Today's Stories
(click the headlines below):
• What's That Buzz: Panel Speaks
• Green Is the New Red, White and Blue: Thomas Friedman's BEA Keynote Speech
• Lighthearted Book Chat at the Children’s Breakfast
• IndieBound or Bust
• For Indies, It's More Than Market Share
What's That Buzz: Panel Speaks
by Claire Kirch
In what might be a sign of the times, flawed characters searching for meaning in an unpredictable world dominated the five novels talked up at Friday morning’s editors’ buzz panel, while a nonfiction book with offbeat information about animals provided some comic relief from fiction’s embrace of dysfunction and witchcraft. Sara Nelson, PW editor-in-chief, moderated the panel, which featured the editor of each book singing its praises to a crowd of more than 200. Richard Nash, executive editor of Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, presented The Flying Troutmans by Canadian author Miriam Toews (Oct.), whose previous novels include the much-praised AComplicated Kindness. “This book gets the hell out of Canada,” Nash declared, comparing The Flying Troutmans, the story of two children, an 11-year-old and a 15-year-old, whose mother is institutionalized and whose father was last seen running an art gallery in South Dakota, to the movie Little Miss Sunshine. Nash told the audience that the children’s voices are “mind-blowing” in their authenticity as Toews explores what Nash called the “sturm und drang” of a dysfunctional family.
Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun (Jan.), presented by Megan Lynch, senior editor at Riverhead Books, is the story of a runaway trying to stay alive on the streets of New York City. “It’s a sad story, a funny book, but most of all, it’s a story of survival,” Lynch explained, saying that the debut novel was loosely based on the author’s experiences.
John Glusman, Crown Publishing Group v-p and Harmony executive editor, lightened the mood with his presentation on a The Book of Animal Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (Sept.), a sequel to last year’s surprise bestseller The Book of General Ignorance, also from Harmony, which has 180,000 copies in print. “This book is useless but entertaining,” Glusman said, comparing it to Schott’s Miscellany. “But I thought it’d appeal to my 10-year-old.” Glusman drew laughs when he related the factoid that a barnacle’s penis is seven times its body size, recounting how another Harmony editor had commented, “Shouldn’t that mean the expression should be ‘hung like a barnacle?” (Though the barnacle bit did not make it into the U.S. edition—we checked—wait till you read about the armadillo’s endowment, which did.) The book’s performance in the U.K. was serious business, selling 400,000 copies in its first three months. Glusman bought the rights at Frankfurt two years ago.
Sarah Knight, Henry Holt executive editor, brought the buzz back to the fictional realm with her take on The White Mary by Kira Salak (Aug.), another debut novel, this one by a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure, whom Nelson noted is an “incredible storyteller” who once held a group of New York City editors spellbound with her stories of kayaking down the Amazon. The White Mary is a tale of a war correspondent who travels to Papua New Guinea to investigate the disappearance of a fellow correspondent. “I felt that [Salak] put me in that jungle,” Knight said. “I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next.”
Reagan Arthur, Little, Brown executive editor, returned the discussion stateside by presenting The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent (Sept.), a novel about Martha Carrier, one of the first women to be executed in Salem, Mass., for witchcraft—and Kent’s 10th-generation grandmother. “It takes you back to an era I haven’t thought about for a long time,” Arthur noted, “not since I read The Crucible or Witch of Blackbird Pond.” Arthur related a pivotal scene in which Martha Carrier has to instruct her daughters to tell authorities that their mother is indeed a witch, in order to spare them the fate that awaited her.
Admitting that the next book also was about witchcraft, and that she’d been worried about seating the last presenter next to Arthur, Nelson then introduced Laurie Chittenden, executive editor with William Morrow, who talked up The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry (Aug.), which she called a “hero’s story for women,” about a family of women who can read the future in lace. PW gave the book, originally published by Barry and her husband, a starred review, leading to Morrow’s acquisition of the title. “This book has grabbed people,” Chittenden insisted “The end of this book has the kind of conclusion,” she said, “that makes you want to give the book to people so you’ll have someone to talk to about it.” back to top
Green Is the New Red, White and Blue
by Wendy Werris
In a passionate speech to an overflow crowd of convention attendees, keynote speaker Thomas Friedman (Hot, Flat and Crowded; FSG) exhorted the group to participate in reviving America by redefining their environmental lifestyles.
