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BEA 2012: Timely Topics at CRP
Booksellers and journalists at BEA should take note of Central Recovery Press’s latest offerings at booth 3830. The Las Vegas publisher of books about addiction and recovery and other behavioral health topics is promoting four titles this week that deal with issues very much in the news—including a title timed to be released in e-book format just as jury selection for a trial certain to garner national headlines is scheduled. Today, CRP is releasing Echoes of Penn State: Facing Sexual Trauma by Jennifer Storm, a 2002 graduate of Penn State University who is the executive director of the Victim/Witness Assistance Program in Harrisburg, Pa.
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BEA 2012: No Baker’s Dozen for Twelve
Twelve, an imprint at Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, got its name from its publishing mission: to turn out 12 books a year—one book each month, no more, no less. Each Twelve book would be carefully chosen and would receive “boutique” attention by all on staff for one full month. Twelve books would be given the best chance possible to succeed in the competitive, cutthroat bookstore world.
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BEA 2012: BEA Jersey-Style
Long before The Sopranos, Jersey Shore, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey embarrassed the Garden State on television, Mark Di Ionno, a veteran journalist and award-winning columnist for the state’s premier daily newspaper, the Star-Ledger, knew that New Jersey’s infamous happenings were fodder for national attention. So for about the past decade, between writing columns, Di Ionno labored over a work of fiction befitting his home state and its history.
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BEA 2012: Top 50 from America’s Indies
When a customer asked Hans Weyandt, co-owner of Micawber’s Books in St. Paul, Minn., to name 10 of his Top 100 books, he started pulling bestsellers off the store shelf. “No, I mean your personal top 10 favorite books,” she said. And with that simple request, Micawber’s Top 50 was born. Last summer Weyandt asked hand-selling friends at independent bookstores from Alaska to Florida to contribute lists of their own 50 favorites, which he began posting on his blog and on Facebook.
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BEA 2012: Gross’s Cop Encounter Inspires 15 Seconds
What’s the worst thing that can happen to an author on a book tour—a talk-show host who can’t remember your name? Bedbugs in your hotel room? How about being handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car? That’s exactly what happened to New York Times bestselling author Andrew Gross while on tour in 2010 for Reckless. Driving to an appearance at Murder by the Book in Houston, he was pulled over for making an illegal U-turn, and what should have been a routine traffic stop turned into a terrifying interrogation. Luckily, Gross was let go with a warning—and in enough time to make it to Murder by the Book—but the experience left him thinking about how even the most fortunate of lives can be destroyed in an instant. And how that experience might just become his next novel.
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BEA 2012: Cypress House Touts Survivors
Who would have thought 12 years ago, when Survivor, the popular reality television program premiered on CBS, that its premise—a group of people marooned in an isolated locale, competing for cash and other prizes, trying to eliminate the other players—would spin off into contemporary literature? First, there was Suzanne Collins’s YA Hunger Games trilogy, which became a blockbuster bestseller and spawned the film version, which drew record crowds to movie theaters. And now Cypress House has released under its Lost Coast Press imprint Show Time by Phil Harvey.
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BEA 2012: St. Nick Comes Early at Baylor
St. Nicholas moves well beyond the usual red coat and sack of presents, thanks to Adam English’s The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra (Nov.). Until supplies run out today, booksellers who have been good this year can pick up a stocking stuffed with care especially for BEA (lip balm, a pen, tissues, a small bandage, chocolate candies, and a breath mint) at the Baylor University Press booth (2834).
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BEA 2012: A Missing Degas at BEA?
Can it be that Algonquin Books has in its possession “After the Bath,” a long-missing Edgar Degas masterpiece? The very same painting that was stolen in the most famous unsolved art theft in history? In March 1990, a pair of thieves disguised as police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and made off with 13 works of art valued by some estimates at $500 million. For 22 years, despite the efforts of law enforcement agencies from the FBI to Interpol and a $5 million reward, none of the paintings has been recovered . . . until now.
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BEA 2012: Selling Like Wild Fire
Six years ago, Rob Eagar opened WildFire Marketing after publishers and authors came to him, asking how he sold 13,000 copies of his first book, The Power of Passion, which he self-published. Now he is distilling the lessons learned from working on the book and consulting with 400 authors in Sell Your Book Like Wildfire (Writer’s Digest, June).
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BEA 2012: Macomber’s BEA Firsts
Debbie Macomber may be a BEA veteran, but this will be a year of firsts for the perennially bestselling author. Her new publisher, Ballantine, will be launching her Rose Harbor series, and Macomber will be making her debut as a BEA speaker at Wednesday’s Audio Tea. Macomber’s new series, which begins with The Inn at Rose Harbor (Aug.), is set in a town beloved by her fans—Cedar Cove, Wash. Macomber had planned to end her wildly successful Cedar Cove series of books, but the outcry from her readers was so great when she announced its demise that the town—albeit with a new set of characters and a new setting—will be making a much-anticipated return. The series centers around Jo Marie Rose, a young war widow who buys a B and B—the Rose Harbor Inn—to begin her life anew. The inn,” promises Macomber, “will be a place of healing, where people with all sorts of hurt come and find peace.”
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BEA 2012: PTA Celebrates Gold
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Planned Television Arts (PTA) has undergone a name change to Media Connect, adopted a new logo, and—for the first time—is taking a booth at BEA to let the world know that this is not your old boss’s PTA. Known to book publicists everywhere for decades, the company is “changing with the times,” v-p and chief marketing officer Brian Feinblum, who has been with the company for 13 years, tells Show Daily.
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BEA 2012: No Catalogues At Skyhorse
When Skyhorse Press (3421) made the decision to switch to e-catalogues for fall 2012, one of its sales reps asked, “What are we going to give out at BEA if we don’t have printed catalogues?”
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BEA 2012: Kitty Kelley Captures Camelot
When photojournalist Stanley Tretick left his old Marine Corps trunk to author Kitty Kelley after his death in 1999, she had no idea of the treasures it contained. “I once asked Stanley what he kept in there. He winked and said, ‘Nude photos,’ and I took him at his word,” When she finally opened the battered chest, she found hundreds of photographs, letters, and keepsakes from Tretick’s coverage of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and presidency. On assignment for Look magazine, he was granted extensive access, and his photographs helped define the Kennedy White House as “Camelot.”
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BEA 2012: A Chat with Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell has been called “the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world” (Time), and her nearly 70 works of fiction include the popular Inspector Wexford series. Known for contemporary crime stories set in her native England, she has won nearly every award for mystery writers, including three Edgars. She also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.
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BEA 2012: Transaction Transitions at 50
For its golden anniversary, Transaction Publishers finds itself facing a time of transition after the death in March of its founder, Irving Louis Horowitz. Mary Curtis, who has been company president since 1997, says that world-renowned sociologist Horowitz (her husband) was the “guiding light” for the company, which is known as the publisher of record in the social sciences. Now the publisher is poised to maintain its place within the social science field and is actively looking for a new executive editor to lead the company into the future.
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BEA 2012: Tea and Mindfulness
Rachel Neumann, Parallax Press’s editorial director and the author of Not Quite Nirvana: A Skeptic’s Journey to Mindfulness, says that BEA is the perfect place to practice mindfulness, i.e., focusing only on what is happening in the moment. “No worries about past or future, just the present—that’s it,” Neumann says, explaining that one should practice mindfulness by first paying attention to one’s breathing—even if one is lugging a bag of books around Javits. “It’s as simple as saying, ‘I’m breathing in, I’m breathing out,’ ” she explains.
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BEA 2012: Something to Chew On
Go fetch some laughs today at the Ryland Peters & Small booth (4235) at 4:30 p.m., as they celebrate the launch of CICO Books’ humor imprint, Dog ’n’ Bone. Billed as “unapologetically off the wall,” the imprint promises to “look at the lighter side of life.”
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BEA 2012: NYC Places to Die For
Patricia Schultz’s first edition of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (2003) was an immediate bestseller, but the author was already contemplating revision. “The ink was still damp when I began thinking of what I wanted to add and what changes I wanted to make—that is the nature of the beast in the world of travel books. Things are forever changing,” Schultz noted shortly before the publication of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, The New Full-Color Second Edition (Nov. 2011). Workman reports that more than 50% of the material is new and newly organized, plus there are more than 200 entirely new places (many in China, India, and countries of the former Soviet bloc). Copies in print for both books, according to the publisher, are more than three million; the first has already been translated into 25 languages.
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BEA 2012: A Poe Resurrection
Edgar Allan Poe may not be able to attend BEA this year—because he’s been dead for nearly 163 years—but minor obstacles like death and physical decomposition aren’t going to deter Chicago’s Wicker Park Press. Stop by the publisher’s booth (4488) for galley copies of Poe’s Lighthouse, a new collection of 23 short stories by the noted 19th-century author. Each story in the collection was written by Poe, in collaboration with a living writer. Poe’s Lighthouse was edited by Christopher Conlon.
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BEA 2012: From Stage to Page
The journey to publishing for a playwright is different from what is typical for most authors. As award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang says, “First you write a play, and you send it to people who hopefully are interested in producing it.”
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