Linda Carlson writes for IBPA’s Independent magazine from Seattle, Washington. She can be reached at linda@ibpa-online.org.

Chelsea Green Publishing — which is now celebrating its 30th anniversary — was showcased in Publishers Weekly’s “Fast-Growing Indie Publishers,” and publisher Margo Baldwin was quoted as saying its consignment program has in most cases doubled or tripled sales by participating stores.

Also cited was Papercutz, a publisher of YA graphic novels founded by Terry Nantier, who is also the publisher at NBM Publishing.

Lynn Taylor Gordon of Cookie & Nudge Books in Mount Laurel, NJ, reports that Gracie’s Night: A Hanukkah Story has now sold almost 10,000 copies, thanks to a huge order from the PJ Library (pjlibrary.org), which provides free books to Jewish children through funding from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation of Agawam, MA. She spent nearly three years preparing her children’s book, which was released this past autumn.

“Heartwarming for a small press with a highly specialized title,” is how Lin Pardey describes the spike in sales for As Long as It’s Fun, a biography of her and her husband Larry that was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year. “All 2,000 copies of the first printing were gone in 10 days, and our distributor received orders for about 600 copies within a week of the Wall Street Journal review,” Pardey reports. “The Amazon ranking for the paperback version reached as high as 150 and stayed in the top 1,000 for 10 days, and e-book sales were just as strong.”

D. Bryant Simmons, author of How to Knock a Bravebird from Her Perch from Bravebird Publishing, was interviewed on Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate radio station 1020 KDKA about domestic violence. Articles by Simmons on avoiding abusive relationships have also appeared this year, in such publications as the North Dallas Gazette, the New Bedford, MA, South Coast Today, and the Oxford, MS, Christian Press.

Skipjack Publishing author Pamela Fagan Hutchins has been named one of Houston’s 100 Creatives 2014 by the city’s arts and entertainment weekly, Houston Press.

A Chicago Review Press title got coverage in a spring Publishers Weekly article, “How to Parent? Hard Science, Light Humor,” which devoted most of a paragraph to Next Chapter: How Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Can Help Girls Navigate Malicious Media, Risky Relationships, Girl Gossip and So Much More by educational psychologist Lori Day.

Sourcebooks’ Put Me in the Story product line was featured in “Put Me in the Story Lifts Sourcebooks Sales,” a March Publishers Weekly piece with a full page on these picture books in print and app formats, which parents can personalize for kids. Introduced in November 2012 with three stories, the line offered 35 titles by early 2014, with one new title to be added each week this year. Sourcebooks president Dominique Raccah was quoted as saying that by June she expects Sourcebooks to be “the biggest personalized book company in the world.”

Separately, a Sourcebooks Casablanca title, Pure Heat by M. L. Buchman, received a starred review in PW, which described it as a “meticulously researched, hard-hitting and suspenseful contemporary.”

Berlinica Publishing’s Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World, by Erik Kirschbaum, has been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, the Chicago Tribune, the BBC, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, NDTV: New Delhi Television, and most recently by the Israeli paper Haaretz, in a writeup headed “Glory Days: How Bruce Springsteen Helped Bring Down the Berlin Wall.”

Poisoned Pen’s Muzzled: A Kate Turner, DVM, Mystery by Eileen Brady got a starred review in April in Library Journal. A review of Allworth Press’s The Pocket Legal Companion to Patents: A Friendly Guide to Protecting and Profiting from Patents by Charles Battle ran in the same issue, and so did a review of Chelsea Green’s The Small Scale Dairy: The Complete Guide to Milk Production for the Home and Market by Gianaclis Caldwell.

Spotlight is compiled by Linda Carlson who welcomes members’ news of notable special sales and licensing deals, significant recent media coups, movie and television options, and other achievements at linda@ibpa-online.org.

Please report on how you accomplished something as well as on what you accomplished so others can benefit from your experience as they applaud your achievements.

Note: We must have URLs for accessing any media coverage you’d like us to mention.

Please submit your news for Spotlight in the text of your email (no attachments) and remember to include:

● your name and title
● the name of your publishing company as it appears in the IBPA membership directory
● your email address
● URLs for the archived editions of any media stories you’re telling us about

Since information for this column is needed about eight weeks in advance of an issue’s publication date, news you submit by May 10 can be considered for the July 2014 and later issues. News that is time-sensitive should be directed to molly@ibpa-online.org for consideration for the IBPA e-newsletter, Independent Publishing Now.