We all know that this summer’s big book will be the third and final book in the Hunger Games series, Mockingjay. The release date is five months away and already the price wars have begun for pre-orders at the online retailers.  All the big web stores are offering the book for pre-sale at discounts ranging from 44% to a whopping 53%, bringing the book to well below what any bookstore can purchase it for.
This aggressive discounting brings up many emotions in me. Chief among them is despair. It’s hard to see the biggest book of the year, and one I cannot wait to read myself, being so deeply discounted seemingly everywhere I turn.  The second emotion is anger. Anger that once again indies are potentially going to get scooped by companies using the book that can make our year, as their loss leader, and in doing so is devaluing the work itself.
The good thing about anger is it spurs action. I am so irritated by all the places I’m competing with that I’m just going to dig and fight for my little corner of the summer’s hot book.  Can I sell the book at 53% off? No. Can I sell it for 44% off? No, again. But I can offer my customers an easy way to order the book locally and save. For a book like Mockingjay that had special orders for it ever since the week after Catching Fire came out, I am offering a staggered pre-order discount for my customers.
Here’s what I’m going to do for fans of the series. If you pre-order and pre-pay for Mockingjay anytime between now and April 30th you will save 35%, buy it between May 1st and May 31st you can save 30%, after that the discount goes down to 20% until the release date.  We’ve never had a staggered discount schedule for a hot book, but never have we had such aggressive competition from so many places.
Bold signage at each register will alert people to this plan and hopefully, they will decide on the spot to pre-order their book with us. The more they pre-order, the better my cash flow is, and the better able I’ll be to know exactly how many Mockingjays to order, because all the outlets for this book are making me really think about the size of my order. And having some pre-orders in the system will be a real guide for me and help me order smartly.
One thing that we have going for us, that few of the web stores do, is that our party won’t be virtual. It will be live and loads of fun, and if you bought your book from us, there might be something extra special in it for you.

This post isn’t about beautiful books, but about books that have been transformed into other art forms. When some artists look at books, they see possibilities even beyond the worlds invented by the books’ authors. From pop-up creations that come to life to cut-out witticisms (rolling paper waves and a ship “sailing” out of a copy of Treasure Island), these paper innovations make my jaw drop. How about yours?
Even the projects that require books to be destroyed (sacrilege! murder!) result in such incredible works of art that I can suppress the horror and simply marvel. And it’s already an old joke, but it must be made: try doing *this* with an e-reader.
After the paper-arts videos, you’ll see another extremely impressive book-related kind of art: artist Althea Crome talking about the miniature sweaters she knitted for the Coraline movie. (Thanks to YA novelist Chris Tebbetts for the link!)
Do you have any favorite book-arts images or links to share? (The comments field doesn’t allow full links, but I think you can enter anything that comes after http://www.)

Bookstores don’t have events only at the store. Events now come in all shapes and sizes and in all venues. This spring and summer we’re having a variety of events off-site. I’ll mention them here and then do a follow-up report in the summer.
The first event is at a local library in South Burlington, which is hosting the wonderful Julia Alvarez in April. Julia asked for us to sell books at the event. I love that Julia asked for an independent store for sales help, especially when there’s a Barnes and Noble 500 feet from the the library. She gets it. And she knows that we’ll donate a portion of the day’s sales to the library. We get signed books (we always bring more than we think we’ll sell) and the library gets a great event and hopeful makes some serious money. Additionally, while I sell books I get to listen to Julia speak, which is always magical and inspiring.
Our second library event is purely altruistic: We’re just helping the Williston library get an illustrator, in this case it’s Harry Bliss for their big Reading Day Celebration in April. This is not a book sales event, but it IS certainly our pleasure to see if we can help a local library reach out to someone they might not know. This type of event goes under the “building a community” heading.  It’s a phone call or email for us and it’s a pleasure to help a local library have a great day.The third event is a ticketed dinner at our favorite restaurant, Bistro Sauce in Shelburne. We’ve been wanting to do something with them since we moved our store to Shelburne, and finally we’ve found the time to plan. In the middle of April we’ll have a “best of the new” preview event for as many book groups that want to attend. We’ll booktalk some of the hot new paperbacks and hardcovers coming out during the late spring and summer. Our goal here is to get readers excited about new books. Each attendee will be given a coupon they can use to purchase any of the books we mentioned at a discount. We want this to be a fun event that they’ll talk about and hopefully, we’ll become the go-to store for all book group members, not just the few who already shop here. We’d like to create buzz for both the restaurant and the bookstore.
Lastly, several towns away, in Panton, there’s the Basin Harbor Club, a vacation/resort set on a lake. They want to create a speaker’s night featuring local authors and some daytime kids’ events. They have a built-in audience of vacationers who just want to relax and have their entertainment come to them. We will help arrange evenings of teaching stand-up comedy, picture book writing seminars, and several events with Vermont authors. We’ll also work with their kitchen staff to do a “favorite cookbook” dinner.
The beauty of this arrangement is they will sell the books for us at the event if we’re unable to, and they’ll keep the signed books for sale in the gift shop for the duration of the summer; it’s like having a tiny satellite store. So, with this one venue we will have six to eight events that are not a drain on my staff. We’ll make the resort more enticing to potential guests by having some truly stellar events, and we’ll all make some money.
One thing I’ve noticed already for collaborative events is everyone from all parts needs to be organized and excited about working together. Promotion needs to be done aggressively and well by both parties. Signage stating “books provided by….” need to be visible on the sales table and in any programs. Bookstores need to be equally thoughtful about promoting their partners with brochures available at the register.
I’m hopeful, maybe too much so, that these events will generate a fair amount of extra income for the store. Here’s hoping.If you or your vacation spot or local bookstore does anything fun, I’d love to hear about it.

Writing is a strange and often humbling business. You hang your own personal thoughts, opinions, ideas, and observations in a place where the world can see them, and sometimes the world responds the way you think it will, and sometimes it does not. What you can’t guess or predict, though, is what a future world will think, or how future readers might be impacted by something you’ve said. Especially not when they’re responding to a thing you didn’t really KNOW you were writing about in the first place.
When PW first approached me about starting this blog, I knew I was being offered a remarkable opportunity — one that might open all sorts of doors for me, both professionally and personally. For the past three years I’ve been pleased to find that it’s allowed me the opportunity to open doors for OTHER people too. I suppose I never really realized, though, that it might help some people close doors that have been open for them, and that that too might be a good thing.
In March of 2007 I was a brand new blogger — still plenty wet behind the ears. On the 22nd day of that month, I wrote my fifth post for this blog, and I wrote it about something not immediately related to books, per se, and not really all that important. Or so I thought. Gareth was out of town, we got hit by a snowstorm, I was out shoveling, and a stranger with a snowplow plowed the end of our driveway for me without my asking. That was all. This singular and unexpected act of kindness, though, was enough to send me to my keyboard and prompt me to blog about it. Wanting to thank him or return his favor in some fashion, I tried briefly to locate and contact the man whose name (Tom Taverna) was stenciled on the door of his snowplow, but I wasn’t successful.
Then, almost three years later, Tom Taverna’s friends and family found me.
On Thursday, January 28, 2010, I received the following message on Facebook, from a complete stranger:

“I read your article that was sent to me by a friend on ‘The kindness of strangers’ which was published in Publishers Weekly. I just wanted to thank you for the kind story on Tom Taverna. He was a friend of mine and a wonderful person. Life just became too overbearing for Tom with the decline in work and his financial issues with his divorce and how he missed his 3 young daughters so dearly. He came from a large family and saw 3 of his siblings pass also. Tom killed himself last week and tonight is his wake. I will be leaving shortly to attend but I wanted to just say thank you from the bottom of my heart. May God bless you always.”

(You can read the death notice for Thomas P. Taverna here.)
I was heartsick to get this message. Heartsick, and humbled too. I promptly went back and looked at my “The Kindness of Strangers” post, where I found that several people had added recent comments — all of them Tom’s friends and family, with whom I now had more than one thing in common.
A year ago I wrote here about my own experience with losing one of my closest friends to suicide. In the days immediately following my friend’s death I dug through all my scrapbooks, photo albums, and journals, trying to find and hold onto every possible reminder of him. Like Tom Taverna’s friends, I trolled the web looking for any possible mention of the person I was missing so desperately. I wanted to be reminded of every little thing he’d ever said, even if it wasn’t to me. I wanted to clutch every remaining piece of his life — every tangible or intangible scrap — in the absence of the real thing. As a result, even random pieces of paper or haphazard mentions of his name felt like a comfort to me. And actual letters from my friend or articles about him — things that said something about his character, said something about the lives he’d touched, or enabled me to picture him more fully again? Those were better than just gifts — those were an actual comfort. It now seems that my post about Tom Taverna has become one of those too.
Words have lives. It is easy to forget this fact. But what appears on the page (or screen) has a life that extends beyond the reach of both the writer and the present time. Who knows what you are capturing when you put your pen to paper or press your fingers to the keyboard? Who knows what lives you are about to touch, change, or capture?
My heart goes out to Tom Taverna’s friends and family. I didn’t know Tom but his singular act of kindness made a permanent impression on me, and I am now so very glad that I took the time and opportunity to write about it.
In some strange cosmic way it appears that maybe I *did* repay Tom for his favor after all.

No, you’re not seeing double. New photos of spines have been uploaded in this version of the ghost post from Monday. Since the blog tool changeover at PW caused this post not to be listed in the Children’s Bookshelf or PW Daily, we’re trying again. I took the opportunity to fix some formatting issues and put in much better images of the 2010 ARC spines. So — here goes.
So many booksellers and librarians weighed in on book spines in my recent post, What You Wish They Knew: A Conversation Between Authors, Publishing Folks, and Booksellers, that I realized this was a subject that deserved its own post.
While spines seem less important than front covers, they are in fact often a reader’s first visual impression of a book. (There just isn’t room for most books to be displayed face-out in bookstores and libraries.) Book designers can do a lot to help their books get noticed on a crowded shelf.  From years of staring at spines while shelving books and helping customers find them, booksellers and librarians will probably agree on a few general truisms about spines. (Take these with a grain of salt, of course; sometimes the exceptions to these rules can be striking. But usually, um, not.)
THINGS THAT MAKE BOOKSELLERS, LIBRARIANS, AND CUSTOMERS HAPPY:
Clear, easy-to-find series numbers are a must on spines. (This was the most often-requested item in the “What You Wish They Knew” post.) As one bookseller commented in that prior post: “Of course, sometimes what was intended to be a stand-alone may later end up becoming a series, but at the very least make it very clear which book came first, second, etc. when the sequel(s) pub.” Booksellers and librarians can’t express heartily enough how often readers get frustrated in their search for these numbers.
High contrast between text and background color = high readability. I know everyone learns this on day one of design school, but sometimes it may get lost in the pursuit of beauty. Which is a choice, but not necessarily a great one for book sales. High contrast and fine art can co-exist, too, of course.
Large fonts really, really stand out, and make a book so much easier to find, it’s absurd.
Keep the author, title, and series elements high on the spine — this one’s for the librarians. All library books need room for spine labels on the bottom 1-2 inches; too often, the label covers up the series number or part of the title.
High contrast between text and background color = high readability. I know everyone learns this on day one of design school, but sometimes it may get lost in the pursuit of beauty. Which is a choice, but not necessarily a great one for book sales. High contrast and fine art can co-exist, too, of course.
Large fonts really, really stand out, and make a book so much easier to find, it’s absurd.
Keep the author, title, and series elements high on the spine — this one’s for the librarians. All library books need room for spine labels on the bottom 1-2 inches; too often, the label covers up the series number or part of the title.



Consider making the spine color match the front cover. When librarians and booksellers and customers search for books, color is the first thing the eye scans for.

If a book has a bright yellow cover, we rarely remember that it has a black spine. There are exceptions to this; for example, this edition of Superfudge by Judy Blume (pictured at right) has a bright green cover and a bright orange spine, but the title is so high-contrast, and its font so large and readable, that there’s no danger of losing this title on the shelf.

