People

New appointments made to Penguin Random House’s sales team; Two clients join Ingram Publisher Services; Grammy win for Stephen Colbert and Hachette Audio

ABA’s Board of Directors has named three director candidates to stand for election to the Board. Under ABA’s Bylaws, bookstore members may submit  petitions to have additional candidates added to the ballot.

Helen Peppe is the author of Pigs Can’t Swim, a memoir of childhood by the youngest of nine children in a hardscrabble, beyond-eccentric Maine family. Her debut title has been praised for being outrageous, hilarious, and touching.

FedEx accepting entries for Small Business Grant Contest; George Coe named B&T president and CEO; Binc Foundation announces new board members

NBCC awards finalists announced; Holiday sales numbers as predicted; IBM says e-commerce will lose to bricks-and-mortar; S&S to launch Simon 451 imprint; Deadline approaching for NBF’s Innovations in Reading Prize; Macmillan to distribute Guinness World Records; Laurie Muchnick named fiction editor at Kirkus

James Scott is the author of The Kept, a debut novel about family and retribution, which he hopes will leave readers with a deeper understanding of the characters and empathy for the things they’ve done and had to do.

Booksellers, friends, family, and colleagues are coming together to support Scott Meyer, the owner of Merritt Bookstore in Millbrook, New York, as he undergoes treatments for cancer.

In the fourth in a series of key insights and tips from Decisive, Dan Heath explains how, in order to boost our decision-making success, we need to be humble enough to prepare to be wrong and anticipate and plan for bad outcomes as well as good ones.

In his debut title, the memoir Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West, Bryce Andrews recounts his experience of living and working on a cattle ranch in remote, windswept southwest Montana, where there’s a fragile balance between the tame and the wild.

Dan Heath, the co-author with his brother, Chip, of the bestselling business book Decisive, will be the opening plenary speaker at Winter Institute 2014. Here, he offers booksellers facing decisions a few tips for overcoming “confirmation bias” — the tendency to seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs or preferences.

Katy Butler was inspired to write her debut title, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, after seeing her father suffer through a medically prolonged death, and then seeing her mother defy her doctors, refuse open heart surgery, and face death head-on.

Tone Almhjell’s debut novel for middle-graders is The Twistrose Key. Here, she talks about being inspired by her Norwegian homeland, favorite authors, and more.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of the autobiographical novel The Residue Years, about coming of age in a black family in Portland, Oregon, in the ’90s and dealing with issues of poverty, drugs, and race.

Tracy Guzeman talks about the inspiration for her debut  novel, The Gravity of Birds, spine poetry, and more.

YA literature is important, said Amy Christine Parker, author of the debut novel Gated, because if it’s done well, “it depicts teens as they really are ... and makes teens feel known in a way that adult books don’t.”