Self-help with real help: that what’s psychologist Matthew McKay and writer Patrick Fanning set out to publish when they founded New Harbinger in 1973. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Oakland, CA, publisher pioneered what has become the standard for self-help books, books that provide readers with inspiration, enlightenment, and, most important, real tools for …

July 2013 by Linda Carlson   Closeup: Jonathan Kirsch Who’s who at IBPA? To introduce you to the people behind the names you often see at IBPA events and in its publications, Spotlight continues its brief profiles. This month, IBPA general counsel Jonathan Kirsch tells us how he combines the practice of law with the …

June 2013 by Linda Carlson   Closeup: Christopher Robbins Continuing to put the spotlight on individuals who’ve made significant contributions to IBPA and to publishing in general, as well as on member companies and their achievements, we’re focusing this month on Christopher Robbins. An IBPA board member, the CEO of a midsize publishing company for …

We’re continuing to put the spotlight on individuals within IBPA as well as on member companies and their achievements. This month we’ve got spotlights (and footlights) on Judith Appelbaum, the long-time Independent editor. She’s been involved with IBPA and its predecessors almost since the beginning in the early 1980s, and Independent editor starting with the July 2001 issue. Judith …

  With this issue, we’re starting to put the spotlight on individuals within IBPA as well as on companies and their achievements. This month we’ve got spotlights (and footlights) on Florrie Binford Kichler, a longtime member who is wrapping up her tenure as the association’s president/executive director, having represented IBPA at conferences and trade shows …

Details on Deal of the Day Having a book selected as Amazon’s Deal of the Day can send its sales skyward, so it’s no surprise that IBPA members have been asking what it takes to get a title selected. Here’s what a “services launch specialist” at Amazon wrote us: “To be considered for inclusion in …

  Spotlight Showcasing the Stinky Series Two segments of a new CNN Headline News show, Making It in America, featured Britt Menzies, author of the Raven Tree Press StinkyKids series, when its third title, StinkyKids Have a Heart, launched in the fall. Introduced in 2011, the hardbound picture books use characters created by Menzies in 2006 for T-shirts, which …

Spotlight October 2012 Major Praise and Pickup Aquila Polonica Publishing’s The Auschwitz Volunteer by Witold Pilecki has received pages and pages of publicity recently, with Publishers Weekly calling it “remarkable revelations” and the History Book Club and Canada’s Maclean’s praising it with phrases such as “extraordinary memoir.” Most impressive is the 1,600-word review that appeared in the New York Times Book Review, which …

Spotlight   Foreign Rights Sales Backstories Jack Mayer, Long Trail Press publisher and author of the 2011 title Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project, reports he has sold foreign rights for Polish, Chinese, and Russian editions of his true story about a Polish Catholic social worker who rescued 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Two …

  Spotlight   Ink for Three Titles “Right books, right time,” is how Emily White, publicist for The Mountaineers Books and its imprints Braided River and Skipstone, describes significant regional media coverage. Late this spring photographs from a Braided River title, To the Arctic, were used on the cover of a 20-page issue of Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Times Sunday magazine, …