In this issue, Shelf Awareness is inaugurating Shelf Talk, a regular column by booksellers who discuss trends in areas in which they specialize. The first column focuses on New Age books; our regular contributor in this category is Susan L. Weis, proprietress of breathe books, Baltimore, Md., which she opened in October 2004 after being inspired by the Bodhi Tree in West Hollywood, Calif. (In a September 27, 2005 profile in Shelf Awareness, we called her "perhaps the most energetic, enthusiastic new bookseller in the U.S.," a description she has continued to live up to.) Before opening her store, she worked as a reporter and film critic for the Jerusalem Post, at Bibelot, at Barnes & Noble and in p.r. and marketing, among other jobs. She is a member of the ABA's Booksellers Advisory Council and contributes regularly to New Age Retailer magazine. 

Share This

Wordsmiths Books is opening on June 15 on Decatur Square in Decatur, Ga., in a 1930s-era building that once housed the Decatur Post Office. The 3,000-sq.-ft. store features a café and reading area; an area for book club meetings; and event space capable of hosting 400 people.

Owner Zachary Steele said the store is planning a "massive grand opening weekend" June 15. Marketing and publicity director Russ Marshalek added the store aims to put on activities "for the entire community that has helped and believed in Wordsmiths Books, including events with local authors who have supported us so generously thus far. We're a bookstore for book lovers, run by book lovers."

Wordsmiths has already been busy selling books online and helping organize the protest against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's decision to let go its book editor.

Wordsmiths Books will be located at 141 E. Trinity Place, Decatur, Ga. 30030. Its website is wordsmithsbooks.com, which includes a blog.

---

Edward McKay Used Books & More, which has several stores in North Carolina, is moving its Fayetteville store to space nearly twice as large as what it has now, the Fayetteville Observer reported. Weirdly the move is occurring in part because the store's second outlet in Fayetteville was wrecked when a car drove through its front window last year, one many car-crashing-into-bookstores incidents of the past year.

The store has one of our favorite mottos: "Feeding your head since 1975."

---

Some 69% of consumers research product features online, 68% compare prices online and 58% find items online and then buy them in bricks-and-mortar stores, according to an Accenture survey quoted by Internet Retailer magazine. Fully 67% of the survey respondents said they prefer to make purchases in physical stores.

"Instead of replacing bricks-and-mortar stores, the Internet is an extension of consumers' in-store shopping experience providing a resource to research product and price," Jeff Smith, global managing director of Accenture's Retail division, told the magazine.

--

Borders's 24-store operation in Australia, which is among parts of the company's foreign operations that are for sale, has attracted interest from the private equity firm that owns A&R Whitcoulls, which operates the Angus & Robertson chain in Australia and Whitcoulls bookstores in New Zealand, according to Reuters. The company is also interested in Borders's stores in New Zealand.

---

Sherlock's Tomes bookstore, Bridgeton, N.J.--a new store specialzing in mysteries, true crime and British imports--and the Nuts and Berry's Book Club are paying the way of Melanie Lynne Hauser, the author of Confessions of Super Mom (NAL), to visit the town, according to the Bridgeton News.

Hauser, who lives in Chicago, will do a signing at the store, meet with the group and visit students from three schools. Her book is about a woman who has an accident with a Swiffer that gives her superhero powers.

--- 

Not everyone is opposed to the changes, however. James Fugate, co-owner of Eso Won bookstore, said, "If you have a lot more people living here, you have a built-in customer base."

---

The April 29 anniversary of the 1992 L.A. riots inspired a gathering Sunday at a vacant lot that had once been the site of a bookstore. According to the Los Angeles Times, community activists came together to condemn "the failure of commercial developers and government officials to rebuild businesses destroyed in the 1992 Los Angeles riots."

Earl Ofari Hutchinson said he had known the owner of the bookstore, which was burned in the rioting. "It was an African American-owned store, which shows it was indiscriminate," he said.

