Publisher News

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill recently announced the creation of a Frontline Fellowship, which will reward the exceptional handselling skills of one frontline bookseller with a trip to ABA's 2007 Winter Institute, to be held in Portland, Oregon, in February.

SIBA Announces Award Winners

On Tuesday, June 20, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) announced the winners of the 2006 SIBA Book Awards, celebrating the best of Southern literature, as picked by independent booksellers throughout the South. The 2006 Winners are:

The Book Sense family of Publisher Partners has two new additions: the University of Georgia Press in Athens, Georgia, and Behler Publications in Lake Forest, California.

This week, Houghton Mifflin announced that its Trade and Reference Division would begin to offer free freight beginning October 1, 2006. In addition, Houghton announced two new retail backlist programs, both now available to booksellers.

Wholesaler BookStream, which opened in Poughkeepsie, New York, last December, is now running at full capacity, according to the company's vice president of sales and marketing, Maury McClelland. Noting that BookStream now distributes virtually all publishers and has been serving many independent bookstores along the East Coast and beyond for several months, he described the company's inventory as being at the proper level to be in a "competitive mode and a source for booksellers."

On Monday, February 13, at the Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, the American Booksellers Association presented a Booksellers Forum and Education Program in conjunction with the Southern Independence Booksellers Alliance (SIBA). Approximately 30 booksellers attended the event, which featured a SIBA membership session, the Booksellers Forum, and the ABA session "Creating a 'Buy Local' Campaign."

While most booksellers would agree that Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) are a useful and necessary tool for gauging the sales potential for all kinds of books, sometimes galleys can pile up in the stock room in a hurry. Since booksellers can't read them all, nor keep them all, Bookselling This Week decided to ask a few publishers and booksellers for their tips about what to do with ARCs once bookstores are finished with them.

In response to the continuing controversy surrounding the veracity of the memoir A Million Little Pieces, James Frey has written an author's note, now available on the Random House website.

It didn't take long for the Renton, Washington's Wizards of the Coast to make its mark in the gaming and role-playing business. In 1990, Peter Adkison and six friends founded the company in Adkison's basement. Within three years, with the release of the first trading card game, Magic: The Gathering, Wizards of the Coast had created an entirely new genre of games.

This week, the American Booksellers Association announced a new partnership with Above the Treeline, LLC, which provides an online software product designed to help bookstores improve finances by optimizing inventory selection.

Boston-based Beacon Press, a nonprofit independent book publisher founded in 1854 as the Press of the American Unitarian Association, has long been known as a house devoted to providing the public with thought-provoking, sometimes controversial, works focusing on social issues. Renamed Beacon Press in 1902, it remains a branch of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), often referred to as the Unitarian Church, although its titles are nondenominational.

Former bookseller Hank Jones developed TitleSmart, www.titlesmart.com, an informational web tool for booksellers and librarians, to provide a single wide-ranging source for easy access to information about major book reviews and book publicity. "From talking with fellow booksellers and from my own experience, I knew there was a search tool needed that could help my store and other stores to more efficiently track down titles for customers," said Jones.

The American Booksellers Association recently launched the Booksellers Resource Directory (BRD), a listing of vendors of nonbook products and services, open to ABA bookstore, provisional, and publisher members.

Just in time for the holiday season, Koen-Levy Book Wholesalers, LLC, will be open to receive orders from booksellers starting this weekend, Bob Koen, Koen-Levy's general manager, told Bookselling This Week in a recent interview. The news comes less a month after Levy Home Entertainment announced that it had acquired certain Koen assets and would be forming Koen-Levy. The company has been operational since Halloween. "We're doing receiving -- getting books in," Koen said. "We have between 15,000 and 20,000 on order with 3,000 received so far.

On Thursday, November 17, the American Booksellers Association announced the launch of the Booksellers Resource Directory (BRD), an electronic source for information about vendors of nonbook products and services, open to ABA bookstore, provisional, and publisher members.