On ARCs, put the release date clearly on the spine. (Preferably horizontally; ideally though not necessarily along thetop.) This is hugely helpful not only to booksellers, but to book reviewers. Children’s book publishers have become much better than adult trade publishers about doing this, but the few holdouts would really help their books by joining in. One reviewer commenting on the earlier post admitted that she actually has “resorted to tossing out ARCs with no detectable pub date because they muck up my system too much.”
Do some field testing of your own. Visit libraries and bookstores and stare at spines. Offer to help a browsing customer in a book search, and observe what you focus on while you look. Slip a mock-up of your cover in among the books on the shelf where it would actually be found. Not every spine will be at eye level; see what your spine looks like up a shelf, down two shelves, and see how that affects its readability. Forgive me if this is an obvious tip, but it’s sort of like reading your own writing aloud: by experiencing your work in a different context, you can catch things you otherwise might miss.
CAVEATS:
Watch out for fancy fonts. Titles in script, for example, are rarely readable on a spine.
Images on a spine — pictures or graphic flourishes — can be a great draw for a reader’s eye. However, if the picture is small enough that readers need to squint to see it, it’s probably more effective to spend that spine space on a larger font size for the text.
Use spine colors to help customers differentiate between different volumes of a series. As Joanne Fritz commented in the prior post: “If you print three volumes in a row of a series and use the same color cover, it’s nearly impossible for us to shelve or for customers to distinguish. As an example, check out the spines of Vols 9, 10 and 11 of Guardians of Ga’hoole by Kathryn Lasky. Sorry to single out Scholastic here, because I’m sure all the major publishers are guilty of this. Make each volume a different color than the one before or the one after.”
Metallic inks: These can be tricky. For example, while Beautiful Creatures photographs brightly, its low-contrast color combo (a subtle metallic orchid against black) can almost disappear in normal lighting. Another issue with metallic inks, librarian Maggie mentioned in the prior post, is that “recently we’ve been getting some children’s books with just the spine of the book in a ‘cloth’ material with the title imprinted in metallic ink. That is very unappealing and definitely will not last. Would love to know the reasoning behind that.” Metallic inks engraved on spines can wear off, which isn’t a problem in a bookstore, but can seriously diminish a book’s library appeal.
FURTHER THOUGHTS:
Which font orientation on the spine is best? We’ve seen great examples of all different styles: traditional left-to-right style, horizontal style, even single-letter drop-style. (This is my term for it; what do designers call it?? In searching for the answer to that question, I came across a fabulous blog by a youth services librarian with a graphic design background: JacketWhys: Children’s and YA Book Covers, which didn’t provide an answer to that question but  featured books with terrific cover and spine designs, and mentioned a font orientation I hadn’t even thought about: diagonal! (It was on an adult title, Michael Dobbs’ One Minute to Midnight. Scroll down his post for a photo.).
Everything’s relative. No two bookshelves will have exactly the same combination of titles next to one another. While you design your books individually, they ‘live’ on shelves collectively, and so some spines that work well in a lineup of one publishing house’s YA shelf might look completely different on a shelf filled with a bunch of books from other houses. The secret lies in creating a strong spine that can withstand a variety of contexts.
I took some photos of a few shelves of 2010 ARCs. Some are taken very close up, some from a few feet away (the distance a bookstore browser is likely to be). Take a look at what pops out at you, what is invisible, what is clear and what is cluttered. Notice how light affects visibility; I included two photos (last two pictured) of the Beautiful Creatures spine, the first with a flash, the second without, so you can see the difference in readability in different lights.  Notice the different font treatments and design elements; some of the most beautiful spines are the hardest to read, and some of the most utilitarian, the easiest. Some books with narrow spines have more readable titles than those on wide spines.
There are so many creative, artistic designs. Book designers, you rock.  Happy browsing, everyone.
Booksellers, librarians, readers, and book designers — what are your spinal thoughts and observations?

Alison Morris alerted me to this book reading video from Ocoee Middle School in Ocoee, Florida. The Black Eyed Peas would be proud. I just love these kids, all happy and reading. It’s wonderful that the school is giving the kids time to create these fun videos about reading. Enjoy.

