MEMBERS IN THE SPOTLIGHT

“TODAY” SENDS SALES SOARING

At Life of Reiley, Amy Reiley uses the “out of office” automated response to email to promote her books and appearances. And what appearances she has to promote! In August, the autoresponse informed people that she was scheduled for the Today show, demonstrating recipes from The Love Diet.

We checked in with Reiley right after the show, and she had fabulous news to share: the four-minute “Getting Saucy” segment showing her making Black Truffle Lovers’ Lasagna and the mention of her at the show’s close sent The Love Diet to the top 100 in Amazon.com’s “mind and body” category and—better yet—resulted in an order for 26 cases (that’s 1,300 books) from Reiley’s distributor. To see “Getting Saucy,” visit today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/38658555#38658555.

HARDLY CHICKEN FEED

The value of media attention even for niche titles was also dramatically illustrated in late July, when Amazon.com ordered almost 500 books after Nancy Rekow spent seven minutes discussing two NW Trillium books on NPR’s Living on Earth.

Aired on more than 300 American public radio stations (sometimes more than once), and on an additional 400 stations in 130 countries via the Armed Forces Radio Network, the July 23 program was the first national broadcast publicity for Minnie Rose Lovgreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens and the late Lovgreen’s biography, Far As I Can Remember: An Immigrant Woman’s Story, 1888–1975. Visit nwtrilliumpress.com to hear the broadcast.

Earlier in the summer Rekow was interviewed on Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW for 10 minutes. In July, on San Francisco’s KSFO, host Bob Tanem spent 30 minutes discussing the book and trading chicken stories with Rekow. He also recommended that grandparents read the book to younger members of their families and said of the guide, “You can’t go wrong.”

TALKINGAND TRAININGRE TEMPERAMENT

How important is a baby’s temperament in its development? That’s what Oakland, CA, nurse and parent educator Helen Neville has been recruited to discuss in Norway this month. Neville—author of Parenting Press’s Temperament Tools: Working with Your Child’s Inborn Traits and Is This a Phase? Child Development & Parent Strategies, Birth to 6 Years—will make two presentations in Tromsø. 

On October 15, at the “Strengthening Parenting Competency in Infants and Toddlers at Risk” conference sponsored by the University Hospital of Northern Norway and the University of Tromsø, Neville will report on a 15-year California study of inborn temperament. October 18–19, she’ll conduct a two-day intensive training for Tromsø public health nurses on the effects of temperament in development and behavior.

AND NOWINA PACKAGE TOO

Child’s Being Publishing has cut a licensing deal with Big Lots, which will reprint Kathleen Goldstein’s 56-page paperback Bunny’s Tale and package it in a gift set with a plush toy rabbit. Although Big Lots describes itself as a “broadline closeout retailer,” Bunny’s Tale is not being discontinued. It’s also available through online retailers and in bookstores.

PUBLISHER BEING PUBLISHED

Tad Crawford, publisher at Allworth Press, has had another short story published. “The Kindness of Strangers” appears in issue 4.1 of the online journal Forge (forgejournal.com).

CONDUITSTO CATHOLICS

If you’re publishing a book for the Catholic market, Karen Congeni of New Springtime Press recommends you consider distributor Catholic Word, which handles about 20 publishers, and the Catholic Marketing Network’s annual trade show, which serves some 1,700 Catholic retailers across the United States. Catholic Word showed Congeni’s We Have a Pope! at the show in August.

MAKING ITINTOA MUSEUM

One of the pieces featured in C & T Publishing’s Felt Wee Folk: Enchanting Projects, Salley Mavor’s “Self Portrait: A Personal History of Fashion,” is now on semi-permanent display at the Woods Hole (MA) Library. A photo of the textile artist and the piece is at weefolk.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/new-home-for-self-portrait.

MEDIA ROOM MUSCLE

“Though Vintage Reflections Publishing has been in business since 2004, we didn’t utilize a media-room section on our Web site until earlier this year, and we quickly discovered what we’d been missing,” reports editor-in-chief Dawn Carrington. Within a week of uploading information, Vintage Reflections was contacted by a Japanese e-book publisher and a Chinese rights agency interested in 16 titles.

“But the story doesn’t end there,” Carrington continues. “We’ve also been contacted by conference chairs, bloggers, and reviewers interested in our books and our company.” So, she says, if you haven’t already created a section for the media on your site, do so ASAP. For suggestions on what to include, the Vintage Reflections editor invites IBPA members to visit vrpublishing.com/media_room.html; and we invite you also to access “Why You Should Build a Social Media Newsroom, and What to Put in It” by Deltina Hay and “The Two Kits You Need for Today’s Media” by Kate Siegel Bandos at ibpa-online.org.

Igniting Interest in E-issues

“Is E-Reading Really Greener?” by Raz Godelnik, co-founder and CEO of Eco-Libris (August), generated dozens of comments in both the trade and eco press. (If you missed his piece, you can read it online at ibpa-online.org.)

Blogs that paid attention to it include Media Bistro’s eBookNewser, Green Biz, Txikito Planet, Librarian and Information Science News: Evangelists of the Semantic Web, and Straight from Hel by freelance novel editor Helen Ginger, which stimulated a bumper crop of comments, among them one that reiterated the importance of all publications: “Who knew reading polluted the earth? How would we know that if we didn’t read?”

Godelnik’s piece was also reprinted by such online publications as Beattie’s Book Blog, created in New Zealand; ACT by Olive Ventures, in Singapore; Password Incorrect, in Poland; and E-Publishers to Watch: 2010, in Boston, and on the Facebook page for the Library Journal/School Library Journal virtual summit.

Plus, it was promoted on the Web site Topix, a Palo Alto, CA, news aggregator, and tweeted by STKS Thailand. Onlinedegrees.org named Eco-Libris’s blog #15 on its “Top 100 green blogs for students,” and recommended the eReader post of Godelnik’s piece. (No word on whether it’ll be picked up by e-magazines!)

Members in the Spotlight is compiled by Linda Carlson (twitter.com/Carlson ideas). She welcomes news of unusual special sales, significant media coups, and other achievements at linda@ibpa-online.org.

The focus of this column is as much on how you accomplish something as on what you accomplish, so details and specific how-to’s are important.

Please submit your information in the text of your email and remember to include your name, title, and the name of your press. This column does not use news about nonmembers. It does not ordinarily use photos or other images. To ensure that you receive Linda’s emails, please make sure that her address has been added to the approved sender list in your email program—and that you have an updated email address on file with the IBPA office, ibpa-online.org.

Since information for Members in the Spotlight is needed at least six weeks in advance of the Independent’s issue date, news you submit by October 15 can be considered for the December and later issues. News that is time-sensitive and misses the Spotlight deadline—awards, events, upcoming television and radio appearances, and co-opportunities—should be directed to Lisa Krebs in the IBPA office atlisa@ibpa-online.org for inclusion in the IBPA newsletter, Independent Publishing Now.