Around Indies

Flying Pig Helps Local Farmers Score Book Deal

Earlier this year, farmers John and Jennifer Churchman approached Shelburne, Vermont’s The Flying Pig about carrying their self-published picture book, The Sheepover, and this ultimately helped the couple land a six-figure book deal with a major publisher, reported CBS News.

“I’ve been in this business a long time and I had never seen [a book] quite like it,” said Flying Pig owner Elizabeth Bluemle. “There’s nothing with this collage photographic style that I’ve seen in the children’s book world. So I think it’s groundbreaking.”

Last winter, the Churchmans documented for their Facebook followers the day-to-day struggles of their sheep Sweet Pea, who was suffering from an infection. When the Churchmans brought Sweet Pea to their house for the night with fellow sheep Violet, Sunny, and Prem, “sheepover” jokes abounded — and then some followers suggested the couple write a book about this adventure.

The Churchmans self-published 4,000 copies of The Sheepover, and it was Bluemle’s review of the book that led book agent Brenda Bowen to offer the farmers a three-book deal with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

“We’re very grateful for all of this. It’s very surreal,” said Jennifer Churchman.

Writer’s Block to Open in Anchorage

Next fall, Vered Mares and Kathy McCue will open The Writer’s Block Bookstore and Café in Anchorage, Alaska, in the former location of an adults-only porn shop, reported the Alaska Dispatch News.

“After I saw what this place was, I just wanted to get rid of it,” Mares said. “A community needs to have healthy spaces.”

The co-owners are planning to clean, repaint, and re-carpet the space now so they can lease it to artists and musicians throughout the winter, then tear down the building in the spring and replace it with a 2,500-square-foot storefront.

The new bookstore will serve as a creative community hub in the once-seedy neighborhood of Spenard. It will house new books, a stage for performances, and a café that will serve coffee, beer, and wine.

Toad Hall Wins Grant From Awesome Rockport

Rockport, Massachusetts’ Toad Hall Bookstore recently won the first grant awarded by the local nonprofit Awesome Rockport, which aims to help fund projects to improve the town, reported the Gloucester Times.

Awesome Rockport held a pitch night on Monday, December 14, to hear appeals from three finalists out of an original 11 applicants. Bookstore manager Ardis Francoeur, who delivered the winning pitch, received $1,000 to go toward creating a new website for Toad Hall.

“We’ll have an online store with a shop function. We’ll add graphics, and be able to send out a newsletter,” Francoeur told the newspaper. “Right now, the web page is really sad. It’s a sad, little page.”

Since 1972, all net profits at Toad Hall have been donated to environmental projects.

The Bookloft Owners Ready to Pursue Other Dreams

Ev and Eric Wilska, the owners of The Bookloft in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, have put their bookstore up for sale after more than four decades at the helm.

“With our kids far-flung and our first grandchild on the way, with enormous gratitude for 42 rewarding years of bookselling, and with many life dreams still unrealized (many of them involving the reading, writing, creating and selling of books), we’ve decided to sell The Bookloft,” they wrote in an e-mail to customers last week.

Within a week of the announcement, 20 interested parties have been in touch, said Mark Kaufman of the Bookstore Training and Consulting Group of Paz & Associates, which is assisting the Wilskas with the sale. Sales at the bookstore, which is located in the Berkshire Mountains, are healthy, and the staff is strong and the community supportive, he added.

The Wilskas said that it is their “intention to find a new owner who will not only carry on with all that’s made The Bookloft a beloved literary destination in the Berkshires, but who will also bring to it new energy, experience and ideas.”