Industry News

Advanced Marketing Services, Inc. (AMS) announced on, January 17, that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Publishers Group West (PGW) for a reported price of about $38 million. Under the terms of the deal, PGW founder Charlie Winton will continue to serve as company president for the next year to implement the transition. AMS -- which has built its business on supplying warehouse price clubs and other large retailers -- had revenues last year of about $700 million, as reported by the New York Times. PGW had sales of over $125 million in 2001.

Random House has begun a reorganization of its company sales group. It is the first company-wide reorganization in three years, and Ruth Liebmann, director of independent bookselling for Random House, told BTW that a major impetus for the changes is that "a lot has changed in the last three years, in the marketplace, in the needs of booksellers, and in the needs of our publishers."

By Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Poetry is in the front hall. Music in the living room. Books on books in the dining room. Science under the piano in the family room. Classics are in the little wooden bookshelf with glass-paneled doors, but only run through Aristotle before they spill over into the den. There are 4,000 books inside the house, 10,000 more in storage. Once, the pantry held cans and plates and no books. Now, the shelves are filled with pages.

For many booksellers, publisher co-operative promotions are an essential and cost-effective tool. As Dave Kaverman, co-owner of the Little Professor Book Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, explained in a previous BTW piece last fall, utilizing publisher co-op allowances can help a store fulfill several goals at once: increasing a store's marketing exposure while also adding money to the bottom line.

A crowd estimated at between 450 and 550 packed A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco on January 11 to raise funds to help pay the legal fees of Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store, which has challenged a court order requiring it to turn over information about a customer's book purchases. The event raised $10,000 for the bookstore.

The Bloomsbury publishing house has garnered its biggest industry headlines for signing J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter titles have been published in the U.S. by Scholastic. This week the U.K.-based publisher -- which has a U.S. publishing program distributed by Holtzbrinck -- released its first catalog of 19 children's books to be published in America.

In December, Scholastic launched a marketing campaign to promote books as a source of understanding, comfort, and connection. The "Read for Life" campaign -- featuring original artwork by Harry Potter illustrator Mary Grand Pré -- is a part of a continuing outreach by Scholastic in the aftermath of September 11, and it carries the message "Read for Comfort ... Read for Closeness ...

After 12 years -- and two expansions -- the Okemos, Michigan, location of Schuler Books and Music has a new home. At 24,000 square feet, the new space (in the Greater Lansing area) is a good deal closer in size to the 20-year-old Grand Rapids Schuler Books and Music, which is 35,000 square feet.

"Books saved my life," said author Luis J. Rodriguez in a recent interview. The 47-year-old author is a former Los Angeles gang member whose love and talent for poetry and prose convinced a judge to give Rodriguez a crucial break 26 years ago when he placed him, not back in prison, but on the road to a writer's life.

Eventually a newspaper job took Rodriguez to Chicago. There, he started his own poetry publishing house and wrote the award-winning 1994 memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (Touchstone Books).

On January 7, Hawley-Cooke announced that it was closing its Glenview Pointe store in Louisville, Kentucky. A statement signed by the store's four owners, Graham and Martha Neal Cooke, Audrey Schuetze, and William Schuetze, read in part, "It is with great sadness, but with a voice of confidence in the future of Hawley-Cooke Booksellers … [that we make this announcement]. We are proud of the Glenview Pointe store and the wonderful staff who made it a remarkable experience for all of us for over five years….

ABA Booksellers Forums provide members with an opportunity to meet with representatives of the ABA staff and Board to discuss issues relating to ABA programs, bookselling, and the state of the industry. Forums get under way in January, and are scheduled through February, March, and April. Stay tuned to BTW for further details of upcoming forums.

The first ABA member forum will be held on Wednesday, January 16, at the DoubleTree Hotel Atlanta/Buckhead in Atlanta, Georgia. The forum will take place from 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Booksellers around the country had many tales to tell about their holiday sales, generally their peak selling period.

There will be more opportunities than ever for networking, professional development, and discovering the best of the fall publishers' lists at the 2002 BookExpo America, held in conjunction with the ABA Convention, set for May 2-5 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City.

Bookstore sales for October reflected healthy growth in a period of economic uncertainty, exceeding sales for the previous October by a solid 6.8 percent. Preliminary sales of $1,187 million for October 2001 compared favorably with the $1,111 million performance of October 2000.

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver this week issued an open letter to independent booksellers. She wrote in the wake of a November 5 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Gregg Easterbrook, which had criticized the writer for an essay published in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 25.