NCIBA Show a Hit With NorCal Booksellers

The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) held its annual Fall Trade Show in downtown Oakland's Convention Center this past weekend, bringing together booksellers, publishers, distributors, and numerous authors.

"I've really enjoyed it, even more than last year," said Shirley Pedregon, who made the journey all the way from The Book Rack in Lodi, California. "I guess you could say every year's my favorite year. When you love books, it's a great place to be for a couple of days." She singled out Medallion Press, with its many science fiction and fantasy titles, as being her favorite exhibitor find on the show floor.

Visiting from Santa Rosa's Copperfield's Books, Andrea Davis said she "thoroughly enjoyed the show" and "looks forward to it every year." Asked about her favorite find of the show, Davis was quick to respond with Winter Lights: A Season in Poems and Quilts, illustrated by Anna Grossnickle Hines (Greenwillow). She was also a fan of Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Hudson Talbott (Putnam Juvenile).

Tom Williams and Barbara Holmes, visiting from Placerville's Hidden Passage Books were thrilled as well, particularly said Holmes, at the chance to "get some exposure as a smaller store," including the full attention of publishers and distributors on the trade show's floor. She added that the chance to interact with the many authors at the show was extraordinary, particularly at the meal events -- which included Saturday evening's Fourth Annual "Moveable Feast," the talk of this year's show.

NCIBA's Friday Day of Education began with bookseller-to-bookseller roundtable discussions about different aspects of customer service, followed by "Lunch With a Buzz," where sales reps had the opportunity to present "quick" picks from their winter/spring lists. Afternoon programming featured panel discussions, including "The Bookseller/Sales Rep Relationship," "SFLOMA [the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchant Alliance] and Local Business Alliances," and "How to Connect With (and Sell to) 18- to 34-Year-Olds," among other topics.

Saturday was the date of NCIBA's annual meeting, and one of the association's board members, veteran bookseller Debi Echlin of A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, spoke to BTW about some of the items on the regional's agenda. Subjects of particular interest, she noted, are a new "peer review" program, in which NCIBA's independent bookseller members will "visit each other's stores and provide a fresh perspective" and a planned "bookseller bus tour," which will provide booksellers and members of the public the opportunity to travel to different stores within the NCIBA region. She also mentioned that, after a discontinuation of a few years, NCIBA plans to bring back its "road shows," at which booksellers in different areas come together to discuss important issues. These will be hosted in restaurants in different Northern California locales.

Echlin, who is also a board member of Books By the Bay, said it was announced at the NCIBA meeting that Books By the Bay is morphing from an annual book fair and recreating itself as a nonprofit that raises money for charity.

At the American Booksellers Association's booth on the trade floor, association COO Oren Teicher, Director of Marketing Jill Perstein, and BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos met with booksellers and discussed ABA programming and services. In addition to the business conducted in the booth, ABA conducted two meetings off the trade show floor. At the first, participants in the BookSense.com program met as the BookSense.com Users' Council to provide advice and feedback to the staff about the BookSense.com program. "These meetings are invaluable to us in helping set the direction of BookSense.com to make sure that we are meeting the needs of our members," said Vlahos.

The other meeting involved booksellers from specialty stores, who offered feedback and perspective on how ABA can best serve its diverse base of bookstore members. "We appreciate opportunities like this, and we as staff members left this meeting with concrete ideas on how to be more responsive," said Teicher.

The winner of ABA's Winter Education Institute scholarship awarded at the show was Christine Mayall of Bookshop Benicia in Benicia, California. Mayall was selected at random from booksellers who dropped off a business card at the ABA booth on the trade show floor. The scholarship includes airfare and hotel accommodations to attend the Institute, which will be held on Thursday, January 26, and Friday, January 27, 2006, in Long Beach, California.

The winner of an inkjet printer, also selected at random at the ABA booth, was the Red Door Bookstore in Tiburon.

Out on the trade show floor, not all the exhibitors were thrilled with their bottom-line sales, but they were happy to talk about titles they were excited about for the fall and winter seasons. At distributor/publisher Beagle Bay Books, President Jacqueline Church Simonds talked up Women in Shadow and Light by Jan Goff-LaFontaine (Creative Minds Press), which she referred to as an "unusual" recovery book. Simonds also dubbed Will Cook for Sex: A Guy's Guide to Cooking, by Rocky Fino (Stephens Press), as "the show giggle. But it's actually a very sensitive book with some good recipes." The book includes recipes printed on cheat sheets for men who want to impress their dates by pretending they know the dishes by heart.

Barbara Beaver, a rep with Chronicle Books, was enthused about several titles, particularly brand-new The Other Side, a wordless picture book by Istvan Banyai, creator of the Zoom and ReZoom books. She referred to it as "a delight to sell" and lauded Beyond the Great Mountains, by Caldecott winner Ed Young, as a "wonderful scrolling collage that explores Chinese characters and their history." On an entirely different note, Beaver gave kudos to Michael Ableman's Fields of Plenty, chronicling a journey across America the author undertook to exchange notes with seasoned farmers about sustainable growth and other agricultural practices.

At Simon & Schuster, rep Laura Webb referred to John Tayman's The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai (Scribner), due out in January, as "uplifting and lovely," and was equally excited about Music Through the Floor (Scribner), a collection of short stories published this month by young fiction writer Erich Puchner.

At Columbia University Press, rep Will Gawronski called Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, by Mia Bloom, as "one of our best books of the season." He also called attention to Nicholas Delbanco's Anywhere Out of the World: Essays on Travel, Writing, and Death.

Elsewhere on the show floor, autographing sessions seemed to appeal to just about every bookseller on hand, with long lines forming for such authors as independent bookseller favorite Walter (The Giant Storyteller) Mayes, autographing Walter The Giant Storyteller's Giant Book of Giant Stories (Walker), and illustrator Ashley Wolff (The Wild Little Horse, Dutton, written by Rita Gray).

At Baker & Taylor, on hand to promote a new version of their title database (Title Source 3), rep Chris Gruener echoed many booksellers in his praise of Saturday's Moveable Feast. "It's really fascinating to sit down with a diverse group of authors in that kind of situation -- it really gets to the heart of publishing. It was definitely the best event of the weekend."

NCIBA's long-time Executive Director Hut Landon echoed the sentiments. "The story of this year's show is the strong events," Landon remarked. "And the 'Moveable Feast' is still the coolest event we do. There were 12 tables set up for signings after dinner, and every attendee got every book." --Zach Chouteau