“Green is the new red, white and blue,” Friedman said. “Tackling the issues of our environment should be considered an act of patriotism rather than counter-American behavior.” The premise of Hot, Flat and Crowded is that the country has lost its way in the global arena largely because of bad environmental habits. “Our challenge is to be innovative in the way we take up the environmental cause. This is the only way we can make America stronger.”
Friedman proposed that the U.S. implement a “Code Green” policy as a means of beginning the process of overhauling its energy policies. Noting that after 9/11, President Bush implemented a “Code Red” philosophy that ushered in the war in Iraq instead of supporting environmental policies, the Pulitzer-winning author told the audience, “To make things stay the same, things will have to change.”
Friedman identified the mega-trends facing the world today as energy poverty, climate change, “petro-dictatorship” and biodiversity loss. “This the early days of what I refer to as EC—the energy climate era,” he suggested. “Too many of us are carbon-dependent. We have to start thinking like Noah; today we’re both the flood and the ark.”
Hot, Flat and Crowded makes the case for redefining the environmental movement. “The media labels this a ‘Green Revolution,’ but I beg to differ,” Friedman said. “Have you ever heard about a revolution where no one got hurt? I’d rather refer to what’s going on as a ‘Green Party’—a celebration of our accomplishments thus far.”
Quoting from a poem by Charles Bukowski, Friedman closed his speech by saying, “All that matters now is how we walk through the fire." back to top
Lighthearted Book Chat at the Children’s Breakfast
by Elizabeth Devereaux
Jon Scieszka, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, welcomed an audience of 1300 to Friday’s Children’s Book and Author breakfast, at the “ass-crack of dawn,” as he called it, setting the tone for an hour and half of banter among luminary authors Sherman Alexie, Judy Blume, Neil Gaiman and Eoin Colfer.
In the role of master of ceremonies, Colfer (Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox, Hyperion) thanked everyone for coming at the unholy hour of 8:00 a.m. and pointed out that “if this were Ireland, there would be one person with a camcorder and we’d all watch it later.” He added that the whole point in being an author is that you don’t have to do breakfast, but then returned to the theme that everything was different in his native Ireland. For one thing, he said, everyone was much more religious. Colfer took up Judy Blume’s well-known title Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret as an example—“We’d have just called it, Are You There, God? It’s Me… Ah, You Know Who It Is.”
Maintaining a self-denigrating persona, Colfer read aloud a letter purportedly sent him by a third-grader named Crowbar. “Have you seen all the Star Wars movies? Your books sure read like you have.” “How does your mother change the subject when people ask her why you’re not clever enough to write books for adults?” “Why haven’t your books received no awards?—See, that’s wrong,” Colfer said in an aside, fanning the crowd’s laughter. “Any. Why haven’t your books received any awards?”
It was a perfect segue to introduce Sherman Alexie (winner of last year’s National Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (Little, Brown). Alexie took the mike: “I’ll trade you half of my awards for half of your sales.” Then he looked over at his fellow panelists. “There’s Judy fucking Blume,” he said, apparently awestruck. “I’ve been having Harold and Maude going through my head—and that’s about Neil Gaiman.”
Along with the jokes, Alexie spoke in a serious vein. “I write books about childhood for people who didn’t get to have a childhood. I didn’t,” he said in a reference to growing up impoverished on an Indian reservation. “The only thing that saved me, the only thing that gave me hope, was books. My grandmother brought me books, any books, but especially any book with an Indian on the cover.
“That meant romances, a noble warrior carrying a white woman in his arms, with titles like Savage Summer. Everything I read I believed. I thought that was the way my life was going to work out. I thought white women were going to love me because I was an Indian warrior. I was wrong. White women love me because I am an Indian writer.”
Judy Blume (Going, Going, Gone! With the Pain and the Great One!, Delacorte) was up next, and recalled the first children’s book and author breakfast, held at the 1978 ABA convention in Atlanta, as a photo of Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Maurice Sendak and Blume flashed onto the huge screens in the room. After reading a letter she received from a 10-year-old in Florida (“Why do you use the word ‘bitch’ in the book Blubber?” it began), she commented on the way the market has changed in the past 30 years.
