Book Sense

By Carl Lennertz

Here's an update on books to watch, thanks to the almost 400 stores who reported last week! Are you one of the stores contributing to that wealth of knowledge?

Hardcover Fiction:

Based on the last four weeks of sales from over 350 independent bookstores across America.

Thanks to all the stores that report, the expanded electronic reporting options including BookScan, and the software our team here has built to sort and slice a ton of data according to BISAC categories, here is the latest subject category list.

Coleen Harty of Madison, Wisconsin, has spent years perusing the vast category of personal growth books and tapes. Beginning March 1, she will be putting her knowledge into practice and helping others navigate the self-help arena in her own bookstore, Invest in Yourself. Harty, a long-time employee of the Middletown, Wisconsin-based Pleasant Company, founder of the American Girl dynasty, is opening the 1,500-square-foot store, also in Middletown.

This week's Book Sense Children's Bestsellers list was previewed in the Wednesday, February 5, edition of USA Today. On the front page of the newspaper's Life section, the top five illustrated children's books were highlighted in the popular "USA Today Snapshot."

There is still time to nominate your handselling favorites for the 2003 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards (BSBY). Every current ABA-member bookstore is entitled to nominate five books in each category: Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Children's Literature, Illustrated Children's, Rediscovery, and Paperback Book of the Year. The Paperback category is open to both fiction and nonfiction titles.

Book Sense, HarperCollins, and the History Channel are launching a significant new promotional opportunity for independent bookstores participating in the Book Sense national marketing program.

Dear Booksellers,

In our continuing efforts to support your work highlighting deserving young adult fiction, here's our third Teen 76 Top Ten in the last year.

The top five titles will be featured in a USA Today Snapshot box in early March, just as the pad of fliers gets to you. Thank you!!

Carl
[email protected]

In December 2002, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Bestseller List marked its fifth anniversary. Beginning next week, the list will take a new step, becoming the NCIBA/Book Sense Bestseller List. NCIBA Executive Director Hut Landon told BTW that "as the NCIBA list enters its sixth year of weekly publication, we're delighted that we have become a Book Sense regional partner."

For the second time this season, Sidewalk Books, a fictitious bookstore with Book Sense, will appear in a new episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, which airs on Monday nights on CBS.

In The Great Good Place (Marlowe & Co.), sociologist Ray Oldenburg writes that a community's social vitality hinges upon having a gathering place where people can meet and exchange ideas -- a place that satisfies America's quest for community. He refers to this as the "third place." It seems only fitting then, that, in Lake Forest Park store, Washington, just north of Seattle, Third Place refers to an independent bookstore -- a popular gathering place that recently opened a second, much smaller (and much different) bookstore.

By Carl Lennertz

Huh? How does that work?

Two ways:

#1) I get a lot of e-mails from you all, obviously, and a surprising amount don't have any store information in a standard signature area at the close of the e-mail. It doesn't affect me much; I can just write back for more info. BUT, are your e-mails to customers and publishers leaving out a chance to promote your Web site and other services?

Dear Booksellers,

As always, thank you for all the great recommendations. A few very deserving mysteries you e-mailed me about are due in March, so we may have enough for another mystery 76 top ten.

And look for more category 76s soon; go to http://www.bookweb.org/read/2330 for a schedule and nomination deadlines. Thanks again!

Carl
[email protected]

By Carl Lennertz

Please check stock on these titles and display in support of the publishers who have made these national ads possible:

In The New Yorker, these January/February Top Ten picks:

January 20 issue; out January 13 - THE PASSION OF ARTEMISIA, by Susan Vreeland (Penguin, $13 paper, 0142001821)

January 27 issue; out January 20 - SAMARITAN, by Richard Price (Knopf, $25, 0375411151)

Here are the top 50 of ALL bestsellers -- hardcover, paperback, and children's combined -- at America's independent bookstores from November 25 to December 29, 2002.

Of note: The top two bestsellers, both novels, summarize the independent bookstores' power to sell both the literary surprises of the year, as well as the commercial blockbusters thought to be the province of the mass merchandisers.