I am in love. With an axe-wielding police officer and his flute-wielding partner. Yes, I said “flute-wielding.” But really the flute is a recorder. And the flute-wielder is actually a dinosaur soldier. At least until he becomes an avocado. With a horn. And… Wait. What were we talking about again? Oh, yeah – Axe Cop. The awesomest web comic EVER.
Axe Cop is the brainchild of 29 year-old comics artist Ethan Nicolle and his 5-year-old brother Malachai. Yes, you read that right. Malachai is 5 years old. Which is half the reason this comic is so awesome. The other half is that Ethan has a brilliant sense of comic timing, mad drawing skills, and the ability to edit his brother’s stream of consciousness storytelling without losing the “my ideas are strung together with no filler” essence of being five.
So, just how did Axe Cop come about? At one point Ethan was home visiting his parents, and (as he explains on the Axe Cop website), “During the visit Malachai was running around with his toy fireman axe and he said he was playing ‘Axe Cop.’ He asked me to play with him, and I asked what my weapon was… so he brought me a toy flute (actually a recorder). I told him I would rather be Axe Cop then Flute Cop, and he seemed just fine with being Flute Cop. The story that followed became more and more brilliant, until I couldn’t contain myself and I had to draw the whole thing into a one page comic.”
That first page became five and then those five became several more after Ethan posted them online and the series gained a following. Today Malachai and Ethan are still collaborating on the comics and posting them to a dedicated (and deadpan) Axe Cop website where, for free, you can (and will) LAUGH uproariously at the madcap adventures that spring from Malachai’s very young mind and are expertly captured by Ethan. I recommend starting with Episode 1 and continuing from there. OR… you can watch Episode 1 as a “Motion Comic” right here, by way of YouTube.
If you want to laugh still harder, be sure to read the “Ask Axe Cop” section of the site too. If you like what you see, consider making a donation to Malachai’s college fund. A button on the Axe Cop front page directs you to the requisite page on PayPal.
Credit for the discovery of this genius goes to my colleague and office-mate Lorna Ruby, who learned about it from Very Short List.

At a NECBA meeting last week, the lunch talk turned to staff picks. All the stores have them and all said how much of an anchor they are to the store. Independent bookstore customers are trained to seek out the staff picks shelf. The personal nature of the indie makes a staff picks shelf successful. As customers grow to know, and more importantly, trust, the picks on the shelf, they will seek out books recommended by certain staffers.
Every store does staff picks differently. Some pick the books quarterly, others at the beginning of the year. We tend to pick them as we are struck by them. Right now our staff picks case is actually an end cap that faces the front door, and is full of books we love. The range is current: How We Decide to the decidedly not so current The Stories of Flannery O’Connor.
I love eclectic staff pick shelves. I don’t want to see all the new paperbacks, I want to be exposed to the oddball books I might have missed but would thoroughly enjoy. Candy Freak by Steve Almond is a book that fits this bill and it rotates in and out of my shelf depending on my mood.
One thing all the booksellers said was the shelf needs to be changed at least once every two weeks. This keeps the shelf fresh so regular customers don’t tire of seeing the same thing.
It was easily agreed that the shelf needs to look full. There is nothing sadder than a shelf that has one copy of each book. The shelf needs to look full and robust. We’ve figured out that our shelves can hold four books in a stack, face out, so that’s how we order them.  It goes without saying that all books should be face out on the staff picks shelf.
Refill the shelf often because customer are loathe to take the last copy of a book on the shelf, especially if they know that there will now be an empty spot on the shelf. Check the shelf frequently for empty spots and fill in with other books if you need to.
In a perfect world every book would have a personalized shelf talker. I’ve been embarrassed by not knowing which staffer picked a book because it wasn’t labeled. Customers want to know who is recommending titles, so make it easy for them to figure out which staffer likes which books. Also, read all the shelf talkers yourself so you can be somewhat conversant in why your co-workers liked a particular book.
Lastly, have fun with your staff picks. Don’t limit yourself. If you can explain why you love a book, then it deserves some time on the staff picks shelf. I’m trying to be more aware about noting which galleys I’ve loved, so I can be better at picking my staff picks. Now that we’ve moved the store around, I’m going to more actively track sales of the staff picks. In a few months, I’ll let you know how sales were per linear foot.
If your store has some great staff pick shelves, please share with us what works and what doesn’t.  Also, customers of bookstores, large and small, what do you think makes a great staff pick shelf?

