Carnegie Fiction and Nonfiction Winners: A Natural for Indie Bookstores

On Sunday, June 30, the second annual Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction were awarded at the American Library Association Conference in Chicago. This year’s winners are Canada by Richard Ford (Ecco) in the fiction category, and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) for nonfiction. Both titles are indie bookstore favorites: Canada was the #1 Indie Next List Pick for June 2012, and both titles have appeared on the Indie Bestseller Lists.

There is strong national interest in the Carnegie awards — ALA and Carnegie Corporation’s announcement of the inaugural winners in March 2012 was picked up by more than 100,000 news, general media, and social media outlets, and the announcements of the finalists, both this year and last year, was widely followed.

Growing recognition of the awards creates promotional opportunities for bookstores. To help booksellers create displays introducing this year’s honorees, ALA is offering a free downloadable poster and bookmark on its website under the “resources” tab on the  Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction & Nonfiction page, as well as a list of ideas for displays and programming.

Award seals for the books’ covers are also available from the ALA online store. (Booksellers with questions regarding other uses of the images of the seals or medals in displays should contact [email protected] or the ALA’s Mary Jo Bolduc at (312) 280-5416.)

ALA suggests that bookstores make use of social media channels, store websites, and newsletters to share news of the Andrew Carnegie Medals and also encourage customers to tweet using the hashtag #ala_carnegie to join the wider conversation.

The other finalists for this year’s fiction medal were The Round House by Louise Erdrich (Harper), which was an Indie Next List Great Read in October 2012, and This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz (Riverhead), a November 2012 Indie Next List Great Read. Nonfiction finalists included The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore (Knopf) and Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen (W.W. Norton & Company).