Western Book Roundup

Tattered Cover & Indie Bookstores on Twitter and Facebook

By Jenny Shank, 3-18-09

ABA’s ”Bookselling This Week” reported on the efforts of Tattered Cover Media Marketing Coordinator Patty Scott Miller to use social networking sites to bolster the sales of independent bookstores.  Miller is campaigning to get people to change their default link from Amazon to Indiebound on websites such as Goodreads and Shelfari.  She’s set up Tattered Cover and Indiebound groups on Facebook and Twitter to further that aim.  (Via Shelf Awareness.)

Margie Wilson wrote in to share an article in the Grand Junction Free Press about the bookstore she owns with her husband, Twice Upon a Time Book Shop.  According to Sharon Sullivan, the shop is thriving.  It’s refreshing to read an upbeat report on an independent bookstore these days. Twice Upon a Time sells new and used books, and according to the article, “customers travel from a 150-mile radius, including Moab and Price, Utah, the Four Corners region, Glenwood Springs, Meeker and Craig. Out-of-town business has doubled since the store was purchased in September 2007.  ‘Our out-of-town customers stock up like it’s milk and bread,’ Wilson said.”

Rick Bass didn’t win the NBCC Award last week for his Why I Came West, which was a finalist for autobiography (the honor went to Ariel Sabar’s “My Father’s Paradise.") But that’s okay, because he picked up a few other honors recently—his story “Goats,” (one of my favorites from his most recent collection), appeared in the Idaho Review and was selected for inclusion in two prize anthologies, “Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2008” and “New Stories from the South 2008.”

Retired University of Colorado history professor Joyce Lebra will present her new novel, The Scent of Sake, at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) tonight, March 18 (7:30 p.m.) and at the Boulder Book Store on March 19 (7:30 p.m.).  According to Publisher’s Weekly, the book is a “historical novel concerning one of Japan’s most ancient practices, sake brewing.” The protagonist is “Rie Omura, the daughter of a brewing merchant in 19th-century Kobe, [who] decides at a young age to get into the business, even though women aren’t even allowed inside the brewing house.”

Meanwhile, in Idaho, David Knibb will present his book Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight Over the Great Bear at Bookpeople in Moscow on Tuesday, March 24 (4-6 p.m.).  According to a press release, “David Knibb explores the policy and political issues involved in managing and attempting to save any species, especially one that can pose a grave danger to human beings. The author looks at the grizzly bear recovery areas on both sides of the border, from the North Cascades to the Northern Rockies.”

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