Taking a break from its usual Portland, Ore., locale, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association met at the Hotel Murano September 26-28 in Tacoma, Wash., for the annual trade show. With programming ranging from publishing reps hyping the season’s big books to the nuts and bolts of keeping an independent bookstore afloat, there was plenty to satisfy attendees. "It’s a good problem to have when there are too many choices," commented one librarian.
With roughly 90 bookstores attending the event this year, executive director Thom Chambliss contributed to the upbeat atmosphere by noting that PNBA is again in the black this year—finances were up $10,000 in 2013—with the annual holiday catalogue on track to feature nearly 140 titles.
During the annual meeting, the PNBA board urged booksellers to keep May 2, 2015 in mind, a day designated as National Independent Bookstore Day. A more immediate source of general excitement is the impending Small Business Saturday on November 29, where authors sign up to greet fans and sell books at their local bookstores. The board underscored that it’s “time to be forceful and confident” in telling the media that “‘beleaguered’ and ‘independent bookstores’ should no longer be coupled.” In a panel specifically designed to drum up excitement for the November event, the panelists underscored that it was a time to stress that—“not all the local bookstores are dying.”
PNBA will feature 138 titles in its holiday catalogue, in contrast to other regions’ numbers, which hover in the mid-80s. There is a definitely a shift in focus in the titles that appear in the catalogue, with PNBA seeing less interest—but far from non-existent—from major publishers and more interest and support from regional titles and small presses. According to Chambliss and executive assistant and bookkeeper Larry West, 95% of other regions’ catalogues are made up of titles from the major publishers, while PNBA continues to draw increasing support from Pacific Northwest presses.
For the first time in 10 years, the board reported that over 200 tickets had been sold to Saturday’s Author Breakfast, which featured heavy hitters in fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books. Marie Lu, best known for her YA Legend trilogy, gave a sneak peek at her new series, with The Young Elites out in October from Putnam/Penguin, while Pacific Northwest resident and well-known artist Nikki McClure presented her latest work, the lullaby May the Stars Drip Down, written by Jeremy Chatelain and illustrated by McClure. Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain) joked that he was glad to take a break from canine narrators and filled the audience in on the origins of his latest novel, A Sudden Light, out September 30 from Simon & Schuster. Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) received a standing ovation following her passionate talk about the importance of literature and how she used it for a lens through which to view America in the forthcoming The Republic of Imagination, out October 21 from Viking.
Traffic was heavy in the exhibitor’s hall, where booksellers munched on chocolates provided by numerous reps and listened to impassioned pitches on the convention’s “Buzz Books” competition, where attendees voted for their favorite, as well as other hot titles from picture books to university presses. William Ritter’s much-lauded YA novel, Jackaby, was the runaway Buzz Books favorite.
The 2015 PNBA show will return to Portland on October 2-4.
For a closer look at children's booksellers at PNBA, see PNBA 2014: Books for 'Our Bravest Readers.
*This article has been corrected. An earlier version of this article listed the publisher of Garth Stein's A Sudden Light as Viking. The book is published by Simon & Schuster.
