West Coast

Last September, author Junot Diaz spoke to a standing-room-only audience at Town Hall in Seattle. Within the first few minutes, he gave the city props for approving a $122 million library levy the previous month. That’s how Seattle rolls.

It’s a book town and proud of it. Seattle always ranks at the top of the list of the most literary cities, dueling with Minneapolis and Washington, DC. Amazon and Costco are headquartered here. We thought we’d head to the Pacific Northwest and see what the publishing scene is all about. And what we found was a vibrant literary community with a lot of publishing options. It just doesn’t look like what you’d expect.

You’d think that Valentine’s Day at Harlequin would be like Christmas at the North Pole. After all, the Toronto-based publisher releases more than 110 romance titles a month — more than 6 billion books since the company was founded. Talk about stamina!

But actually, the staff at Love Central sounds pretty low-key. The only thing you’ll see there that’s out of the ordinary on Valentine’s Day is some extra chocolate.

After tentative first steps, e-commerce giant Amazon is going on the offensive in Canada’s burgeoning e-reader market, finally debuting its Kindle north of the border in a direct challenge to the country’s top-selling Kobo.

But e-bookworms shouldn’t expect the same prices or selection granted to Kindle users in the U.S.

“It’s the big entry,” said Amazon’s vice-president of Kindle Peter Larsen, who flew to Toronto from Seattle to make the announcement.

For 36 years, an undaunted Irwin Zucker, himself a public relations professional, has been hosting bi-monthly meetings of the Book Publicists of Southern California, bringing together at each event a hundred or so published authors and authors on the way: to share ideas, display their works, and to learn how to sell more books.

As with IBPA -- which started a few years later as the Publishing Association of Southern California (PASCAL), with then former PW Publisher Dick Bye as President and Jan Nathan as Executive director. It then became PMA and is now IBPA, a 3,000-member strong national organization -- Zucker reveled in the trenches of book publishing outside the mainstream channels. He brought enthusiasm, hope and know-how to equip authors with the tools to work around barriers to entry and, eventually, if they found a strong enough audience, to find their way into the mainstream; or, more often, to stay independent and pocket the proceeds and the glory on their own.

Amazon’s New York-based imprint has signed a deal with Ingram to distribute its ebooks to other retailers, paidContent has learned. The deal will make the ebooks available to Amazon competitors like Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo.
Larry Kirshbaum    

Amazon’s New York-based book publishing imprint, which is headed by publishing industry vet Larry Kirshbaum, has signed a deal with Ingram to distribute its ebooks to other retailers, paidContent has learned. Amazon and Ingram confirmed the news.

A total of seven exceptional printing and production executives will be inducted into the Printing Impressions/Rochester Institute of Technology Printing Industry Hall of Fame and the Publishing Executive Hall of Fame