Celebration of Bookselling Features Indies Choice Book Awards

Three hundred ABA member booksellers lunched with 50 of their favorite authors and celebrated the past year's top Indie Next List titles at Friday's ABA Celebration of Bookselling at BookExpo America. A highlight of the event was the presentation of the inaugural Indies Choice Book Awards.

The theme of the day was gratitude -- for both booksellers and authors. As Indies Choice winner Neil Gaiman summed it all up: "Independent booksellers are awesome."

Bookseller Tom Lowenburg of New Orleans' Octavia Books said that the awards ceremony belongs to the independent booksellers who chose its winners. "This is really our event. There's an air of informality as we sit at the table with and honor these authors that we've had a relationship with." He also appreciated the expansion of the awards beyond the previous four categories. "It lends more personality to the event," he said.

The Indies Choice Book Awards, formerly the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards, honor titles in six categories -- Best Indie Buzz Book (Fiction), Best Conversation Starter (Nonfiction), Best Author Discovery, Best Indie Young Adult Buzz Book (Fiction), Best New Picture Book, and Most Engaging Author -- and represent the collective picks of nationwide independent bookstores.

Incoming ABA President Michael Tucker, of San Francisco's Books Inc., who served as the event's emcee, thanked Levenger for providing the gifts for the award winners and honorees. He also offered booksellers' collective appreciation to outgoing ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz and outgoing President Gayle Shanks of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona.

Gaiman, whose Graveyard Book (Harper Collins) won Best Indie Young Adult Buzz Book, earned a round of applause when he announced a Graveyard Book competition for independent booksellers. He challenged booksellers to create the best possible Graveyard Book-themed Halloween party and to send pictures and details to HarperCollins (though HarperCollins was hearing about it for the first time, