As this is my first official blog post, I thought I’d take a moment and introduce myself. I own the Flying Pig Bookstore, a general bookstore, in Shelburne, Vt., with my partner Elizabeth Bluemle, who will co-blog with me. We’re entering our 13th year in business and have seen many changes in the business, some good, some bad and some downright funny. I’ll almost always go for the funny as my other job is performing and teaching stand-up comedy.

After reading Alison’s ShelfTalker posts for the past two years, I feel there are some very large, extremely talented shoes to fill. I’m grateful to her for bringing her writing skills and keen eye to children’s bookselling on a regular basis. I’m somewhat – okay, a lot – daunted by the prospect of replacing her. I am grateful that she will guest-blog often, as I look forward to hearing what she’s got to say.

There are many aspects to bookselling that are obvious: buying books, sales meetings, working with customers, etc., but there’s one thing that often goes unnoticed: the folks who bring us the books.  I want to talk about UPS and the relationship we have with our delivery men, or women. Really, without them, we’d have no just-in-time inventory, no rapid turnaround on special orders, no fun boxes to open on a daily basis. They can make us or break us. Does anyone remember the UPS strike during the summer of 1997, when business literally ground to a halt?

Since we opened in 1996, I can count on one hand the number of steady UPS drivers we’ve had. We started with grouchy Dave: dependable, but always had something to complain about, as he had been with UPS for 28 years. When he retired we got Steve, a lovely older gentleman who was killed in a bizarre tractor incident (this could probably only happen in Vermont). Steve’s death gave us a string of poor imitation substitute drivers who never quite knew the route well enough to know that we were used to getting our shipments by noon, not at 5:30, or that sometimes in winter I accepted all the packages for my neighbors because our road was a half mile of ice from December to April and no driver dared to brave it. Then we got Jeff. Robust, chatty and delightful, always on, and able to carry many boxes in a single trip. We loved him. Then we moved the store and I worried again what would happen.

Well, Mark happened. A young, funny, unicycling champ, who always has something to say about just about everything. He delights in watching my face sink when I realize that all 20 boxes on his cart are for us. Every day he arrives right around 11:30; he’s cheery and courteous, and knows that getting my shipments before lunch means more business for me at the end of the day when special orders get picked by delighted customers.

Just when I think everything’s going great, Mark is having knee surgery next week.  And I’m worried. Oh, not about him, he’ll be fine. His orthopedist shops at the store and I’ve strongly suggested that if he wants to get continued recommendations for great fiction, he should treat Mark like the VIP he is. But Mark will be out for at least a month. A month of substitute drivers who give my boxes to the toy store next door, who forget things on the truck until the next day, or who literally drop the boxes from a standing height and then kick them over to where they belong.

And it’s Easter season, the first bump in sales since Christmas. I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope Mark recovers as quickly as he thinks he can, and that the new drivers take to our quirks well.  

After two years of supplying ShelfTalker readers with odd insights into my bookselling life, quirky questions to contemplate, photo tours of bookstores, and the occasional book-related craft project, I am handing over the blogging reins and taking a backseat to two other more-than-capable booksellers.

The decision to make this change has been a long time coming for me. About six months into writing this blog I began to question my own sanity. I’d come home from a long day at the bookstore to sit down in front of the computer and try to compose blog posts, all the while thinking that this was the time I was "supposed" to be spending on my as-yet-unfinished book. A few hours later I’d crawl into bed and Gareth would shake his head at me, his look saying what we both knew: I couldn’t keep this up. I told him (and everyone who said, "How do you find the time?") that I felt I had to stick with it for a year. I didn’t want to give the appearance of someone who jumped in and out of things, and besides? The blog was gaining steam. People were contacting me all the time to tell me how much they were enjoying it. I had things I wanted to say. Fun topics I wanted to explore. True, I had almost zero time to devote to them, but still…? I could do this for a year, I said.

And then somehow that one-year commitment became two, and with it came lots of great things, like connecting with so many of you! But now if you ask me about the timing of anything that’s happened to me in the past two years I draw a blank. The past two years feel like one big blur to me — a sign that I’ve been doing WAY, WAY too much and that something’s got to give.

