Indie News

"Things in New Orleans are still very strange," said Britton Trice, owner of Garden District Book Shop in the Big Easy. "We're in a slice of normality surrounded by a sea of destruction. It looks fine in our area, but 15 blocks away there's still no power." Despite the store being closed from August 28 through October 9, the bookstore's December sales were actually higher than those in the previous year. "People are more in tune to shopping locally to support each other." It also helps that the nearest B&N will remain closed until March.

For the last 12 years, rather than returning books after the holiday rush, Gayle Shanks, owner of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz., has held a Customer Appreciation Day on New Year's Day. This year the store made $50,000 during the nine hours the store discounted its entire inventory by 25%. "We never do any advertising other than handouts to customers during December, telling people if they didn't get what they wanted for Christmas, come back on New Year's Day," said Shanks. "It was a phenomenal day and really reduces the amount of returns we have to do, and also endears us to the public."

A full-page rave in the New York Times Book Review for Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury is helping three-year-old Archipelago Books break out the renowned Lebanese author. The 532-page tale of two Palestinians who flee their homes in the late 1940s also won praise in Harper's, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. More reviews are coming as NYU professor Khoury continues his 10-city tour through May. Distributed by Consortium, the book has 8,000 copies in print.

John F. Blair, in Winston-Salem, N.C., has added nearby Parkway Publishers to its distribution list. The 10-year-old Parkway, located in Boone, has published more than 125 hardcover and paperback titles specializing in North Carolina and the southern Appalachians. Blair president Carolyn Sakowski said Parkway is "filling a much-needed niche in regional publishing."