchen Crary, co-founder of February Partners, said her company started out doing straight publicity but is moving more and more into marketing. "We really focus on social media a lot for our authors," she said.

By way of example, she shared how February Partners helps its clients not only set up and maintain personal Facebook pages, but also customize pages for all their books. "Every book should have its own page," she insisted, or it's just a lost opportunity.

Even in this changing industry--or maybe especially in this changing industry--Crary said authors need to be engaged in publicizing and marketing their books. "If you're an author, your book is your business," she said. "Why would you turn that over to someone else?"

Pauline Hubert, president of Book Movement, which has 30,000 book clubs as members, used the site's current top 10 book club book lists to prove how pub date is irrelevant to readers. "They like to have a book earn its stripes," she said. And right there on the list was One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus, published in 1998. That's what an evergreen title is," she said.--Bridget Kinsella

 

BEA: Magic and Myth for Middle Grade Readers

Jenny Brown, children's editor for Shelf Awareness, opened up the middle grade panel Wednesday at BEA by delving into what inspired author Lauren Oliver (Leis