SO, let the giving begin. Starting next week, PW will be giving you the voices of not one but TWO talented and very entertaining booksellers. Your new ShelfTalker bloggers will be Elizabeth Bluemle and Josie Leavitt of the The Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vermont (see my post about their store from March 2008). I feel certain you’re going to enjoy and appreciate their intelligent insights into the book business, their infectious enthusiasm for books, and their creative ideas about… everything. Elizabeth and Josie have been trusted and well-respected colleagues of mine for many years, so I assure you that I’m leaving you in EXCELLENT hands. I’m looking forward to seeing what things they post in this new phase of life for ShelfTalker — a phase during which I too get to sit back, read, and learn a thing or two!

As for my role here, I will continue to offer up occasional posts for the next few weeks but sometime thereafter will assume the intermittent role of "guest blogger." (Hopefully a much more relaxed and happy guest blogger, at that.) There are still SO many things that I want to say, share, ask, explore with you, entertain you with, and that will still happen, just on a less frequent or consistent basis — and hopefully in part through my book(s)!

Before I hang up my "blog owner" hat, though, I want to do two things. The first is to ask you to share what it is you’ve liked about this blog, so that Josie and Elizabeth will have some idea of what they might want to think about continuing or exploring in greater detail here. Tell us why it is you’ve come back for more and/or tell me what things you’d have liked to see me do differently. (Seriously. I want to know.) If you’d prefer not to post your thoughts on these things in the comments field where the whole world can see them, e-mail me. My address is ShelfTalker (at) Gmail (dot) com.

The second and most important thing I want to do is thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the time and attention you’ve paid to my blog over the past two years. As an (overly) busy person, I know how much competition there is for any one person’s time and attention nowadays, and I’m overwhelmed by the fact that so many of you have thought that my little missives were worth the expenditure of those two things. I don’t think that, as a reader, I ever realized what a privilege and HONOR it is for a writer to have an audience. As a blogger, though, I’ve experienced that honor first-hand, and it humbles me. Again, thank you for that. THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!

And please tune in next Monday, when you’ll officially "meet" Josie and Elizabeth, who are very much looking forward to blogging for you. Onward, ShelfTalker readers!

Good news, everyone – I’m headed to television! Bravo is piloting a new reality TV show called Project Publishing, and they’ve asked ME to appear on the panel of judges (which is why they’re allowing me to announce the big news right here)!!!

The format of the show is going to be very much like Project Runway, hence the name. (Though I should point out that the Weinstein Company is the owner of Project Runway, whereas Project Publishing will belong to Bravo and hopefully therefore won’t get caught up in any network tug-of-war.) Each week talented would-be author/illustrators will compete in various writing and illustrating challenges. At the end of each episode they’ll appear before the judges to share their work with us and then (based on our assessment of their work) we’ll decide which contestant will be eliminated that week. This will continue until the final episode, in which one author/illustrator will be selected as the winner and awarded the prize of a big chunk of money plus a contract with a major publisher!

As a big fan of Project Runway and Top Chef, I feel so honored to have been selected to what is an  incredibly prestigious panel of judges!! Sitting beside me on the judges’ panel will be Leonard Marcus, Maurice Sendak, and the show’s host, Anita Silvey. (I can’t wait to see what hat Anita picks to wear for the show each week!)

Wait’ll you see the challenges the producers have planned for the contestants! Things like "Anything but the Great Green Room" in which contestants will be asked to reimagine Goodnight Moon in a new setting and illustrate it as a graphic novel, or "Sabuda MacGyver," in which contestants will have to create their own pop-up books using nothing but string and chewing gum. Contestants will be sharing housing in vacant stacks at the New York Public Library.

As for when the show will air, I’m afraid you’ve got a while to wait. We haven’t started taping yet, so it’s going to be many months before you’ll be able to see my smiling face on your TV screens. At this point, the best guess is that you might be able to tune in by this time next year, on APRIL FOOL’S!!!!!!!!!

Oh how I wish this wasn’t a joke! ; )