The Written Nerd

I'm still reeling from the amazing Fort Greene bookstore party on Tuesday (look, ma, I'm in the New York Times! ) Much follow-up to be done with the wonderful booklovers who put their support in writing, which Rebecca and I are furiously working on. But bookselling life goes on, and how. Wednesday morning I spoke on a panel with Lance Fensterman and Ruth Liebman at the Association of American Publishers ' Intro to Publishing course. It was a cool conversation about selling books all the way through to the consumer (i.e. through editorial, publicity, marketing, sales rep, etc.) and what that implies for cover design, flap copy, blurbs, etc. Lance is the most self-deprecating, energetic powerhouse of a book person I know, and Ruth is incredibly gracious and one of the reasons indie bookstores get the cred and attention they do; I was humbled by both of them. Hope the assembled young and eager publishing folks got something out of it; they're the emerging leaders of t...

John Freeman asked me to write up my impressions of the Friday night Out of the Book event; you can see an abbreviated version on the NBCC blog Critical Mass . Friday night, June 15, McNally Robinson hosted one of many incarnations of Out of the Book . You can check out the project website for details about the other events that took place all around the country, and the project's mission and future; this is just one event coordinator's take on how our evening came together. Ever since I realized that being a bookseller was my calling, my passion has been the various ways of creating space – for readers to discover books, for authors to present their work, and for literary conversations to take place. When Dave Weich of Powell's first sketched out for me the idea of the Out of the Book project when we were both in Portland for the ABA Winter Institute, I was on board even before I entirely understood what he was talking about. It seemed obvious to me that this project ...