---

Sports Update

Have you got the game to search for OP books? News from the retail book world seldom finds its way onto ESPN's website, but in Monday's True Hoop column, Henry Abbott wrote, "David Halberstam's legendary book The Breaks of the Game . . . is not easy to find at the moment. The cheapest copy on Amazon is $100. Powell's, a massive bookstore headquartered a walk from where the Blazer team in the book played, has no copies at all." [The book was No. 2 on Abebooks.com last week--see the last item today.]

In baseball news, the Associated Press (via Forbes) reported that Boston slugger David Ortiz signed copies of his memoir, Big Papi, in enemy (aka Yankee) territory at a "Manhattan bookstore" on Monday. Red Sox caps were sighted in the crowd, and New Yorkers treated him well. The book? "We're talking about a book people love reading," Ortiz said. "People love to get to know about all of us. In my book I talk about my life and tell people that it doesn't matter what you go through, if you keep on fighting you might get to the point where you want to be."

Share This

Just a few weeks before the pub date of The Witches of Portobello (HarperCollins, $24.95, 9780061338809/006133880X), the New Yorker has a profile called "The Magus: The Astonishing Appeal of Paulo Coelho." The Brazilian author's books, the story said, have sold "nearly a hundred million copies. Bellboys, waitresses, and policemen recognize his face; in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Clinton was photographed carrying a copy of The Alchemist."

--- 

This morning on the Today Show: John Grogan entertains with Bad Dog, Marley! (HarperCollins, $16.99, 9780061171147/006117114x), a picture book based on his bestselling memoir, Marley & Me.

---

This morning the Early Show focuses on George Tenet, author of At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (HarperCollins, $30, 9780061147784/0061147788). The former CIA director will appear on the O'Reilly Factor tonight.

---

Today on the Oprah Winfrey Show: Dina Matos McGreevey, estranged wife of ex-New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey and author of Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (Hyperion, $23.95, 9781401303648/1401303641).

---

Today the Martha Stewart Show serves up Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook (Clarkson Potter, $40, 9780307236722/0307236722).

---

Today the Rachael Ray Show checks in with Judge Judy Sheindlin, whose advice tomes include You're Smarter Than You Look: Uncomplicating Relationships in Complicated Times (Harper Paperbacks, $13, 9780060953768/0060953764).

---

Today on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show, Robert Hormats offers The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars (Times Books, $27.50, 9780805082531/0805082530).

---

Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Dina Rasor, co-author of Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War (Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95, 9781403981929/1403981922).

---

Tonight on the Late Show with David Letterman: multi-talented Amy Sedaris, author of I Like You: Hospitality under the Influence (Warner, $27.99, 0446578843), promotes her role in the upcoming movie Shrek the Third.

---

Tonight on the Colbert Report: Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Back Bay, $15.99, 9780316010665/0316010669), now out in paperback, we think.

Share This

Share This

For a while last year, only New Age bookstores were selling The Secret (Atria/Beyond Words, $23.95, 9781582701707/1582701709), and we had the market cornered. At breathe books, for example, we sold more than 800 copies of the DVD after it came out in early August and 140 copies of the book, which came out in November. But now The Secret is no longer a secret and can be purchased just about everywhere at a 30% discount; in the past month, sales for us have slowed to a trickle. My goal here is to let you in on the other secrets of the New Age world before Oprah and Target catch on.

When your customers who have read The Secret ask "What's next?" the answers can be found in Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks (Hay House, $14.95, 9781401904593/1401904599), the ultimate book on the law of attraction, which is what The Secret is all about. As the book outlines, the Universe is here for our well-being and gives us whatever we ask for. We just need to know how to receive it. This is the law of attraction. Like attracts like. And you will attract sales! Ask and It Is Given is the best book at this time to communicate the message and includes 22 concrete exercises to help raise your vibrations to what you want to achieve. We have sold nearly 400 copies of Ask and It Is Given.

