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New Atlantic Booksellers Navigate Changing Landscape
In a tough year, booksellers hope for improved fall.
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New England Booksellers See Some Hopeful Signs in Weak Economy
Some small sales improvements and the strong fall list helped lift the mood at the New England Independent Booksellers Association regional meeting, even as the region's economy sputters and the trade association itself faces tough choices.
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Great Lakes Booksellers Find Some Optimism Despite Tough Times
Despite the gloom of the continuing recession, which has hit Michigan and Ohio especially hard, booksellers from both states, as well as Illinois, were a highly visible presence at GLiBA this year, determined to educate themselves on how to best negotiate the latest technological and social trends, when not snapping up ARCs of winter and spring 2010 releases.
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Children’s Books Front and Center at Midwest Show
Children’s books played a prominent part in the Midwest Booksellers Association’s annual meeting and trade show, held last weekend in St. Paul. To no one’s surprise, in the wake of Stephenie Meyer’s incredible success with the Twilight series, YA novels that contain magic, vampires or paranormal themes were popular with booksellers trying to anticipate the next big YA hit.
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Children's Authors Sparkle at MBA
The children’s book and author breakfast, which traditionally kicks off the trade show portion of the Midwest Booksellers Association’s annual gathering, is usually a literary-star studded affair, and this year was no exception. Nearly 200 groggy booksellers straggled into St. Paul’s RiverCentre last Saturday morning to hear an A-list of children’s authors: Loren Long, M.T. Anderson, Catherine Gilbert Murdock and Neil Gaiman...
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Mountains & Plains Booksellers Gets Boost from Guns, Tourists, Hype
The talk at the Mountain and Plains Independent Booksellers Association meeting centered around the hope that the holidays will bring better sales to a soft year.
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Midwestern Booksellers See Hope for Holidays
The strong fall list, including a number of promising regional titles, had many booksellers attending this weekend's MBA that the holidays will be a good one; many booksellers also said that after a tough year, they need a strong finish to 2009.
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Booksellers Help Bring Libraries To Africa
When Susan Hickey, co-owner of Hearthside Books & Toys in Juneau, Alaska, read The Camel Bookmobile, Masha Hamilton’s novel about an American librarian bringing literacy to Kenyans, she wanted to do something to improve literacy in Africa herself. So Hickey, who had traveled to Africa on a photo expedition, started looking into possible options and found the African Library Project.
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Book Soup Adds Adult Video
Book Soup announced it will now carry Vivid-Alt porn DVDs for sale at the Sunset Strip landmark, the first such offering in its 33 -year history.
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A Day for the Bookstores
This fall, we invite you to join Publishers Weekly in celebrating the first annual National Bookstore Day, a day devoted to celebrating bookselling and the vibrant culture of bookstores. This year's day will take place on Saturday, November 7, and to make it a success we need your help and participation.
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Tor.com Releases First Book
Tor.com recently announced that David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s anthology Year’s Best Fantasy 9 is available as a print-on-demand paperback, priced at $15.95. The book’s release marks Tor.com’s debut as a publishing entity, distinct from Tor Books.
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Bookseller Pens Mystery About Book Hound
“Independent bookselling is over,” says 62-year-old Vincent McCaffrey, who dates both the death of the book and of independent bookstores to 2004 and the closing of his nearly 30-year-old bookstore, Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston’s Back Bay.
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Kiyosaki’s Online Book Ready for Print
Robert Kiyosaki’s experiment to write a personal finance book in one-chapter installments and release them online for free has come to an end—and now it’s time for the hard copy of the book to make its way into readers’ hands the traditional way. Rich Dad's Conspiracy of the Rich, a $12.99 trade paperback, will go on sale September 8 from the Grand Central imprint Business Plus, featuring the material Kiyosaki posted online as well as selected comments from readers.
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Borders Leads Chains Downward
After falling 6.7% in the first quarter, total sales at the nation's three largest bookstore chains fell 7.5% in the second period and were down 7.3% for the first six months of 2009 ended August 1. The decline was driven primarily by the weak performance of Borders, where revenue fell 17.7% in the second quarter.
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Thinking Outside The Bookstore Box
A new breed of booksellers, many of whom got their start in the B2B world, are finding success by altering the traditional independent bookselling model. They retain a commitment to independent bookselling and frequently belong to both their regional booksellers' association and ABA—and they influence the bestsellers by reporting their sales to the New York Times.
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Online Bookstore, Literary Matters, Launched
Esther Bushell, a former teacher turned book group facilitator has moved online with Literary Matters.
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Spreading the Word: Summer Reading at DDG
Inspired by a summer reading program at the Alphabet Garden in Cheshire, Conn., Kenny Brechner, owner of Devaney Doak and Garrett Booksellers in Farmington, Maine, came up with what he regards as the 18-year-old store’s most successful summer reading program to date. If Goldilocks were testing out a summer reading program, Brechner says, this year’s Spread the Word program would be just right. It captured the attention of both children and parents—and sold books.
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Cost-Conscious Consumers Put Drag on Sales
Customer traffic remained weak in the second quarter, and shoppers who made it into stores continued to be very price sensitive, executives at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million said in conference calls discussing second-quarter results. B&N CFO Joe Lombardi said floor traffic was slow throughout the quarter with no significant changes from month to month (May, June, July).
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Rent Dispute Threatens Libros Revolucion Books
A rent dispute between Libros Revolucion Books and its landlord has resulted in the filing of a three-day eviction notice against the progressive Los Angeles bookstore that promotes the literature of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
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Galley Talk: ‘Once Was Lost’ by Sara Zarr
Jennifer Laughran of Books Inc. in San Francisco talks about a favorite fall galley.
With a Mom in rehab, and a pastor Dad who knows a lot more about shepherding his congregation than taking care of his own family, Samara feels like her whole world is falling apart. When a girl in her town is kidnapped, Sam latches on to the case as a way to feel useful and a part of something bigger than herself, but nobody in town is beyond suspicion, even the people that Sam trusts most.