Fiorina, Goodman Set Fast Start for NCIBA

by Bridget Kinsella, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 10/10/2006

Copies of Carly Fiorina’s Tough Choices (Penguin) were not available for Saturday’s opening breakfast of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association trade show, but that didn’t stop the former Hewlett-Packard CEO from taking tough questions about the indictments of her former colleagues. Fellow speaker Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! asked Fiorina what surprised her most?

“What surprised me was how out of hand it got, all due to people’s personal agendas,” she told the attendees. “It made me think about how little the issues of character and ethics are talked about in business.”

Goodman, there to promote Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back (Hyperion) told the booksellers: “We’re all together in this independent media landscape.”

Attendance matched last year’s numbers, according to Hut Landon, NCIBA’s executive director, with 600 booksellers, 600 exhibitors and 100 other attendees. This year, NCIBA instituted some new elements to the program and handed out four “outstanding bookseller” awards. The first two awards, for outstanding book event, went to Jennifer Laughran of Books Inc. for her Young Adult focused Not Your Mother’s Book Club, and to Kate Levinson at Point Reyes Bookstore for a fundraiser with Wendell Berry that raised $20,000 for a local sustainable living organization and a similar organization Berry supports.

Alan Beats, owner of Borderlands Books, a sci-fi bookstore in San Francisco, presented the outstanding hand-seller award to Jeremy Lassen, his staff member, who once sold a sci-fi book titled Cooking Out of this World to a woman who stumbled into the store looking for the cookbook. The first annual Debi Echlin Memorial Award for outstanding community service--named after the owner of A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland and NCIBA board member known for her community service, who died suddenly last year--went to Kathleen Caldwell, the events coordinator at GGP who inherited the store from Echlin.

One element added to the show was a Friday afternoon Reps Pick lunch that focused on the Winter and Spring lists. “The big publishers come to create buzz for their winter and spring titles, even if the booksellers want to meet the authors they are going to sell tomorrow. So we give [the publishers] that time,” said Landon. The change affected the buzz at the show as the titles getting the most attention are all slated for February publication. Among the eagerly anticipated books for next year were two debut novels, Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon (HarperCollins) and Petropolis by Anya Ulinich (Viking). Highmarks also went to Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart (Algonquin), which one bookseller called the Fast Food Nation of flowers; and The Eighth Promise: A Memoir by William Poy Lee (Rodale). Korje Gutturmsen from Books Inc. likened the buzz around The Eighth Promise to that at the ABA Winter Institute for Sara Gruen’s Like Water for Elephants. The Eighth Promise is Lee’s memoir of growing up with his mother in the projects in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the ‘60s and ‘70s.