On the eve of a major winter storm, my thoughts turn toward shopping patterns in bad weather. Our store is in Vermont, so we’ve got snow, often lots of it, for long periods of time. Do folks hole up when the weather’s bad? Not so much. The beauty of our store is folks can snow shoe, cross country ski or pull their kids on sleds right up to the front door. Vermonters are an anticipatory bunch. Rumors of bad weather tend to send families in for books to read during snow days.  There’s nothing like a stack of books to calm kids during a long snow day. Let’s face it, not every kid wants to go outside and play in a snowstorm.
Not every family or person plans ahead. These folks brave the weather when the need for reading takes over. They do come to the store in a myriad of ways. There is a perverse pride in braving even the worst storm. These folks arrive triumphant and spend a lot of money as if saying, “Thanks for being open.” Younger children who can’t stay outside that long tend to get pulled in sleds to the store. There’s nothing quite as cute as an entire snow-suited family that comes clomping in, shaking snow off their boots. I can always tell how long a family has stayed in the store by how large the pile of winter clothing is in the picture book section.
Customers generally don’t mind the snow, it’s the rain they hate. Too many rainy days in a row, especially in the summer, makes customers crabby even while they’re buying the book that they hope will be their salvation.  Rain tends to make customers stay away. It’s as if they’re just angry and don’t want to be bothered. Cold weather seemingly has no effect on shopping patterns.
One thing I’ve noticed is most Vermonters just like to come to the store to complain about the weather, whatever it is. Too many sunny days in a row during the summer,   people start to worry about drought and we recommend books about the dust bowl. If the summer is too rainy, well then there are mosquitoes and I’ll recommend a book about exploring the Amazon. If there isn’t enough snow, people stand around the register wondering about global warming and we’ll hand them the latest Bill McKibben book. A late spring storm has gardeners agonizing about when they think they’ll be able to put their garden in, so we soothe them with The Secret Garden.
One very strange thing I’ve noticed is the first beautiful day after a spate of ugly weather tends to put people in a bad mood. It’s almost as if they’re angry because they’ve realized how nice the weather could be. For them I recommend David Sedaris or Calvin and Hobbes, because life is short and you need to laugh.

On Friday night we had our first-ever teen appreciation night, and what fun it was. There was no author, no activity, just seven pizzas (which the school paid for) and twenty kids who wanted to talk about books with us.
We’ve been working very closely with the Vergennes seventh and eighth grade teacher choosing books for her classroom. Ms. Lawson, Jen to me, comes in with a list and a deep knowledge of her students and together we match the kids with books. Jen is the kind of classroom teacher all kids need, someone who cares a great deal about them and knows them as readers. Jen had the kids write shelf talkers for us. She asked who would like to participate in this and all thirty kids said yes. That was gratifying to say the least.
Look how cute this shelftalker is! Hand-drawn by an eighth grader from our newsletter, this is so much more appealing than our index card shelftalkers. These have only been up a day and already I’ve heard kids reading them and talking to their friends about the books. Now that’s a successful shelftalker. I am going to track the sales of the books these kids choose to write about and see if kid-written shelftalkers increase sales.
I have a feeling they will. The kids and I finished the pizza and then talked about books. The conversation turned to book covers with one boy asking,”Why are they so ugly?” Well, that’s direct. He said he hated photographs of real kids on covers, especially modern-looking kids on historical fiction titles. Many girls chimed in that they were getting “really tired” of covers that had girls’ bodies, but no heads. The consensus was the photographs ruined the book in a way because it dictated what the characters looked like, and that might not be how the reader actually saw them. Editors, are you listening?
I  gave out galleys at the end and the kids were excited, but one boy was disappointed there weren’t more 2010 galleys. I told him I hadn’t finished reading them yet.
The teacher and I decided that we will do this quarterly. So, in the spring, I’ll get 30 more reviews, we’ll have some more pizza and honestly, I can’t wait.