“All three authors here write for both children and adults,” she observed, after making the distinction that Colfer was a moderator, not a panelist. “This was unthinkable 30 years ago. You were told it would ruin your career if you wrote for adults. Or if you had to, do it with a pseudonym,” said the author of Forever and Summer Sisters. “Now everyone who writes wants to write for children. I think that’s great.
“Lately I have been writing for a younger age than I have before,” she said, “with the chapter books in the Pain and the Great One quartet. If you don’t catch kids early, you’re never going to catch them.”
Returning to the podium, Colfer, elaborately identifying himself as exclusively a writer for children, picked up a motif that had run through the authors’ talks by saying that he knew exactly where he got his ideas: by going through Neil Gaiman’s garbage. Gaiman himself was preceded by a two-minute preview of this fall’s film adaptation of Coraline, directed by Henry Selick, and he began his own talk by calling attention to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (Tor Teen), “the best children’s book I’ve read this year.”
Gaiman talked a bit about the history of Coraline, explaining how he’d sent the first three chapters to his editor, who pronounced it the best thing Gaiman had ever written but declared it unpublishable—a horror novel for children, or a novel for both children and adults, a category without an audience. “When I tell people that story, they say, ‘Aren’t you glad you proved him wrong?’ But he wasn’t wrong. It was 1992.”
For a number of reasons, Gaiman set the book aside, and resumed writing it a few years later, slowly finished it, found an editor, and the book was not published until 2002—“the best year it could possibly have been published. It was the first year Rowling skipped a Harry Potter novel. There were plenty of column inches available in newspapers to devote to the subject of why adult authors could write children’s books.”
Gaiman quickly supplied the genesis for his fall title, The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins), explaining that as the young father of an 18-month-old son with a passion for tricycling, he’d used the graveyard across the street as a playground. “I thought about Kipling’s TheJungle Book. It’s about an orphan who takes refuge in a jungle and is taught the things the jungle creatures know. So I thought about an orphan who takes refuge in a graveyard and is taught the things dead people know.
“I think I’ve written a book about why families are important and about why life is important. But I’m a writer. We make stories.”
At this point Colfer returned to end the morning’s events. “I think I can sum it up,” he offered. “Three ass-cracks, four shits, and one bitch.” back to top
IndieBound or Bust
by Jim Milliot
At the annual Celebration of Bookselling last evening, the American Booksellers Association unveiled a new initiative that will replace the nearly decade-old Book Sense. IndieBound, seen by ABA as more comprehensive than the Book Sense marketing program, is aimed at taking advantage of growing consumer interest in supporting locally owned business as well as businesses that incorporate sustainable business practices, explained ABA COO Oren Teicher in an interview just prior to the launch of the initiative. “Consumers are realizing that bigger isn’t always better,” Teicher said.
IndieBound will retain many of Book Sense’s most popular features, such as bestseller lists and monthly selections, although both will receive new names. The bestseller list is being rebranded as simply the “Indie Bestseller List,” while Book Sense Picks will be known as “The Indie Next List.” Teicher acknowledged that “some parts of Book Sense worked and some didn’t,” and the weakest link was the one to the consumer. “You ask 10 customers about Book Sense and nine will have never heard of it,” observed one publisher. By branding IndieBound, the ABA hopes to overcome that problem by emphasizing to consumers the value of independent businesses. Posters, decals, shopping bags, t-shirts and book marks will incorporate different IndieBound slogans. “We want to create a program that can be adaptable by each store,” Teicher said. Other materials will explain to booksellers how they can involve other local businesses in developing a buy local program. “We hope booksellers can form and lead these local movements,” Teicher said.
“Literary Liberation Boxes” with information on how booksellers can participate in IndieBound will be sent to all ABA members in June. “We want to supply booksellers with all the information they need to celebrate independence and localism,” says ABA chief marketing officer Meg Smith. To reinforce the IndieBound message among consumers, ABA is establishing the Web site IndieBound.org, which will allow the public to locate indie booksellers and look at the Bestseller and Next lists, and give information about how they can join the independent movement. According to Teicher, ABA hopes the new site will provide a sense of community among local retailers and consumers. The existing BookSense.com site will be used in only for e-commerce.
