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Regionals: And They're Off! Bob Summer -- 9/25/00 Mid-South celebrates 10-year anniversary with author events and lots of book buzz Throughout its decade of existence, the Mid-South Independent Booksellers Association has returned in alternate years to New Orleans for its annual fall trade show. So by the fate of rotation, the September 7-10 anniversary gathering of the nation's youngest regional in tandem with the four-year-old Mid-South Independent Booksellers for Children appropriately unfolded in a locale famous for revelry. Among newsworthy events at the convention:
As if to prove the adage about the importance of location, this year's attendance was up to 402 from last year's 375. First-timers included Tom Lowenburg and Judith Lafitte, owners of the new Octavia Books in New Orleans and Alabama's e-commerce booksellers ANovelApproach.com. The registration total was deceptive, according to a breakdown from executive director J Holmes. Although the 202 attending booksellers and 36 participating author counts exceeded last year's Little Rock show's respective 155 and 20 numbers, the exhibitor rep count dropped from 200 to 164 and exhibiting companies declined from 75 to 71. More positively, Holmes noted that MSIBA was among the three regionals chosen by Windstone Editions to receive $1,000 checks, a share of profits from the sale of their book-ends. And this year's Mid-South will be the last at the Radisson, a 20-story hotel so shopworn that it couldn't keep its elevators running when an electrical storm passed through the area Friday afternoon--an outage that continued intermittently into Saturday and resulted in heavy use of the back stairs. "We're looking into other New Orleans sites to use after our 2001 meeting in Oklahoma City," Holmes told PW.
Overall, though, the show was mutedly upbeat. Except, that is, at MSIBC's festive Friday children's events. "The children's events here are always fantastic," exclaimed Charlotte Wells, owner of Baytime Books in Houston, Tex. Among the array of children's and young adult authors attending MSIBC's breakfast and lunch as well as Humpty Dumpty Dinner and Silent Auction were Marc Brown, Ruth Pennebaker, Pam Munoz Ryan, Robert Sabuda, Betty Traylor and Lemony Snicket. Held at Mulate's, a Cajun restaurant with a lively band, the dinner's speaker was R.L. Stine. But its main purpose was the presentation of the annual Humpty Dumpty Award as determined from customer nominations gathered at MSIBC stores. And in this year of Harry Potter no one was surprised that J.K. Rowling won. Scholastic national sales manager Margaret Coffee accepted on her behalf. And at the auction for signed handprints-on-paper from MSIBC's lineup of writers, the top bid ($155) was for Brown's donation. New MSIBC president Susan Kent, Treehouse Readers in Kingwood, Tex., pegged the fundraiser's take at $1,000. Still, the celebration might have been the finale for MSIBC as a separate entity, since at the business meeting it was announced that integration into MSIBA was still under study. "We will continue to hold our events at Mid-South," noted outgoing president Tiffany Durham, who's now unemployed due to the recent closing of Austin's Toad Hall. "But a merger would cancel duplication, so our members would pay dues to only one organization." In other business, Tamra Dore, of Katy Budget Books in Katy, Tex., took over the MSIBA presidential helm from Mary Gay Shipley, of Arkansas's That Bookstore in Blytheville, under whose leadership an umbrella alliance of bookseller groups became a unified membership association.
There was also a strong bookseller buzz for Kathy Hepinstall's novel The House of Gentle Men (Avon) and Terry Kay's Taking Lottie Home (Morrow). And Tom Payton, president/publisher of Georgia's Hill Street Press, was gratified by the enthusiasm for M.A. Harper's Alzheimer's-focused novel, The Worst Day of My Life, So Far. Saturday night proved a hot night for invitation-only attractions. Random House held a dinner at the Commander's Palace restaurant to promote Broadway's Commander's Kitchen, by Ti Adelaide Martin (daughter of restaurant owner Ella Brennan) and executive chef Jamie Shannon. And Talk Miramax's party for Christopher Rice's A Density of Souls was held at St. Elizabeth's, a 19th-century landmark that was built as a Catholic girls orphanage and renovated by the young debut novelist's mother (yes, Anne Rice) after she bought it in 1993. PW was joined there by People, and upstairs in the Sanctuary retrofitted into the original chapel, some Mid-Southsters were seen discoing amidst a bevy of the City That Care Forgot's most beautiful upscale GenXers. All aboard!Buddha's rail passage. Author's Innovative Book Tour
"My last book tour, for my novel [Coffee House Press's Namako: Sea Cucumber], felt like a series of random sallies and wasn't as satisfying as it could be," McFerrin told PW. "This time I wanted to create a journey out of it. I always wanted to cross the U.S. in a long, slow way and hang out in different communities and get to know this country. I've been all over the world but not the U.S. The train is slow and romantic." While McFerrin will be promoting The Hands of Buddha (Coffee House), her new collection of short stories, and conduct autographings, she will also hold a traveling one-hour workshop. "How to Turn Life Into Literature" is designed to show how personal experiences can be turned into writing. The seminar will also demonstrate the various forms stories might take as well as detail markets for publication. "My fiction is grounded in real experiences. I go into communities and share ideas and knowledge rather than teaching," said McFerrin. "I'm calling this trip my Book Passage by Rail tour. I want to live life for the long-haul, not the short-run. Books are like that: there's so much more you get out of a book rather than a movie. Train travel feels the same way, it takes longer and it's not abbreviated in any way." McFerrin's 30-day unlimited Amtrak pass will allow her to start the tour at Bluestockings Women's Bookstore in New York City on October 5 and work her way across the country, hitting independents like Chapters in Washington, D.C., Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, N.C., and the Tattered Cover in Denver. Her final destination is Sam Weller Books in Salt Lake City on October 28. As if book signings and seminars and train schedules were not enough to juggle, McFerrin will also be writing about her experiences along the way, to be posted on Book Passage's Web site (www.bookpassage.com). --Kevin Howell Top
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Regionals: And They're Off!
Sep 25, 2000
A version of this article appeared in the 09/25/2000 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:
