February

Home
Up

 


AnvilPub's Southern Review of Books is updated on the 15th of each month or the first business day thereafter. Back editions may be accessed by clicking on the "Southern Review of Books
wpe2.jpg (53816 bytes) Archives" hyperlink at the bottom of this page. The search engine for the current edition and archives may be accessed by the button at the bottom. The Southern Review is edited by Noel Griese. The author of 17 books and numerous articles on various subjects, he has been a newspaper reporter and editor and has taught English and journalism at the Universities of Wisconsin and Georgia. Elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi, he holds three degrees in English and journalism.

To add your e-mail name to the subscriber list, send an e-mail to custserv@anvilpub.com.  E-mail news to ngriese@anvilpub.com or fax it to 770-493-7232. For advertising rates, e-mail custserv@anvilpub.com or call Kathie Splinter at 770-938-0289.

Welcome to the
Southern Review of Books

an online newsletter for publishers, authors, book lovers and booksellers

Vol. 7, No. 2   February 2009
Index (scroll down for stories) 

  1. Targeting the Christian market? These books could be helpful
  2. VanderWyk & Burnham sold to Quick Publishing of St. Louis
  3. Breaking news from the book barons
  4. Want your book made into a movie? You may have a long wait
  5. Trade association for indy publisher reps unveils new online service
  6. News about bookstores, publishing, marketing and promotion
  7. Chelsea Green, HarperStudio pioneer in ‘no returns’ arena
  8. Bookstore sales dip in October; Publishers ship fewer copies
  9. Sourcebooks acquires Nashville’s Cumberland House
10. Update journalism: Latest skinny on past Southern Review stories
11. Publisher Jane Daniel tells her side of 'Misha' hoax in new memoir
12. We get letters: The Salisburys comment on Amazon rankings
13. Berkley, Lerner pull fake Holocaust memoir as author confesses
14. Monitoring the e-book, graphic novel and e-tailing markets
15. Major publishers agree to sell e-books to iPhones, iPods
16. Random House offers free titles for Lexcycle's Stanza reader
17. BISG releases new BookDROP Standard for online book content
18. There be sharks: Be careful of where you swim in the book biz ocean
19. Useful information and free services for writers
20. Christian Post names three stories about books to top 2008 news list
21. News of how innovative authors and publishers are selling books
22. South Carolina publishing company thrives in local history niche
23. Bright Mountain Books publisher preserves Appalachian history
24. How publishers use marketing, publicity and events to sell books
25. Some Christians see ‘The Shack’ as worse than ‘DaVinci Code’
26. Novel written in Ernest Hemingway's attic named one of best of 2008
27. News of chicanery, dishonesty and tort-feasing in the book business
28. Watchdog details long list of inaccuracies in latest Coulter diatribe
29. New standard requires testing of paper in children’s books for lead
30. Bookkeeper charged with embezzling $348,975 from store
31. BEA and ABA announce they’ll be back together at NYC show

32. Major upcoming trade shows, book fairs and book festivals
 

1. Targeting the Christian market? These books may be helpful

If you’re looking to write fiction or nonfiction aimed at the Christian market, you might find helpful our list below ranking a number of books on writing and editing, finding agents and publishers and marketing to this special segment of the overall book market.

We’ve listed the books by their rankings on Amazon.com in December. Keep in mind that Amazon.com rankings change hourly for the most popular titles (but less frequently for the not so popular ones). So if you check a ranking, it might be somewhat or even considerably different than the ranking that existed when we ran our scans.

Remember also that just because a book is least or most popular in any table we run, it may not be the one that you would find the most helpful.

Prices shown are the Amazon.com discounted prices for new copies.

Author(s)

Title

Rank

Format

Price

Date

Sally Stuart

Christian Writers' Market Guide 2008: The Essential Reference Tool for the Christian Writer

25,798

pbk

$23.09

2008

Sally Stuart

Christian Writers' Market Guide 2009

34,847

pbk

$23.09

2009

Wesleyan Publisher House

Writers on Writing: Top Christian Authors Share Their Secrets for Getting Published

106,542

pbk

$10.19

2006

Ron Benrey

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Christian Fiction

123,446

pbk

$11.53

2007

Jerry Jenkins

Writing for the Soul: Instruction and Advice from an Extraordinary Writing Life

153,486

cloth

$1.95

2006

Leonard G. Goss

The Little Style Guide to Great Christian Writing and Publishing

177,861

pbk

$11.04

2004

Robert Hudson

The Christian Writer's Manual of Style: Updated and Expanded Edition

211,382

pbk

$14.59

2004

Leonard G. Goss

The Little Handbook to Perfecting the Art of Christian Writing: Getting Your Foot in the Publisher's Door

222,636

pbk

$10.19

2006

Gail Gaymer Martin

Writing the Christian Romance

250,778

pbk

$11.55

2007

Ethel Herr

An Introduction to Christian Writing: An Indepth Companion to the Complete Writing Experience

255,792

pbk

$11.56

1999

Sally Stuart

Christian Writers' Market Guide 2007: The Essential Reference Tool for the Christian Writer

337,792

pbk

$24.26

2007

Anne E. Byle

The Making of a Christian Bestseller: An Insiders Guide to Christian Publishing

386,903

pbk

$11.04

2006

Leonard G. Goss

The Little Handbook to Perfecting the Art of Christian Writing: Getting Your Foot in the Publisher's Door

420,742

pbk

$10.19

2006

Barbara Kipfer

The Complete Guide to Writing and Selling the Christian Novel

765,912

pbk

$15.99

2000

Penelope Stokes

Complete Guide to Writing and Selling the Christian Novel

782,535

pbk

$15.99

1998

Sarah Bolme

Your Guide to Marketing Books in the Christian Marketplace

937,755

pbk

$14.03

2006

Gilbert Morris

How To Write And Sell A Christian Novel: Practical Advice from a BestSelling Author

1,013,077

pbk

$10.69

2000

Bette Filley

365 Ways to Market Your Christian Book: Specific People, Places, Procedures

1,717,606

pbk

$14.00

2007

2. VanderWyk & Burnham sold to Quick Publishing of St. Louis

Book publisher VanderWyk & Burnham of Acton, Mass., in the Boston area, has been acquired by Quick Publishing of St. Louis, Mo.

According to Meredith Rutter, who has been the VanderWyk & Burnham publisher, the time was ripe for selling the firm to a larger publisher capable of continuing to expand the brand.

Quick Publishing acquires more than 25 new titles in the VanderWyk & Burnham portfolio. Included in the sale is the hardback edition of Front of the Class, the book that was the basis of a Dec. 7 national telecast by CBS of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

Front of the Class is an inspirational memoir written by Brad Cohen, who was diagnosed at age 10 with Tourette syndrome and went on to overcome obstacles to become an outstanding grade school teacher in the Atlanta, Ga., suburbs.
VanderWyk & Burnham published the book in 2005. Paperback rights were subsequently sold on behalf of VanderWyk & Burnham to St. Martin’s by West Coast agent Sharlene Martin.

“We’re delighted to add the VanderWyk and Burnham brand to our other imprints,” said Quick Publishing President Angela M. Quick of St. Louis.

The acquisition of VanderWyk & Burnham by Quick Publishing was brokered by Noel Griese of Anvil Brokers of Atlanta. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Quick Publishing was created in 2003 when Angela and Fred Quick acquired Cache River Press and Studio 4 Productions, both of which were established more than 20 years ago. The Studio 4 Productions line has been divided into two imprints: Senior Sense and Quick Prints in the fields of family/senior/aging issues, parenting, character education, travel, and disaster preparedness. The Cache River Press line has been divided into two imprints as well: Cache River Press, which publishes local interest/travel books about the Midwest, and Cache River Science, which specializes in award-winning and well respected books in microbiology, pathology, reproduction and more.

Effective with the sale to Quick Publishing, the distributor for VanderWyk & Burnham titles was moved from NBN to Partners of Holt, Mich.


Register now to Learn How To Become
a Successful Published Author!

We've arranged for an outstanding faculty for two full days of instruction in cooperation with the Spring Book Show at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta March 6-7

The Southern Review of Books has once again organized an outstanding faculty that will inspire and inform you. This year, we're offering a comprehensive one-day seminar in addition to an intensive seminar on writing for the Christian market. Both seminars will be held in  classrooms at the Cobb Galleria Centre in north Atlanta. Attend either, and you get free admission to the Spring Book Show, a $75 value.

The comprehensive seminar theme is "Authorship 101: How To Become a Successful Author." Instructors include romance writer Anna DeStefano, humor writer Hollis Gillespie, Southern Review of Books editor and author of 17 nonfiction books Noel Griese, Wordsworth Books marketing director Russ Marshalek, Georgia Author of the Year award winner and humor novelist Man Martin, Apex Book Manufacturng CEO Ahmad Meradji, successful mystery novelist and nonfiction author Patricia Sprinkle and novelist/memoirist Darlene Ford Wofford. Authorship 101 will be held on Saturday, March 7. For details on the full schedule of the eight presentations and registration information, please click on Authorship 101.

Saturday, March 6, is the date for the one-day seminar "Authorship 201: Writing for the Christian Market." Instructors are "90 Minutes in Heaven co-author Cecil "Cec" Murphey and "Hot Topics host Kimberley Kennedy of WSB-TV Ch. 2, author of the forthcoming "Left at the Altar" inspirational title from Thomas Nelson. For those unfamiliar with Cec Murphey, he's the author of 112 books and hundreds of articles. "90 Minutes in Heaven" and its related spinoffs have four million copies in print in 32 languages. See full details at Authorship 201.

wpe37.jpg (2289 bytes)

3. Breaking news from the book barons

J.K. Rowling's at it again. Her latest tome, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, in December became the fastest-selling title of 2008. Reuters reported that "more than 2.6 million copies sold worldwide in less than two weeks"… HarperCollins Publishers has acquired world rights to a book about Ponzi scheme conspirator Bernard Madoff, to be written by journalist Andrew Kirtzman. Bertelsmann AG's Random House imprint said that it, too, is acquiring the rights to a book about Madoff by investigative reporter Richard Behar. Both are to be published in 2010… According to the New Yorker, Attorney Bob Barnett, who is representing Laura Bush in negotiations with publishers for her memoir about her years as the First Lady, is well along toward cutting a deal. Barnett told the magazine, "We have eight very interested publishers. Far from declining to meet, there were several more who asked for a meeting who we were not able to accommodate because of scheduling. The meetings were lively, insightful, and revealing. I have been at this long enough to know that, because certain publishers are well-known for being pathologically unable to maintain confidentiality, you don't reveal your best material in multi-publisher meetings. We will resolve it right after the first of the year"… The financially troubled Borders chain has ousted would-be turnaround specialist George Jones as CEO after he failed over two-and-a-half years to return the company to profitability. Selected to replace him is Ron Marshall, principal of Wildridge Capital Management. As part of the change, Chief Financial Officer Ed Wilhelm, who has been with Borders since 1994, and Rob Gruen are also leaving Borders. Senior Vice President of finance Mark Bierley becomes the new CFO. Anne Kubek takes over Gruen's position. Borders reports sales for the nine-week holiday period of $869 million, down 11.7 percent from a year ago. Same-store sales at the company's superstores declined 14.4 percent. Waldenbooks sales of $162 million declined by eight percent on a same-store basis, and 16.4 percent overall due to continued store closings. The company's web site did $20 million of business... Borders has been informed by the New York Stock Exchange that their stock is in danger of being delisted after trading for less than one dollar for 30 days. Borders stock closed 2008 at 45 cents a share, making its market capitalization $27.2 million. The market values the company at such a low level that theoretically one could buy one of the company's superstores for a little more than $50,000.… Effective Feb. 2, William J. Lynch, Jr., becomes president of Barnes & Noble.com. Lynch had been executive vice-president of marketing and general manager of HSN.com (the Home Shopping Network).

4. Want your book made into a movie? You may have a long wait

At Anvil Brokers / Anvil Publishers, Inc., we’ve been associated with a number of book to movie deals. Most recently, we brokered the sale of VanderWyk & Burnham to Quick Publishing. One of the V&B titles sold is Brad Cohen’s Front of the Class. Cohen, when age 10, was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. He went on, nonetheless, to become one of the most outstanding grade school teachers in Georgia. His story was optioned to Hallmark Hall of Fame, and broadcast nationally in a CBS-TV movie aired on Dec. 7, 2008, to an audience of 11.8 million tuned-in households.

So, what are the odds that your book will get optioned for a movie, and then made into a film? Astronomically high against it, according to available numbers.

Take the case of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. According to a story by David Mehegan in the Dec. 27 Boston Globe, it took from 1961, when the novel was published, for it to become a movie in 2008. The movie, which stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, drew Hollywood interest almost as soon as it was published, but Yates died on 1992, long before the book became a movie. Had it not been for the personal passion of Winslet and her director husband, Sam Mendes, the book might never have reached the screen.

Now showing are movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer's vampire-teen tale Twilight, F. Scott Fitzgerald's short fantasy story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Bernhard Schlink's 1997 novel The Reader and Kate DiCamillo's children's story The Tale of Despereaux.

Of the 500 to 600 movies, counting art-house films, that are made annually, only a fraction are based on novels. With more than 50,000 works of fiction published each year, according to W.W. Bowker, publisher of "Books in Print," the odds of any given novel becoming a movie – even if the book is optioned – become far less than one in 100.

Says Boston literary agent John Taylor Williams: "An author shouldn't be surprised if, after a movie option is sold, the movie is never made."


Interested in buying a publishing or book-related business? Please contact us. Here are some of our current listings!

We currently have more than four dozen publishing properties listed or listing. For further information about our listings or about selling your publishing property, please click Publisher Brokerage

INVESTOR PARTNER SOUGHT. Book publisher in Texas with successful line of local and regional titles seeks an investor partner willing to take over day to day marketing and management while current owner concentrates on acquiring new titles. One of the titles written by the publisher, who is also an author in her own right, is the basis for a made-for-TV movie scheduled for telecast on the Hallmark Channel in March 2009. Publisher seeks investment of $20K in return for a 30 percent interest in the business. Email ngriese@anvilpub.com or call 770-938-0289 or 1-800-500-FLAG.

ESTABLISHED NEWSLETTER AND BOOK PUBLISHER: Lucrative newsletter dealing with hot current issue, with national and overseas circulation and peripheral information products for sale. In business for 34 years. Assets include copyrights to a number of books and reports related to the core newsletter, which covers privacy issues. Loyal following, 90 percent plus renewal rate. Revenues of $65K in 2007. Approx. value of inventory at cost: $9K. Asking $165K. Contact Anvil Brokers for prospectus and other information. Email ngriese@anvilpub.com or call 770-938-0289 or 1-800-500-FLAG.

ESTABLISHED PUBLISHER OF TIGHTLY FOCUSED TRADE BOOKS AND TEXTBOOKS FOR SALE. Trade titles for "word lovers" and writers have been written about in NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Trib and countless other pubs, featured by Writers Digest Book Club, and selected for ABA BookSense; plus line of journalism textbooks used at hundreds of colleges across country. Distributed by IPG. Owner is selling because he has accepted a top position with another publisher. Revenue $300K per year, currently has $40K in inventory at cost (about 20,000 copies of various titles). Excellent acquisition for publisher seeking to add a line of books about writing/words. Asking price of $250K includes inventory at cost. If interested, call Noel Griese at 770-938-0289 or 1-800-500-FLAG, or email ngriese@anvilpub.comFOR SALE: Financially sound West Coast publisher, 25 titles in print, with associated self-publishing operation. Gross revenues $1.045 million in 2007. Discretionary cash flow after expenses, taxes and owner draw of $42K was $302K in 2007. Organized as sole proprietorship. Includes approx. $49K in inventory at cost. Owner wants to devote more time to a nonprofit. Asking $1.0 million with minimum 50% down, security for balance. Won't last long! For information, email custserv@anvilpub.com or call 770-938-0289.

DEEP DISCOUNT IN ASKING PRICE FOR EAST COAST PUBLISHER. We have a listing for an East Coast publisher of 27 nonfiction titles, mostly in the self-help and general nonfiction areas, with some memoirs. Topics include aging, death & dying, education, health, family, and social or contemporary issues. Revenues last three years in $121K-$161K range. This publisher wants to follow a new career path in publishing starting immediately. Publisher has been asking $250K, but has drastically reduced the asking price in an effort to move the property quickly. The asking price is now $125K plus inventory at cost. The owner is also willing to finance up to 33 percent of the sale price. All offers will be considered. If you are interested, please email ngriese@anvilpub.com or call 770-938-0289 or 1-800-500-FLAG for further information.

FOR SALE: North American rights to manuscript by former European manager of major big pharma company. Explosive content about pill-mongering in the U.S. and worldwide pharma industry. Author, who was recently deposed in a U.S. class action suit, was responsible for bribing Swedish government official to pave way for European introduction of controversial drug Prozac. Describes dangers big pharma refuses to disclose about a wide class of therapeutic drugs such as Vioxx. Email ngriese@anvilpub.com or call 770-938-0289 if interested.

LITERARY AGENCIES WANTED: Successful East Coast literary agency seeks to expand by acquiring other agencies in the $5K-$250K gross revenue class. Candidates should be willing to disclose list of author clients, publisher clients, agency financial data. Contact Noel Griese at ngriese@anvilpub.com or 770-938-0289 or 1-800-500-FLAG.

FOR SALE: Financially sound West Coast publisher, 25 titles in print, with associated self-publishing operation. Gross revenues $1.045 million in 2007. Discretionary cash flow after expenses, taxes and owner draw of $42K was $302K in 2007. Organized as sole proprietorship. Includes approx. $49K in inventory at cost. Owner wants to devote more time to a nonprofit. Asking $1.0 million with minimum 50% down, security for balance. Won't last long! Email custserv@anvilpub.com or call 770-938-0289 if interested.

FOR SALE: Sub-S publisher with 50 titles in print (mix of mostly fiction, some nonfiction), strong online presence. Includes rights to one title being made into major movie this year. Titles distributed by Ingram and Baker & Taylor. Owner wants more time for his own creative endeavors. Revenue in 2004-2006 $75K plus. Sale price includes $25K in inventory at cost. Asking $229,800, but all offers will be considered. Owner willing to finance balance with 50 percent down. Email ngriese@anvilpub.com or call 1-800-500-FLAG.

My partner and I together have sold more than 100 businesses. We'd be happy to put you on our contact lists if you'd like to be notified of new listings. Just email us at either custserv@anvilpub.com or anvilpub@earthlink.net to let us know you'd like to be added.

5. Trade association for indy publisher reps unveils new online service

The National Association of Independent Publishers Representatives is introducing a new service, Frontlist Plus Universal, an Internet-based service that will provide publishers and sales reps, both independent and in-house, "with a one-stop catalogue-order data-management system that includes file-format translation compatible with a variety of proprietary inventory-control systems and other industry platforms."

The impetus comes as many publishers are beginning to switch to electronic catalogues.
Frontlist Plus Universal will be available starting in late January. The service is free to booksellers and will work on inventory control systems used by trade, college and Christian bookstores, including Anthology, Booklog, Books-in-Store, Bookstore Manager, Information Partner (IRT/IBID), Square One, TBM Book Manager and WordStock. Data may also be exported in ONIX, MS Excel and ROSI-104.

The service enters new-title data in catalogue order from participating publishers and primary distributors, who pay nominal per-title fees, allowing booksellers and other buyers to avoid hours of redundant data entry from a range of systems and data platforms.

Buyers will be given a user name and password that will admit them to the system to view available publisher catalogues and to maintain their profiles, which will include contact information, type of operating system, file format type and preferred method of import. Buyers will receive authorization seasonally from reps that will allow them to unlock a particular catalogue or set of catalogues. Buyers will then be able to export an entire catalogue (or just titles they select) via FTP or dial-up connection for import into their store system and to create a seasonal new-title purchase order.

6. News about bookstores, publishing, marketing and promotion

Commenting on the acquisition of Cumberland House by Source-books (see story below), publishing industry guru Al Greco, a marketing professor at Fordham University in New York, said more small publishers that don't have enough capital are going to go out of business. Many more are likely to cut back on titles that they publish. "The next year to year-and-a-half will be a challenge for publishers big and small," he told the Nashville Tennessean. "The smaller publishers are a lot more volatile because if they don't have the capital to get through the credit crunch, they can run out of money. What that means is that they don't have money for technology, don't have money for acquisition of new titles."


We can represent your book - cover out -  at the Spring Book Show in Atlanta March 6-8, 2009

The Spring Book Show is one of the Big Three remainder and bargain book shows in the nation. The 2009 show will be held Friday-Sunday, March 6-8. 2009, at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta. If you have overstocks, your titles need to be represented. More than 50,000 bargain-priced titles represented by 100-plus dealers will be up for sale.

Here's how our offer works. First, email us at custserv@anvilpub.com to let us know you're interested. We will respond with an email that tells you what to do in detail. We'll ask you for some information about your title(s). Then, ship two copies of each title you want represented to us, along with the information. It costs only $10 for each title we represent. You can pay by credit card, money order or check.

Our catalog for the Spring Book Show 2009 is currently loading. To look at the incomplete catalog as it now stands, please click on Spring 2009.

To look at our 2008 catalog for the Spring book Show, click on: Spring 2008

7. Chelsea Green, HarperStudio pioneer in ‘no returns’ arena

Chelsea Green Publisher and President Margo Baldwin, who launched a “no returns” opportunity in 2007 for bookstore owners to get deeper discounts, is finding less resistance to the program.

Chelsea Green offers discounts and other perks to retailers that purchase books on a no-returns basis. According to Baldwin, response to the program launched in 2007 has been extremely positive and growing. Program participants get a 50-percent discount and free freight. Participants are also first in line to get their shipments, and also get first dibs on author events. So far, 42 retailers are participating.

More recently, financially troubled Borders Group Inc. has agreed to accept books from HarperStudio - the HarperCollins imprint started by former Hyperion Books publisher Robert S. Miller - on a nonreturnable basis, according to The Wall Street Journal.

When Miller, who serves as HarperStudio's president and publisher, joined HarperCollins in the spring of 2008 to develop the new publishing group, one of the goals of the group was to eliminate the practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies of books.

Under the terms of the deal, Borders will receive a greater discount on initial orders of books published by HarperStudio - 58 percent to 63 percent off the cover price instead of the usual 48 percent - in exchange for not returning any unsold books to the publisher.

"The idea of taking inventory and then shipping it back isn't a good idea for anybody. We're open to all publishers to discuss alternatives to the traditional return model," says Robert Gruen, Borders' executive vice president of merchandising and marketing. "Returns have never made sense in our business, and with the recent economic downturn, publishers and booksellers are more open than before to experimenting with models that might decrease waste and increase profit."

8. Bookstore sales dip in October; Publishers ship fewer copies

U.S. bookstore sales in October dipped for the second month in a row, falling 5.6 percent to $1.060 billion, according to preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau. A month earlier, in September, bookstore sales fell 4.5 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. However, all the news is not bleak. For the year to date, bookstore sales have risen 1.3 percent to $13.833 billion.

Under Census Bureau definition, bookstore sales are of new books and do not include "electronic home shopping, mail-order, or direct sale" or used book sales.

Meanwhile, publishers' net book sales fell 20.1 percent to $644.5 million in October, as reported by 80 publishers to the Association of American Publishers. Sales for the year through October were down 3.4 percent to $8.362 billion.

E-book sales in October continued their high-double-digit growth rate, rising 73 percent, but to only $5.2 million, a miniscule part of the overall book market. By comparison, adult paperback shipments dropped 23 percent to $95 million, while adult hardcover deliveries fell 25 percent to $246.2 million.

The AAP sales statistics track self-reported publisher net shipments  (shipments less returns) from 80 association members. They give an indication of how some publishers are filling the supply chain, but do not necessarily correlate with sales at retail for the entire book business.

 

We can include your book in our Summer 2009 catalog! Your book will appear before more than 10,000 buyers! the catalog closes May 15, 2009!

If you'd like to promote your book - preferably with a copyright of 2006, 2007 or 2008 or 2009 - please consider our Summer 2009 Catalog. Here's how our offer works. First, email us at custserv@anvilpub.com to let us know you're interested.
We'll email you a form we use to collect informatio
n about your title for buyers. Then, return the form to us along with two copies of each title you want represented to Anvil Publishers, Inc., 3852 Allsborough Drive, Tucker, GA. 30084. It costs only $15 for each title we
represent. You can pay by credit card or check.

Here's what we do:

1. Your book - along with a color cover thumbnail and relevant data - will be added to the Summer Catalog page on our Web site. If you have a fiction title, for example, your book will appear with other fiction titles, listed alphabetically by the last name of the primary author. The page stays up until we publish a new Summer catalog in June 2010.

2. On June 1, 2009, we begin emailing promotional information to more than 10,000 buyers - independent bookstores, acquisition librarians, buyers for the major chains and discount stores and individual booklovers.

3. We provide a convenient Excel spreadsheet order form to select bulk buyers to make it easy for them to buy.

For whatever we sell, we bill you 10 percent - but not until our commission amounts to $10 or more. You get to keep everything before that point is reached. You bill the buyer for the full price plus shipping. Example: We get an order for 10 of your books at $15 each, or $150 total. You pay us $15 (10 percent of $150). We release the order to you. You ship the books and bill the customer $150 plus shipping. You're responsible for filling the order and shipping the books to the buyer.

9. Sourcebooks acquires Nashville’s Cumberland House

Sourcebooks, the Naperville, Ill., publishing house owned by Dominique Raccah, has acquired the major assets of Nashville-based Cumberland House, best known as the publisher of Gregory Lang's Why a Daughter Needs a Dad series of gift books, said to have sold more than three million copies.

Ron Pitkin, who founded Cumberland House in 1996, told the Nashville Tennessean that "he is seeking publishers to take on rights to 400 other previously published titles not included in the Sourcebooks deal."

Raccah, who has also served as head of the Book Industry Study Group, says "the addition of Cumberland House provides us with the opportunity to add a remarkably talented publisher to our team as well as significantly expanding our gift and regional titles."
This is her seventh acquisition since starting the company about 20 years ago.

Raccah has reportedly been in talks with three companies about further acquisitions and is also planning to hire three more employees, a salesperson in the Naperville office and acquisition editors in the company's New York and Connecticut offices."
Cumberland will remain as an independent imprint, and founder Ron Pitkin joins Sourcebooks as executive acquisitions editor.

Sourcebooks is acquiring 97 backlist and an additional nine forthcoming titles.

Cumberland vice president of sales and marketing Chris Bauerle will join Sourcebooks as director of mass market and specialty retail sales, and Paul Mikos stays on as acquisitions editor for the Cumberland House imprint.

Cumberland's Nashville office, which employs 14 other people above those joining the Sourcebooks staff, is being closed.
Pitkin says "Dominique and I have been friends for many years, and I am so pleased to be able to be able to join with her and make my own contribution to the ongoing success of one of the most exciting independent publishing companies in America."

He told the Tennessean that costs the bookstore chains are pushing off on publishers made the move important. He said  that "it would have cost Cumberland a quarter of a million dollars to buy equipment to keep track of customers' inventory, a responsibility large bookstore chains are passing on to publishers." He also noted that bookstores are afraid to bring in more books because sales are slow.

Pitkin started Cumberland 12 years ago after serving as co-founder and vice president of the former Rutledge Hill Press and as an editor at publisher Thomas Nelson Inc. of Nashville. Cumberland had been selling a million books a year, but sales have fallen amid tough economic times made worse by a financial market meltdown, Pitkin said.

Raccah plans to hire three more employees, a salesperson in the Naperville office and acquisition editors in the company's New York and Connecticut offices.

"We think this is a great environment for growth," Raccah said.

10. Update journalism: Latest skinny on past Southern Review stories

A few years back, we covered the story of how Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan landed a $500,000 two-book contract with Little, Brown and a movie deal with Dreamworks but was found out as a plagiarist after the first book was published. A William Morris literary agent placed the manuscript for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life with Little, Brown when Viswanathan was a freshman at Harvard with a full course load. So far, so good. In April 2006, Little, Brown printed 100,000 copies. Then author Megan McCafferty claimed portions of Opal Mehta and her books Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings were remarkably similar. Viswanathan attributed the copying to her “photographic memory” and said  that "any phrasing similarities between (McCafferty's) works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious." The publisher recalled all copies of the book, canceled Viswanathan’s planned second book and said that it would not revise the published version of Opal for republication. The Dreamworks deal was nixed, too. Now, it appears, Viswanathan's suffering will be short-lived. She graduated in the spring of 2008 with an English degree and has entered law school at Georgetown. Dare we venture that she might end up as an intellectual property specialist?


WOW! More than 12,000 comic books for less than 20¢ EACH!

Books were Designed to retail for $3 to $13 on up

We're importing  up to 40 mixed skids of comic books from the UK.
 
The skids usually contain over 12,000 comics. Most of these will be standard-sized comics designed to retail for $3, but a few will be thicker than normal special editions (the equivalent of graphic novels) designed to retail for up to $13 each. Most will be Dark Horse, but some DCs and Marvels exported from the U.S. for sale in the UK will be  mixed in. Most will have copyrights of 1999 or later.
 
Typical comics feature Wonder Woman, Iron Man, Shadowman, Witchblade, Star Wars, Spy Boy, Xena Warrior Princess, The Jaguar, The Agency, Planet of the Apes, Kin, Obergeist and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
 
The price is £1,200 (1,200 British pounds) per skid. At the exchange rate current when this was posted, that works out to around $2,350 per skid, or just under 20 cents per comic. Freight is in addition.
 
If you would like to see more sample covers from a typical skid, please go to the the Anvil mixed skids catalog page at http://anvilpub.net/Mixed_Skids.htm. Lots of other bargains listed there as well.

11. Publisher Jane Daniel tells her side of 'Misha' hoax in new memoir

Publisher Jane Daniel describes her publishing of Misha Defonseca's hoax about surviving the Holocaust in a new book, in which she defends the actions she took that led to a $33 million judgment against her and her publishing house.

The founder of Mount Ivy Press, Daniel in 1997 published Defonseca's Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust, which eventually sold 70,000 copies in the U.S. and abroad, was translated into 18 languages and made into a hit movie in France. At one point the Walt Disney Company optioned rights to the book but did not exercise the option.

In 2001, Defonseca and ghost writer Vera Lee sued Daniel charging she'd hidden royalties in offshore accounts and failed to adequately promote the book in the U.S.

A former professor of romance languages at Boston College, Lee had been asked by Daniel, her then-friend and neighbor, to help write the book because she was fluent in French.

After a Massachusetts jury awarded Defonseca and Lee $11 million, Judge Elizabeth Fahey described Daniel's conduct in publishing the book as "reprehensible" and tripled the award to $33 million with two-thirds going to Defonseca.

Then the case took another unexpected turn.

After researchers abroad dug up her true past, Defonseca admitted her story as told in the book was a hoax.

Daniel sued to overturn the judgment after it was revealed that the book was fabricated falsehood. In October 2008, her lawsuit to overturn the $33 million award was rejected by Middlesex Superior Court Judge Timothy Feeley, who ruled Daniel hadn't filed it within the one-year statute of limitations. In a statement, Feeley said the issue before the court only involved Daniel's breached contract with Defonseca and Lee and not the story's veracity.

Daniel still owes Defonseca $22 million and another $11 million to Lee, a small portion of which has been paid.

Daniel has now published her side of the case, in Bestseller! The $33 Million Verdict. The 20-year Hoax. The Truth Behind the Headlines.

Published by Laughing Gull Press, Daniel's book is a detailed recounting of events leading to her publication of Misha's story and her views that the courts erred by awarding Defonseca and Lee $33 million and then rejecting her appeal that she was the victim of an elaborate fraud. She says in her book that Defonseca "polished" her story, a fabrication of lies,  for "three to five years" at speaking engagements with Jewish groups at temples and other events where she was often paid.

While Daniel insists she didn't cheat Defonseca or Lee out of royalties or fail to publicize the book, she argues that Defonseca's fraud against her and the court invalidate the claims.

Lee's attorney, Frank Frisoli of Cambridge, called Daniel's Bestseller a "good work of fiction" that obscures the "simple logic" behind the court's dismissal of her appeal.

He said Judge Feeley accepted his argument that questions about Defonseca's truthfulness should not affect the initial court decision. Daniel defrauded Lee and Defonseca of contractual royalties by placing them in Caribbean offshore accounts, the court found in the original decision. Daniel then "defrauded" his client and Defonseca by placing "hundreds of thousands of dollars" from book and movie sales in a company she formed in Turks and Caicos, he said. "The judgment against Jane Daniel has nothing to do with the book's veracity," said Frisoli.

He alleged Daniel has reneged on an agreement to pay Lee a fixed monthly fee and said he may reinstitute legal action to require her to sell her Gloucester home.

"(Jane) is a nice lady but seems unable to keep her word contractually," said Frisoli. "Vera (Lee) made a big mistake getting involved with Jane."

Reached at her Newton home, ghostwriter Lee said Daniel's Bestseller "mixes together things that are true and things that are wrong."

Lee said the court's initial judgment proved Daniel "diverted funds" that should have gone to Defonseca and herself. "In every case, the jury was 100 percent against Jane," she said.

Lee said she's now writing her own account of the story. (Source: Chris Bergeron, GateHouse News Service)

12. We get letters: The Salisburys comment on Amazon rankings

Hi, Noel.

As usual we enjoy your "Southern Review." Usually print it out and read all. Also recommend that newbies in the publishing field subscribe.

One disappointment lately is your "rating" of books about publishing. In our opinion, an Amazon ranking is not really a rating of anything aside from the effectiveness of the marketing that particular author has done with the various stores. Having read a number of those books, we know many of them are really not very good, and many seem to be stamped from the same mold.

With Smart Self-Publishing we have attempted to do what you have done with "Southern Review," that is, tell it like it is, not necessarily the way you would like it to be. Folks getting into the game need to know the pitfalls before they invest their money, and many of those "high rankers" do not tell the whole story!

Best to you and Kathie for a great holiday season and a prosperous new year!

Jim and Linda Salisbury


Check out these great children's bargain books

LaLumiere, Michael, and Kim Messinger. Birthday Snow. Stagger Lee Books, 2007.

It has always snowed on Daniel's birthday. So he isn't worried when he wakes up on his fifth birthday and there isn't a cloud in the sky. Daniel puts on his snowsuit and mittens and pulls his snow tube up the grassy hill next door. While he waits patiently in the sun, his know-it-all sister, some older boys from down the street and the mailman explain to him why it can't possibly snow that day even if it is his birthday. Daniel begins to lose hope of seeing a single flake. Finally, Daniel's mother comes to help and together they tackle the problem of the missing snow. Birthday Snow is a story about a magical bond between a mother and her son.

Specifications: 8.6 x 11.1, hardback, 32 pp., ISBN 978-0979100611.
Cover price: $14.95, 1,000 available, 30 books per carton.
Price to individuals and retailers: 1-2 copies, $7.48 ea. (50% discount) plus $3.90 S&H, 3-99, $3.74 ea. (75% discount); 100-999 copies, 2.24 ea. (85% discount); 1,000 or more, 1.50 (90% discount).
Ships from: Sun City, AZ 85351
 

LaLumiere, Michael, and Kim Messinger. Princess Caitlin's Tiara. Stagger Lee Books, 2006.

One rainy morning, Caitlin tells her mom, "Watch out! I'm in a big old bad news funk!" Mom tells her daughter about a special tiara that cheered her up and made her feel like a princess when she was a little girl. Caitlin decides to make one for herself. She covers poster board with shiny foil, blue ribbons, feathers and glittery diamonds. And when the little girl nestles her new tiara into her strawberry blonde hair, she discovers that a princess can do just about anything. Caitlin races penguins at the South Pole, rides a sea horse deep in the ocean and flies around the world to have a picnic with Parisian pigeons on top of the Eiffel Tower. But the best fun comes when Mom finds her old tiara in a box in the attic. Together, the two princesses enjoy a slumber party at Buckingham Palace with the Queen and then, before they fall asleep, plan a trip through space to faraway Saturn. Princess Caitlin's Tiara is intended for children 4-8 years old.

Specifications: 8.6 x 11.1, hardback, 32 pp., ISBN 978-0979100611.
Cover price: $14.95, 1,000 available, 40 books per carton.
Price to individuals and retailers: 1-2 copies, $7.48 ea. (50% discount) plus $3.90 S&H, 3-99, $3.74 ea. (75% discount); 100-999 copies, 2.24 ea. (85% discount); 1,000 or more, 1.50 (90% discount).
Ships from: Sun City, AZ 85351

 

13. Berkley, Lerner pull fake Holocaust memoir as author confesses

Well, Oprah’s been sucked into promoting another book that turns out to be a fabrication.

Berkley on Dec. 27 cancelled publication of Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived, scheduled for release in February. In a short statement the publisher, which initially defended the book following a long expose piece in The New Republic, said the cancellation came "after receiving new information from Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst." They also said that they "will demand that the author and the agent return all money that they have received for this work."

The New York Times said later that it was sold "for less than $50,000."

Lerner Publishing Group, duped into publishing a children’s version in September 2008, recalled their copies of the book. The company is "issuing refunds on all returned books" and "no longer offering the book for sale," Lerner said in a news release.

Author Laurie Friedman, who interviewed the Rosenblats in order to retell their story for children, says "throughout the development of this book, the Rosenblats reviewed my manuscript and assured me of the authenticity of the details of their story. Unfortunately, I, like many others, am disappointed and upset to now learn of Herman (Rosenblat)'s fabrications."

In a statement on Dec. 28, agent Andrea Hurst said "Herman revealed to me that part of his memoir was not true. He'd invented the crux of this amazing love story - about the girl at the fence who threw him an apple.... Like millions of others who read this story or saw Herman and Roma on ‘Oprah,’ I never for a moment questioned the authenticity of the widely circulated story. I know that everyone who has worked so hard with Herman this past year is as stunned and disappointed as I am that this story of hope has such a sad ending."

Rosenblat justified his hoax, saying "I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world."

Said agent Hurst to the Associated Press, "I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible, hope-filled story."

The Times said that Rosenblat "first concocted his story in the mid-1990s as an entry to a newspaper contest soliciting the 'best love stories.'"

Long before he fooled his agent and Berkley, he fooled Oprah Winfrey and many others. "In 1996, he appeared on Ms. Winfrey's show with his wife and repeated the fabricated story. From there, it snowballed, with versions appearing in magazines, a volume of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and a children's book, Angel Girl, by Laurie Friedman, released in September by an imprint of Lerner Publishing. Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblat, who now live in North Miami Beach, appeared on CBS's Early Show in October."

Berkley Books is an imprint of Penguin Group (USA). It withdrew the memoir following allegations by scholars, friends and family members that the tale was untrue.

A few days before the cancellation, Berkley had offered a qualified defense of the book, saying it was a work of memory, a story whose truth was known only to the author.

Rosenblat, 79, a resident of the Miami area, was virtually unknown to the general public until the 1990s when he began speaking of how he came to know his wife, Roma Radzicky. According to Rosenblat and his wife, he was a prisoner at a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Nazi Germany and she was a young Jewish girl whose family was pretending to be Christian and lived nearby.

For months, supposedly, they would meet on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence, where she would sneak him apples and bread. Rosenblat was then transferred to another camp and the two lost touch, until the 1950s, when they were reunited by accident - on a blind date - in New York. They soon married and earlier this year celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

The Rosenblats were interviewed twice over the years by Winfrey, who has called their romance "the single greatest love story... we've ever told on the air."

A feature film adaptation is scheduled to begin next year.

Unlike such fake Holocaust memoirists as Misha Defonseca (see story above) and Benjamin Wilkomirski (Fragments), Rosenblat was indeed a survivor of the konzentrationschlagern, and records prove that he was at the Buchenwald camp. But scholars doubted his story, noting that the layout of the sub-camp made encounters at the fence such as he described virtually unthinkable.

The article in The New Republic quoted friends and family members who were outraged by Rosenblat, so much so that one of his brothers stopped speaking to him.

Why weren’t the facts checked by Penguin? Even after such fabrications as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, another Winfrey favorite, publishers have said that with more than 100,000 books coming out each year, fact-checking is too time-consuming and too expensive.

Penguin has already had to break ties with two authors this year.

In March, the publisher pulled Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences after the author acknowledged she had invented her story of befriending gang members in South-Central Los Angeles. A month later, Penguin parted with romance writer Cassie Edwards over allegations that she had lifted numerous passages from other sources.

14. Monitoring the e-book, graphic novel and e-tailing markets

Sony in December launched a promotional blitz in airports, train stations and bookstores with the goal of personally demonstrating its e-book Reader device to two million people by the end of 2008. Sony’s latest model, the Reader 700, priced at $400, has a reading light and a touch screen that allows users to annotate what they are reading. According to a Dec. 23 story in the New York Times by Motoko Rich and Brad Stone, Sony’s sales tripled this holiday season over last, in part because the Reader is now available in the Target, Borders and Sam’s Club chains. Sony has reportedly sold more than 300,000 of the devices since the debut of the original Reader in 2006. Amazon will not disclose sales of its rival $390 Kindle device, but Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company, said he believes Amazon sold as many as 260,000 units through the beginning of October. That was before Oprah Winfrey endorsed the Kindle on her popular TV show. The Winfrey endorsement appears to have been the major factor leading to Amazon selling out of the device over the holidays, with additional supplies not expected until February. Some analysts say the number of Kindles sold could now be as high as a million… E-book sales to the new generation of cellphones are contributing to rapidly accelerating e-book sales. Several e-book-reading programs have been created for Apple’s iPhone. At least two of the apps, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scrollmotion, has announced that it will begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin. All of these companies say they are now tailoring their software for other kinds of smartphones, including Blackberries. Publishers say these iPhone applications are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still lag sales of books for the Kindle format… Some of the small e-book publishers that have faced relatively light competition will soon be butting heads with the major publishing houses, who are coming to recognize the rapid expansion of the niche. HarperCollins has made 25,000 titles such as Lemony Snicket's The Lump of Coal available digitally. Readers can browse them online or in some cases read them in full for free. The sector is Random House's fastest growing, and the publishing behemoth recently announced that it was nearly doubling the number of digital books available. Generation of revenue is not the only positive offered by e-books. With digital books, there are no shipping, printing or return costs, which eat into publisher profits… While e-book revenue is doubling, its overall share of the $32 billion book market is miniscule, and is forecast to rise to just five to six percent of sales by 2013. By comparison, audio books make up nine percent of the market. A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that sales of e-books will be $9.6 billion annually by 2012, but won't pass sales of paper books until 2018. Beware - 10 years out is long time for a prediction to hold.


Looking for publicity for your book? Want news about your book to appear on hundreds of Web sites? For information on the public relations and publicity services we offer, please visit PR Services.

15. Major publishers agree to sell e-books to iPhones, iPods

New York mobile app developer Scrollmotion has made deals with a number of major publishing houses to produce newly released and best-selling e-books as applications for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Publishers initially on board include Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette and Penguin Group USA.

The Scrollmotion app is good for Apple because it boosts iTunes as an e-book shop and the iPhone in becoming an e-book reader and competitor to products like the Kindle and the Sony E-Reader.

Scrollmotion can also work not only with an iPhone but with an iPod as well. These have become hugely successful, far more so than Amazon’s Kindle reader, with over 174 million sales for the iPod alone.

Although there may be more than 174 million potential users of the Iceberg technology, Scrollmotion is not limiting the technology to the Apple devices alone, and plans to release the application for use by Android and Blackberry users as well.

While a huge potential market awaits Scrollmotion, it isn't the only company rolling out mobile e-book reading applications. Penguin books recently released its Penguin Mobile reader software, which enables readers to receive text on Apple Inc.'s iPhones and other mobile devices, while Random House has signed a deal with Lexcycle’s Stanza reader, bringing Stanza's mobile literary library to over 40,000 titles. HarperCollins is making classic titles such as those by Dickens and Shakespeare available to Nintendo DS users.

Other publishers with mobile phone programs include HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Simon & Schuster.

There is another major reason why Scrollmotion could stand as a serious threat to Amazon. Scrollmotion doesn't require an e-book reader.

The first official books being offered using Scrollmotion’s Iceberg app include titles such as Christopher Paolini's Brisingr, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Peter Matthiessen's award-winning Shadow Country. Brisingr is $27.99; Brad Meltzer's The Book of Lies is $25.99, andbest-selling The Shack is $14.99.

TechCrunch notes, "for the 11 Iceberg Reader powered books I could find in the app store, the prices fell between $12 and $28, with each book coming in at 30-40 percent more than what their respective Kindle edition goes for on Amazon. The Golden Compass is $11.99 through Scrollmotion, while it's $7.50 for the Kindle. Twilight is $10.99, or $6.04 for Amazon's reader."

There are already several e-book readers in the app store that feature out-of-copyright books, but Scrollmotion’s product is unique in that its offerings are stand-alone and newer in-copyright titles and best-selling novels.

Each book is a separate app using Scrollmotion's new reader technology called Iceberg, and is wrapped only in the FairPlay iTunes DRM, putting Apple directly into the e-book business by allowing them to pick up a certain percentage of each sale.

Unlike other e-book applications, each title keeps the same pagination as the print book, while still allowing the reader to zoom in and scroll down as well as skipping ahead with a feature called "Book Skim." Current functionality also includes note taking, text search and the ability to purchase additional books using a recommendation service over a Wi-Fi connection.

Fictionwise recently announced that it would make 40,000 of its e-books available for viewing in Stanza, another Apple app, by licensing out its eReader format to the app's creator, Lexcycle.

Scrollmotion says it envisions a more organized app store and iPhone/iPod interface in the future where titles could eventually be sorted and grouped creating a virtual library of all of your books. 

16. Random House offers free titles for Lexcycle's Stanza reader

The Random House Publishing Group and Lexcycle, Inc., jointly announced on Dec. 8 that Random House and Ballantine will be the first major book publishers to make full-length books available for free on iPhone through Lexcycle Stanza, the popular electronic book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

The promotion will allow over 500,000 Stanza users to enjoy free e-books from a varied list of authors including Alan Furst, Julie Garwood, Charlie Huston, David Liss, Laurie Notaro, Arthur Phillips and Simon Rich. The initial offerings will be drawn from each author's backlist and will include excerpts for any new hardcovers coming in 2009.

Random House is providing links to retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, Borders.com, Powells.com and IndieBound.org to encourage readers to purchase more books by these authors.

"A free e-book is a great way to sample a new writer, and help spread the word," says Charlie Huston, whose novels Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things and A Dangerous Man will all be available on Stanza. "Besides, it's good to give things away. They're books. We write them for people to read them."

Stanza users already have access to a public domain library that is drawing nearly 40,000 downloads a day.

Stanza for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch is available as a free download from the iTunes App Store.


Mixed skids added to Anvil book catalogs!

We invite book lovers, book sellers, chain and specialty store buyers, wholesalers, book distributors, acquisition librarians and K-12 media specialists to browse our catalogs. We're currently offering more than 1,000 titles - with more than one million copies in inventory with a retail value in excess of $14 million.

We list new titles, backlist titles, pristine remainders and, occasionally, lightly scuffed returns from book stores. Our Spring Book Show Catalog and Great American Bargain Book Show Catalog are devoted exclusively to remainders and returns. The Summer and Winter Catalogs are devoted to new and backlist titles, with an occasional remainder.

The following hyperlinks will take you to specific catalogs:

Mixed Skids Catalog (especially for people marketing books in online stores)

Spring Book Show 2009 Catalog (remainders catalog now loading)

Winter 2008-2009 Catalog (retail titles catalog now loading)

Great American Bargain Book Show 2008 (remainders and bargain books)

Summer 2008 (frontlist, midlist and backlist catalog)

Catholic Titles Catalog (Just added, with more than 400 titles, 500,000 books initially)

Spring Book Show 2008 (remainder and bargain book catalog)

Winter 2007-2008 Catalog (frontlist, midlist and backlist catalog)

Great American Bargain Book Show 2007 (remainder and bargain book catalog)

Summer 2007 (current, midlist and backlist catalog)

Spring Book Show 2007 (remainder and bargain book catalog)

Winter 2006-2007 (current, midlist and backlist catalog)

Fall 2006 Catalog (current, midlist and backlist catalog)

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival Catalog (current, midlist and backlist catalog)

Like what you've seen so far of the Southern Review of Books? Use the handy box at the bottom of this page to subscribe!

17. BISG releases new BookDROP Standard for online book content

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has released version 1.0 of its BookDROP technical specification, a new standard intended to support the search and discovery of digital book content on the Web.

According to BISG, BookDROP defines a set of HTTP transactions between a publisher’s digital-book archive and the Web sites of the publisher’s syndication partners. The overall goal of the standard is to encourage the discovery, search, browse and distribution of digital book content across the Web, while allowing publishers to manage the quality and availability of their content.

The big question is whether the standard is still relevant given the recent legal settlement between Google and the publishing industry. "The $64,000 question is whether these standards are still relevant in light of Google Book Search, particularly with the Google-AAP case settled," said Book Business columnist Andrew Brenneman. "Has the issue of discovery already been solved?"

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) began the work that led to BookDROP. Subsequent development was managed by BISG’s Digital Standards Committee, a cross-industry group comprising representatives from publishing companies, booksellers, search engines and other organizations.

“The central idea behind BookDROP is a simple one: to standardize a set of HTTP calls that allows a publisher’s channel partners to connect easily and efficiently to a publisher’s digital book content," says BISG Executive Director Michael Healy. "It’s the result of a lot of effort from a lot of different people - not just publishers, but booksellers, systems and service suppliers - and the product of cooperation between the AAP and BISG.”
The BookDROP technical specification may be downloaded at http://www.BISG.org/committees/digitalstandards.html

18.
There be sharks: Be careful of where you swim in the book biz ocean

POD publisher Author Solutions has added rival Xlibris to its stable of subsidy-publishing imprints. Author Solutions prior imprints include iUniverse and AuthorHouse. According to the New York Times, Author Solutions' chief executive Kevin Weiss said that last year the company “published 12,000 titles and sold more than 2.5 million copies of its books… the title count for the combined company would have been about 19,000 in 2008.” Now, if the 2.5 million books sold by the AuthorHouse and iUniverse imprints in 2008 were only of the new 12,000 titles published by the two imprints, that would mean the average vanity press title published by Author Solutions imprints would have sold 208 copies. But many of the 2.5 million copies sold in 2008 would have been of titles published in prior years, meaning that the typical Author Solutions vanity press title sold well under 208 copies on average. If you’re an author who wants to publish to feel important or because you can’t cope with the details of self-publishing under your own imprint, subsidy presses like the Author Solutions imprints may be a suitable outlet for you. But if you expect to make money on all the time and effort you invest in writing a book by subsidy-publishing it… well, face it, the averages are against you! Traditional book outlets – the chains, big box stores and independent bookstores – know that the quality of subsidy-published books tends to be low, and will almost never stock ‘em.


Were the visions of this 19th century stigmatic and inediac authentic, or merely the explainable creations of her subconscious? Did she really have visions of the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? You decide!

While he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI advocated the cause for sainthood of a 19th century Westphalian nun who was a stigmatic (bled from wounds in her hands, feet and side), ecstatic (visionary) and inediac (lived on water and communion wafers).

In the 100-page introduction to a new edition of a religious classic, The Dolorous Passion, Atlanta author and historian Noel Griese writes about this nun whose piety touched the pope, and relates how Mel Gibson used the account of her visions to script more than 40 scenes in his "Passion of the Christ" movie.

The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is an 1833 work in which German author Clemens Brentano related the visions of the 19th-century nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, regarding the Last Supper, Passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

"Had Mel Gibson relied solely on the accounts in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the Acts of the Apostles, he would perhaps have had only two or three minutes of film," said Griese. "The visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich gave him many of the details that permitted him to create what is perhaps the most dramatic Passion Play yet produced."

Griese's introduction to the new edition of "The Dolorous Passion" links more than 40 scenes in the Gibson movie to the 19th-century German classic.

"People who saw the movie will recall Judas hanging himself over the carcass of a flyblown dead animal," Griese notes. "In the New Testament, only the Gospel of Matthew says Judas hanged himself, and it does not describe the locale. In Acts of the Apostles, a continuation of the Gospel of Luke, Judas is said to have met his end when his insides burst out. Gibson takes his cue for Judas hanging himself from Matthew, but his details of the locale are from Emmerich and Brentano."

Another example: one of the thieves crucified with Jesus is named Gesmas in the Gibson movie. The thieves, Griese notes, while not named in the Bible, have variously over time been identified in apocryphal material as Dismas and Cestas, Dumachus and Titus, Joca and Matha and Nismus and Zustin. Only Emmerich and Gibson identify the "bad thief" as Gesmas.

Similarly, the Roman centurion Abenadar in the movie, the 'right-hand man' for procurator Pontius Pilate, is an extrabiblical figure drawn straight from "The Dolorous Passion." Griese, a student of religious mysticism and the author of 17 books, says of Abenadar, "According to Emmerich, he was converted to Christianity as a result of his presence at the crucifixion. She says he took the Christian name Ctesiphon, and became an evangelist."

Emmerich and Gibson place Abenadar at the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, the scourging and crucifixion. There is a historical record of a first-century Ctesiphon, Griese says. "This Ctesiphon accompanied the apostle James the Greater into Spain, where he helped to evangelize the Spanish at Verga. After James was martyred in Jerusalem, Ctesiphon is said to have taken his body back to Spain."   

To write The Dolorous Passion, Clemens Brentano sat beside the sickbed of ailing nun Emmerich daily from 1818 forward, recording the visions she experienced up to her death in 1824.

Brentano, a friend of Germany's greatest author, Johann Goethe, and of the Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame, was a well educated author of poetry and plays who first gained fame as a collector and editor of German folk songs. Emmerich, whose visions he recorded, was a nun whose convent was closed in 1811 by Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Jerome Bonaparte, the king of Westphalia.

Brentano worked on his notes for nine years after Emmerich died in 1824 before publishing them as The Dolorous Passion. The book soon outsold even Goethe in Germany and became an international best-seller. However, it was all but forgotten until Gibson resurrected it to script his Passion movie.

The book is available in both cloth and paperback from Anvil Publishers and from local bookstores. It is distributed by Ingram and Baker & Taylor.

Hardback version with dust jacket, just $26.95 plus $3 S&H.
 

Paperback version only $16.95 plus $3 S&H.
 

19. Useful information and free services for writers

The Authors Show web radio program went from a weekly to a daily broadcast starting Jan 5th, and is looking for guests. The producer is looking for authors, published or self-published, to be interviewed on the show (free). All topics welcome, including children books, business, spiritual. Go to www.TheAuthorsShow.com and submit the interview request form. No emails or phone calls please… "Miss Young,” the producer at Blog Talk Radio, is putting together the guest list for January – December 2009, and is looking for guests to interview. She’s seeking, among others, guests who are authors, professional speakers, entrepreneurs and experts in the field of health/wellness; wealth building; and economic and family relationship Issues. Send an email with your name and contact information to nno7@mail.com. In the Subject Line put "RADIO SHOW GUEST"…

20. Christian Post names three stories about books to top 2008 news list

In selecting the top 10 entertainment news stories in 2008 with a Christian slant, The Christian Post listed three stories about books.

In its top pick, the post named coverage of The Shack, noting that author William Paul Young had not originally intended his novel to be for public consumption. Nonetheless, The Shack shot surprisingly to the top of best seller lists, generating large amounts of buzz – both positive and negative – within Christian circles. Through yearend, The Shack sold more than 4.4 million copies in 24 different countries.

The Post’s second choice was the church-produced movie “Fireproof,” which spawned two books in addition to raking in over $33 million in ticket sales. Directed and produced by the Kendrick brothers of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., the movie tells the inspiring story of a fireman and his struggle to save his faltering marriage from ending with his newfound faith and with the help of the “Love Dare,” a 40-day spiritual guide that utilizes Scripture to reveal what true love is. The movie version of “Fireproof” debuted Sept. 26-28 at No. 4, with $6.5 million in ticket sales, marking the year’s second highest grossing opening weekend. The ministry’s movie also spawned a best-selling book that started as a plot device in the film until audiences repeatedly requested copies for themselves.

The third story about books in the Christian Post’s top-10 stories about entertainment centered on the Oprah Winfrey promotion of Eckhart Tolle’s New Age books. A YouTube video that features talk show host Winfrey denying Jesus as the only way to God and promoting New Age ideas drew over five million viewers after being public for only a month. The under seven-minute video montage, entitled "The Church of Oprah Exposed," was posted late March and highlighted the concerns of Christians who believe the popular day-time host has been distorting Christianity and leading her audience into spiritual confusion. When asked a direct question about how she is able to reconcile belief in Christianity with belief in author Eckhart Tolle’s message, Oprah answered: “I reconciled it because I was able to open my mind about the absolute indescribable hugeness of that which we call God. I took God out of the box.” She said she got tired of “rules” and “doctrines,” and particularly of the Scriptural idea that God is a “jealous God.” “Something about that didn’t feel right in my spirit,” she said, “because I believe that God is love.”

Oprah’s promotion of Eckhart’s book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, was criticized by Christian leaders including Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, and S. Michael Craven, president of the Center for Christ & Culture, who called the book “nothing but spiritualized self-help and repackaged paganism that serve to deceive and divert people from the One True God and the salvation that comes only through Jesus Christ.” The YouTube video on “The Church of Oprah” at year-end 2008 had accumulated more than eight million views.

21. News of how innovative authors and publishers are selling books

Joshua Henkin "has visited more than 80 book groups in person or on the phone and, believe me, will visit yours even with only a few hours' notice" to promote his book, says the Philadelphia Inquirer in a profile of the author. Henkin approaches the book clubs in person, on the phone or by email to discuss his novel, Matrimony (Simon & Schuster, 2008). "He's really kind of off the charts on it," says Wendy Sheanin, senior marketing manager at S&S.

22. South Carolina publishing company thrives in local history niche

The History Press of Charleston, S.C., is only five years old,  but it’s already selling 200,000 books a year.

The company sells books at out-of-the-way local stores like Bert’s Market and the visitors' center at Ninety Six National Historic Site.

The company published only 20 titles in 2004, its first year in business. But its five-year list of titles now tops 500.

History Press’ sales topped 200,000 books in 2008. The subjects range across 20 states, with titles such as The Wilmington Shipyard: Welding a Fleet for Victory in World War II and Explorations in Charleston’s Jewish History.

History was the  third most popular book genre in sales nationally in 2007, behind only biography and romance, according to Michael Norris, editor of Simba’s Book Publishing Report newsletter.

What started around founder Kirsty Sutton’s dining room table in 2004 expanded to the downtown Charleston home office, a warehouse a few blocks away and a satellite office in Salem, Mass. Another office in the Midwest is scheduled to open early in 2009.

“We definitely have hit a niche in the market,” said Julie Foster, managing editor of History Press. “There are so many towns and communities that haven’t had their history told in print.”

Sutton first hit on that pent-up demand as founding editor of Arcadia Publishing, which created hundreds of books filled with old photos and postcards of local landmarks. Some of History Press’ titles also are photo-driven, but most use words to tell the story. And almost all are printed in paperback form.

Potential authors are recruited from county historical societies or at local museums. Most already have done the research involved. Some already have done the writing.

Eric Williams researched local histories for 27 years to improve the tours he guided as a park ranger at Ninety Six National Historic Site. In 2006, History Press published Old Ninety Six: A History and Guide, written by Williams and his friend and fellow park ranger Robert Dunkerly.

The book sells well at the national park’s visitors' center in Greenwood County, and Williams gets a kick out of seeing it on the shelves in the big chain book stores in Greenville, S.C.

Williams and Dunkerly have received a couple of royalty checks. But they were more interested in telling the area’s story than in making money.

The History Press business plan is to sell small quantities of lots of books. The typical History Press title might have a press run of 1,000 to 1,800.

“For each one, we try to determine how many we’re confident we can sell in a year or a couple of years,” said Brittain Phillips, the chief operating officer of History Press.

History Press has already done three press runs for a history of the Miller & Rhoads department store in Richmond, Va., selling nearly 5,000 copies since it came out in November 2008.

Some of the History Press titles include the footnotes, detailed bibliographies and expanded indexes that help researchers. Some don’t. (Source: Joey Holleman, The State, Columbia, S.C.)

23.

Bright Mountain Books publisher preserves Appalachian history

Cynthia Bright's publishing company, Bright Mountain Books, publishes, republishes and wholesales books by local authors that have subject matter rooted in the Southern Appalachian region. The publishing house currently has nearly 40 titles in print. Most are nonfiction, with a few historical novels.

Bright moved to the Asheville, N.C., area in 1980 with husband Eric, now deceased. Both had worked in the publishing field in Boston early in their careers.

Initially, they started a wholesale book business, Bright Horizons, which specialized in selling Appalachian-based books to area bookstores.

Publishing titles was a logical next step for the Brights. Created in 1983, Bright Mountain Books releases only a few books per year.

After her husband's death, Bright began publishing books from the basement offices of a new home in Fairview, N.C., near Asheville.

“We started republishing books that have proven to be of value to this area,” Bright said.

Though a number of her titles may have been published elsewhere first, Bright feels that purchasing the rights and republishing the books is worthwhile.

Examples of popular reprints by Bright Mountain Books include Mountain Spirits and Mountain Spirits & More by Joseph Dabney. Bright describes these books as a “touristy, but authentic, history of moonshine and moonshiners.”

The ratio of new manuscripts to reprints published is about 50-50, according to Bright. She accepts submissions if they fit the publishing house's requirements of being by local authors examining local themes with a bent toward the historical.

Print runs can be as low as 500, although a typical printing produces 1,500 to 2,000 books.

Bright employs one other full-time worker, plus three part-timers. (Source: Anne Fitten Glenn, Asheville Citizen-Times)

24. How publishers use marketing, publicity and events to sell books

Last February, female financial advisor Suze Orman went on the Oprah Winfrey Show and offered a two-day free download of the e-book version of her year-old, best-selling book Women & Money. The offer resulted in over a million free downloads. Orman and publisher Spiegel & Grau hope to build on that success by launching her new Suze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan with another appearance on Oprah's show in early January, with a free e-book download for a full week, ending with a live webcast on Jan. 15. As with the previous download program, the book is being providing in both English and Spanish versions.

25. Some Christians see ‘The Shack’ as worse than ‘DaVinci Code’

Through December, The Shack, by author William Paul Young, has sold more than 4.4 million copies in 24 different countries after initially being rejected by 26 publishers and then published by Young and two cleric supporters.

It has remained on the New York Times Bestsellers List for Paperback Trade Fiction for more than half a year, and at yearend 2008 retained the No. 1 spot.

Despite its overwhelming popularity with the laity, the book has been openly criticized by conservative Protestant clerics including R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.; Chuck Colson, founder of the Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

Young is not a member of a church and is somewhat reticent about being labeled a Christian.

The Shack has generated large amounts of buzz, both positive and negative, within Christian circles.

 “It was the most disturbing book that I had ever read in my life,” writes John Langemann in the yet-to-be-published book Beware the Shack.

According to Eric Young of the Christian Post, while many of the arguments presented in the new anti-Shack books are the latest in efforts by opponents of a book considered to be even more harmful than The Da Vinci Code, which centers on the alleged conspiracy to conceal the offspring of a married Mary and Jesus.

“Indeed, because it is being promoted as Christian fiction, it is much more dangerous than books like The Da Vinci Code, which never claimed to be Christian,” argues ministry leader Tim McGhee of Powell, Tenn., in a review of the book. “The Shack is nothing less than rank heresy disguised as Christian literature.”

According to Eric Barger, who has produced the DVD “The Death of Discernment: How The Shack Became the #1 Bestseller in Christianity," the real problem with The Shack and other books, movies, and television shows like it, is that Christians can fail to use scriptural discernment if they let their emotions rule.

“We can be taken captive by ‘evil imaginations,’” argues Barger, who runs Take a Stand! Ministries.

“As one who wears his emotions on his sleeve and who found himself being swayed by the heartbreaking storyline of The Shack, I must again caution," Barger says. "To allow a gripping story to cloud our ability to detect even the subtle theological errors strewn throughout its pages is exactly what Dr. Michael Youssef meant when he described The Shack as ‘a deep ditch that's covered by beautiful landscape.’”

26. Novel written in Ernest Hemingway's attic named one of best of 2008

Hard as it is to believe, a contemporary novel was written in the dark Victorian attic of a home that once belonged to Ernest Hemingway.

There is not much light and the wood is very dark and it looks like, well, an attic! But it is also the place William Elliott Hazelgrove has been going for 10 years to hack out a new work of literature after not publishing anything for a decade.

The novelist had published three books before he began his sojurn in the attic in Oak Park, Ill. "I really couldn't come up with another Southern novel and that is what Bantam had published before," the 48-year-old author said of his attic studio. "So I looked around at what was going on and came up with this disaffected guy named Dale Hammer and put him smack in the middle of the housing crisis and that's really how Rocket Man began."

The book came out in December and is being hailed as an exemplary novel dealing with the death of the American Dream.

Rocket Man tracks a man in his last week of normalcy in a far western suburb, struggling to hold onto his home while losing the battle with "whitebread" conformity that surrounds him.

The Chicago Sun Times reviewed Rocket Man, calling it "(T)he funniest serious novel I have read since Richard Russo's Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike."

The book is a satire in which the themes of conformity and economic survival are played out in a situational comedy.

Over one hundred online reviews have been posted with top ranked Amazon reviewer, Grady Harp, summing up the book: "William Elliott Hazelgrove's Rocket Man is a brilliant piece of writing, a work that meticulously dissects contemporary life in America with such a keen eye that the author is able to catch at least passing glances at us all." The San Antonio Express picked Rocket Man as one of the Best Books of 2008 with novelist David Liss citing the book as "a first rate black comedy."

27. News of chicanery, dishonesty and tort-feasing in the book business

No stranger to getting publicity by making outrageous claims, right-wing attack dog Ann Coulter publicized her latest book, Guilty, by claiming she had been banned from appearing on NBC, a claim that proved to be outrageously false as she made appearances in two separate segments on the network. An earlier Coulter appearance on “Today” was cancelled to make way for coverage of the Israeli war in Gaza. Coulter used that cancellation to charge in an appearance on the Hannity sans Colmes show on Fox that she had been banned. Thereafter, Coulter was interviewed once by Harry Smith on the CBS “Early Show” – who called her “sophomoric” and as much a victim as those she attacks in her latest book - then twice on NBC’s “Today.” She publicized all three appearances on her Web site. The brouhaha began when Coulter, a frequent critic of the mainstream media, including NBC, was scheduled to appear on “Today” to discuss Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America. When the interview was canceled, Matt Drudge headlined a story on his Web site proclaiming that NBC had banned Coulter for life for her controversial views. Coulter fueled the fire in entries on her own Web site and in appearances on other news shows. She was invited back eight hours after Drudge broke his story. Interviewer Matt Lauer told Coulter that the reason her segment was dropped to make way for a live report from Israel on the conflict in Gaza by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. If Coulter harbored any animosity, she didn’t show it. Lauer accused her of saying, “The mainstream media hates conservatives.” “I didn’t say that,” Coulter said. She admitted that she agrees with the sentiment, “but I have much more colorful language.” “The point is, I was canceled twice,” Coulter rejoined, referring to a second scheduled appearance with Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford in the show’s fourth hour that was also dropped. But Coulter did make a second “Today” appearance with Kotb and Gifford, using the time to expand on her earlier discussion with Lauer. Coulter kept trying to turn the discussion to her book, which has ignited familiar firestorms in both the conservative and liberal camps. A master at touching raw nerves and making over-the-top statements, Coulter has been accused of making at least 12 false statements in the book by Media Matters (see story below), an independent media watchdog group. She insists that she is right on all issues. She refers to President-elect Barack Obama as “B. Hussein Obama” throughout the book and repeated the usage on air with Lauer. Critics say she’s playing to the false belief among some conservatives that Obama is a Muslim. “It’s not untrue that’s what his middle name is,” she said with a smile. “It’s insane to act as if using someone’s middle name is some sort of vicious hate crime.” But the part of the book that has raised the most controversy is Coulter’s contention that single mothers portray themselves as victims when in fact they are the cause of most societal problems. “We could wipe out chronic poverty in America tomorrow if women could just manage to get married before having children - and to stay married after having children,” Coulter writes in the book. She told Lauer, “We know that children raised without fathers are filling up the prisons,” and accused the mainstream media and Hollywood of glorifying single mothers instead of condemning them.

28. Watchdog details long list of inaccuracies in latest Coulter diatribe

The latest tome by Ann Coulter, who has made millions by preaching a gospel of hate in her books, is littered with inaccuracies, a laundry list of which has been published by Media Matters for America.

Media Matters examined an advance copy of Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America by author and syndicated columnist Ann Coulter. It then published a kong laundry list of the book's numerous falsehoods, including misrepresentations of the sources she cites.

The falsehoods come in a wide-ranging list of subjects including her defense of the claims made against Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign; her assertion that "Fox News has never been caught promoting a fraud"; her claim that President-elect Barack Obama was referring to Gov. Sarah Palin when he said "you know, you can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig"; and attacks she makes against New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Media Matters also documents that Coulter made numerous inflammatory and offensive comments in Guilty.

29. New standard requires testing of paper in children’s books for lead

All the publishers who sell books on Amazon were warned rec ently by the online merchant of new U.S. standards for lead and other substances in the paper used in children’s books. Beginning with books manufactured in February 2009, such books aimed at children 12 and under must be tested by an independent laboratory for the presence of substances harmul.

The paper and cardboard in children’s books manufactured from February 2009 forward for sale in the U.S. must be tested for lead in particular. Information on the new rule and testing appears at  www.cpsc.gov, the Web site of the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, especially at http://www.cpsc.gov/ABOUT/Cpsia/faq/101faq.html#educational
According to the FAQs at the CPSC site, books meant for children must be tested by an independent lab to assure that they meet a 600 parts per million standard if they are manufactured from Feb. 10, 2009, forward. If the lab test has not been conducted, books and other children’s products are considered a "hazardous substance."

Additional information is available at the Toy Association Web site:
http://www.toyassociation.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=CPSIA

Available inflromation includes a letter from the National Association of Manufacturers, requesting specific changes made in the legislation that would make the law more manufacturer-friendly and would exclude children's books, since paper and cardboard is seldom a source of lead. The Association of American Publishers is an NAM member.

The Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Toy Safety, ASTM F963-07, becomes a mandatory consumer product safety standard on Feb. 10.  This standard places limits on the amount of lead and other heavy metals (antimony, arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, mercury and selenium) based on the soluble portion of that material using a specified extraction methodology given in the standard. Toys including children’s books manufactured after Feb. 10, 2009, will have to meet these requirements.

Beginning on Aug. 14, 2009, however, the soluble limit testing for lead paint under ASTM F963-07 will not be necessary because the maximum total lead content in paint will be reduced to 90 ppm in 16 CFR § 1303.1, which would be a more stringent requirement in all cases. It will remain necessary to conduct ASTM F963-07 solubility testing for antimony, arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, mercury, and selenium, as those are not covered by 16 CFR § 1303.1, according to FAQs on the new standard.

There will likely be clarifications from the CPSA on the new testing standards as they apply to children’s books in the days immediately ahead, as CPSA responds to the NAM request, so stay tuned.

30. Bookkeeper charged with embezzling $348,975 from store

A former bookkeeper at Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh, N.C., has been arrested and charged with embezzling $348,975 from the bookstore since 2001, the News & Observer reported. Anna Susan Kosak worked at the store from 1998-2001 and again from 2004 until this past September, though general manager Sarah Goddin said Kosak's departure was unrelated to the charge.

"We're shocked," said co-owner Nancy Olson. "We felt a professional closeness with her. We thought a lot of her." According to Goddin, the theft went undetected because the money disappeared over a long period of time.

Olson told the News & Observer that while the bookshop does about $3.4 million in sales per year, neither the embezzlement nor current economic conditions threaten the business.

 "We are in very good shape. I would call our sales flat, which is a good thing these days." Olson said, noting that the bookstore was already striving for increased financial diligence in a tough economy. "We thought we were watching our every dollar. I guess we weren't."

Olsen notes that the store remains solid. "We are in very good shape. I would call our sales flat, which is a good thing these days."

31. BEA and ABA announce they’ll be back together at NYC show

BookExpo America and the American Booksellers Association are launching a program of initiatives intended "to help ease the economic challenges facing booksellers who wish to attend the 2009 trade show; to invigorate the convention; and to give booksellers and other industry professionals who attend BEA more networking opportunities," according to Bookselling This Week.

As part of the cooperative effort, BEA will offer limited free convention attendance to ABA bookstore members.

ABA will move its annual Day of Education back to the convention facility. The Day of Education will take place on May 28, the day before the exhibit floor opens, at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City. For the past two years, ABA has been conducting its panels and forums off site.

BEA, in turn, will offer a concurrent retailer education track to encourage "crossover" attendance.

By holding the Day of Education at the convention center, ABA and BEA noted that the Editor & Bookseller Buzz Forum can now be featured in its traditional time slot on the afternoon of May 28 at 4:15 p.m., and BEA's Opening Night Keynote on May 28 at 5:30 p.m.

ABA's annual Celebration of Bookselling, previously a ballroom event, will be marked by a series of nightly events at the Brooklyn Marriott, ABA’s designated hotel for members. All other ABA functions, including the Indie Next List Lunch on May 29, will be held at the Javits Center, as will the newly revamped Indies Choice Book Awards, at a time yet to be determined.

Major upcoming trade shows, book fairs and book festivals

2009 Trade Shows

January

Inspirational Value Book Show (IVBS), Jan. 15-16, Nashville, Tenn., www.ivbshow.com
ALA Midwinter 2009 in Denver, Colo., January 23 – 26,  www.ala.org

March

Spring Book Show - March 6-8, Atlanta, GA. Cobb Galleria/Renaissance-Waverly Hotel. SBS is one of the largest remainder and bargain book shows in the world. www.springbookshow.com
National Association of College Stores (CAMEX) – March 13-17, Anaheim, CA.  www.nacs.org
Bologna Childrens Book Fair- March 23-26, Bologna, Italy.

April

London Book Fair -  www.lbf-virtual.com

May

BookExpo America - May 28-31, 2009, New York -  www.bookexpoamerica.com

June

BookExpo Canada - June - Toronto, Ontario.  www.bookexpo.ca

The Australian Booksellers Association's -  Melbourne.

The American Library Association - Anaheim, CA.

July

The National Association of College Stores Conference.  www.nacs.org

CBA/The International Christian Retail Show. www.christianretailshow.com

ALA Annual Conference 2009, Chicago, Ill. July 9-15, McCormick Place Chicago, Ill. Committee and business meetings take place July 9-15, 2009 and Council Meetings run to July 15. Education programs take place primarily July 10-13. Exhibits held July 11-14 at  McCormick Place West. Programs and meetings take place at McCormick Place West and nearby hotels.

August

The Great American Bargain Book Show (GABBS) – August  www.gabbs.net

The New York International Gift Fair –  www.nyigf.com

The Beijing International Book Fair – Beijing, China. www.bibf.net/bibf

New Orleans-Gulf South Booksellers Association. betbooks@aol.com

September

CIANA – September 14-15, London. www.ciana.co.uk
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association – September, www.pnba.org

New England Independent Booksellers Association - Sept. www.newenglandbooks.org

New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association – September. www.newatlanticbooks.com

Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association –September. www.mountainsplains.org

Midwest Booksellers Association –September. www.midwestbooksellers.org

Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance - Sept. www.sibaweb.com

Great Lakes Booksellers Association – September. www.books-glba.org

Beijing International Book Fair/ International Children’s Publishing Exhibit- September -China. http://www.combinedbook.com/2008-beijing-international-book-fair_4_307.html

October

Oct. 14–18, 61st annual Frankfurt Book Fair, Germany.

Northern California Independent Booksellers Association – Usually first weekend in October.  www.nciba.com

Southern California Independent Booksellers Association – October. www.scbabooks.org

Frankfurt Book Fair - Oct.. www.book-fair.com

Oklahoma Independent Booksellers Association – info@stevessundrybooksmags.com

CIROBE- October, Chicago Hilton. www.cirobe.com


SUBSCRIBE TO SOUTHERN REVIEW OF BOOKS

Enter your email address in the box below and then click the "Add" button to receive an email each time we post a new issue of the Southern Review of Books. You may also unsubscribe by entering your email address and then clicking the "Unsubscribe" button

Subscribe     Unsubscribe

Visit back issues of the Southern Review of Books by clicking on

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

For more information about the book business, visit:

Hit Counter

[Home] [Up]

Contact Information

Telephone:
770-938-0289
 
Fax:
770-493-7232
 
Postal address:
P.O. Box 2694, Tucker, GA 30085-2694
 
Ground Delivery and Mail Address:
Anvil Publishers, 3852 Allsborough Drive, Tucker, GA 30084
 
Electronic mail:
General Information: custserv@anvilpub.com

Copyright © 2001-2010
Last modified: 01/14/10