Publishers support the overall concept behind the move to IndieBound. “There is something in the air out there when Walmart ads talk about shopping at your local Walmart,” says Wendy Shanin, senior marketing director of Simon & Schuster. Macmillan director of field sales Ken Holland calls the program “fabulous.” ABA “needed to come up with something that had a more relevant connection to consumers and the community at large,” he says. He was also impressed by ABA’s sense of urgency in rolling out the program. “IndieBound needs to be put in play immediately” if it’s to take advantage of current customer attitudes, Holland says. Teicher agrees; acknowledging that it has been a tough 15 years for independent booksellers, he says some trends are finally turning in independents’ favor and that “the moment to promote the independent, local movement is now. We want to be in the first part of the wave.” back to top
For Indies, It's More Than Market Share
by Jim Milliot
Even though two recent studies have put their market share at below 10%, independent booksellers are as critical to publishers as they have ever been. In an ironic twist, the very fact that the number of independent booksellers has declined severely in the last decade makes the stores that have survived all that more important, publishers say. “Their numbers are obviously smaller, but they are a significant outlet for us,” says Matty Goldberg, v-p and group director for sales and marketing at Perseus Books Group. “The booksellers that are left standing are true believers in books and the book business,” Goldberg adds. That sentiment is picked up by Anne Brooks, director of sales at Overlook Press, who notes that Overlook often sees higher sell-through on titles favored by independents. “When they latch onto an author they really like, they just don’t buy [the title], they sell it,”Brooks notes. “That makes a big difference.”
“Independents have something you can’t put a number on,” observes Karen Torres, v-p, trade sales marketing director for the Hachette Book Group USA. “They bring a buzz that can help elevate a book and build word of mouth.” “Independents, with their strong relationships in their communities, are often ‘tastemakers,’ ” notes Wendy Sheanin, senior marketing director at Simon & Schuster. It is their role in creating that sometimes elusive buzz that makes indies crucial today, says Ruth Liebmann, v-p, director sales communications & events, at Random House. “Buzz is more than just a good review,” she notes, adding that booksellers talking up a book to different facets of their communities—customers as well as other readers, like teachers and librarians—can generate early interest in a title. “Before there is a bonfire there has to be a spark,” Liebmann says.
A viable independent network helps ensure there will be a diversity of voices in the market, publishers note. Even though books are sold in a variety of outlets, it is important to have an organized network in place that, along with the chains, can break out new authors. Having a new author highlighted by Book Sense, Borders or Barnes & Noble can help make a career, and having an author selected by all three “is like winning the trifecta,” says Carl Lennertz, v-p of independent retailing at HarperCollins.
All publishers can cite instances where independents were out ahead of other outlets in making bestsellers. “They led the charge for The Glass Castle,” says Sheanin. “They help to put Stephenie Meyer on the map,” Torres points out. And for books that don’t reach that blockbuster level, indies play an even more important role. Ken Holland, v-p of field sales at Macmillan, notes that indies accounted for about 30% of the initial retail sell-in of Per Peterson’s Book Sense bestseller Out Stealing Horses, and long into its sales life, they still account for 20% of the retail channel sales (the trade paperback edition is now #1 at Book Sense). Lennertz notes that while indies’ share of sales may be only 3% for commercial titles, it can be 25% for other books, and Goldberg observes that books from iconoclastic publishers (like McSweeney’s) often sell in greater numbers at indies than the chains.
Holland notes that the type of books indies are best at selling has changed over the years. While serious fiction, memoirs and regional titles are still an important part of the mix, indies are more willing to add new categories such as paranormal and “smart chick lit,” Holland says. “Good independents will embrace good books if there is a good story,” says Torres, who says she has seen more independents willing to take on commercial titles if they believe the title can sell in their stores.
It is not inexpensive to maintain a field sales force, but many publishers believe it is necessary, both to give indies the tools they need to sell books effectively and to get the attention of booksellers who receive thousands of galleys. Trish Weyenberg, director of field sales/paperback at Penguin, notes that her marketing efforts are aimed at moving beyond just book buyers at the indies to get to the frontline booksellers. And Liebmann points out that books that work at indies tend to have long lives in backlist as they get picked by reading groups and in course adoptions. “A strong independent marketplace is a good investment,” Liebmann says.
