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 As part of an ongoing campaign, Windstone Editions, a company located in North Hollywood, California, supports independent bookstores with an unusual profit-sharing program: It donates 10 percent of the company's profits from the sale of its line of cast stone bookends to independent booksellers associations.
Windstone is the exclusive vendor of bookends, figurines, candleholders, sconces, and other sculptural items designed by artist M. Peña.
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 Karl Kilian, owner of Brazos Bookstore in Houston, is determined to try to put his city and his store on the literary map. "[The University of] Houston has this very good writing program … and it's made serious inroads to the consciousness of the city. But we still don't figure in nationally," he told BTW. "When times were better, [Brazos] bookstore itself could hold events ... but we're off the map in terms of author tours."
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At the recent ABA Board meeting (click here for related story), the Board approved the report of the ABA Nominating Committee, chaired this year by Lilla Weinberger (Readers' Books, Sonoma, California). The committee presented the Board with the names of three candidates for three-year terms as directors on the Board. (Under the current ABA Bylaws, each year three members of the nine-member Board come to the end of their terms.)
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The Women's National Book Association (WNBA) has announced the names of 25 stores nominated for this year's Lucile Micheels Pannell Awards, which recognize "retail booksellers who excel at creatively bringing books and children together and inspiring children's interest in books and reading."
A Pannell Award will be presented to one general bookstore and one children's bookstore at BookExpo America, to be held May 1-5 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City.
The first ABA Booksellers Forum of 2002 took place at the DoubleTree Hotel in Atlanta on January 16, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. The forum was held after a busy day of ABA activities in Atlanta, which included meetings of the Strategic Planning Committee and the Governance Review Committee.
By Robin Whitten
The unabridged audiobook is easy for booksellers to understand: "Audiobooks the way books should be -- complete." Independent booksellers, once slow to embrace audiobooks precisely because titles were abridged, are in many cases welcoming the trend by audio publishers to offer more titles unabridged.
The next week-long intensive workshop, "Opening A Bookstore: The Business Essentials," will be held March 3 - 8 in Raleigh, North Carolina. More than a dozen book industry professionals will conduct training to introduce attendees to retail bookselling. From what it will cost to how much you'll make, from choosing a smart location to creating your initial inventory and selecting a computerized management system, attendees will learn the kinds of details that will help decide whether bookselling is the right choice and how to avoid common start-up pitfalls.
 Cheryl and Raymond Zadd, co-owners of Mail Hub Plus Books, have long been on the lookout for niches to fill in their community of Brecksville, Ohio. Midway between Akron and Cleveland, with a population of 13,000, Brecksville is a little too small to be courted by any of the big chain stores. And that's just fine with the Zadds. "There are no malls in Brecksville," Ray Zadd told BTW emphatically.
Bookstore sales in November remained resilient in the face of difficult economic conditions, registering a 5.9 percent increase over the previous November. Preliminary sales of $1,282 million for November 2001 compared favorably with the $1,211 million performance of November 2000.
November bookstore sales outperformed overall retail for the same period. Preliminary overall November retail sales of $299 billion were 4.9 percent better than the $285 billion in sales recorded the previous November.
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About ABA
The American Booksellers Association, a national not-for-profit trade organization, works with booksellers and industry partners to ensure the success and profitability of independently owned book retailers, and to assist in expanding the community of the book.
Independent bookstores act as community anchors; they serve a unique role in promoting the open exchange of ideas, enriching the cultural life of communities, and creating economically vibrant neighborhoods.
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A brilliant young lawyer practices in a small town in the Deep South; respected and beloved, he's elected to the state legislature. He continues practicing law while serving in the House of Representatives for years until a case about rape and revenge changes his life forever.