What Rhonda Byrne and others in The Secret don't really say is that the information they discuss is channeled; it seems they didn't think the masses could handle the notion of channeled information, and maybe they were right. By contrast, Esther and Jerry Hicks don't shy away from their story of how Esther began channeling this powerful source, who gave themselves the name Abraham (you will hear people ask for the Abraham-Hicks books often). Bestselling author Wayne Dyer attributes much of his knowledge to Esther's channeling. (Next time you see Wayne on PBS, notice the ball of light on the corner of the stage. It's his "source energy.")

The entire Abraham-Hicks line of books and DVDs is extraordinarily powerful. If you can, host a screening of segments of the DVD The Law of Attraction in Action (Hay House, $34.95, 9787407978439) and hold a discussion afterwards. This is the real secret.

Even the earliest discussions of the law of attraction (written in the early 1900s), such as Wallace Wattle's The Science of Getting Rich (Tarcher Penguin, $10, 9781585426010/1585426016), Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (Fawcett, $14.95, 9780452266605/0452266602) and James Allen's As a Man Thinketh (Putnam, $6.95, 9780399128295/0399128298), all refer to a mystical force in the Universe that matches our vibration and provides us with whatever it is we are asking for. More recently, the very accessible Lynn Grabhorn, author of Excuse Me Your Life Is Waiting (Hampton Roads, $16.95, 9781571745293/1571745297), also teaches the law of attraction.

---

If this is too New-Agey for your customers, you may want to look to some people here on earth who are dispensing similar information.
 
How to be Happy All the Time (Crystal Clarity, $16.95, 9781565892156/1565892151) is a beautiful book by Paramhansa Yogananda, a renowned yoga master of the 20th century (as you may know, yoga is more than a series of movements--it is a philosophy of living based on ancient Indian teachings).

Yogananda (1893-1952) is best-known for his classic Autobiography of a Yogi (Crystal Clarity, $14, 9781565892125/1565892127). This slim, non-intimidating collection of teachings reveals that happiness is closer than you think. In fact, it's inside you. Happiness is the foundation of all we do, he continues, and one can choose to be happy in any circumstance. This is a wonderful gift book or a good place to start for someone who is interested in yogic teachings.
 
Another easy place to start on the path to enlightenment is with Pema Chodron. Your customers will find this Buddhist nun's teachings easy to understand, in part because her background might resemble that of some of your clientele's: Chodron, formerly known as Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, hails from New York and was educated at Berkeley. In 1972, she was a housewife and mom when she came across the Buddhist teacher Chogyum Trungpa Rinpoche--and changed her life. Her down-to-earth wisdom is refreshing, logical and comfortable.
 
If your customers aren't familiar with Chodron, have them begin with her classic Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (Shambhala, $12.95, 9781570628399/1570628394). She writes in a clear voice on compassion and awareness and how to end your own suffering and unhappiness so that you can help others. People from all walks of life can relate to her teachings. This book will open the door for your customers to Buddhist-American thought, and Chodron has a huge backlist as well as meditation CDs you'll want to stock up on.
 
Another favorite of mine is Christel Nani, who worked for years as an emergency room trauma nurse before devoting her talents to being a medical intuitive. Her innate abilities to "see" what's wrong with people led to her first book, Diary of a Medical Intuitive (L.M. Press, $13.95, 9780974145020/0974145025). In her new book, Sacred Choices: Thinking Outside the Tribe to Heal your Spirit (Harmony, $23, 9780307341655/0307341658), she hones in on what holds so many of us back from living our dreams. By resisting our true nature, she says, we create illness in our minds and bodies.
 
Through case studies and personal experiences, she communicates ways to break out of social expectations and "tribal language" (notions such as "taking care of yourself is selfish" or "if you have a secure job, don't leave it") to reconnect to your soul and your true desires and move forward with the life you want to live.

All these writers encourage you to take control of your life, live it as you want and be happy. By listening to your inner voice or higher self, you will hear what's best you. So how do you hear that inner voice? The key is meditation . . . in my next column I'll tell you about the best meditation books and CDs on the market.--Susan L. Weis
 

Share This

Share This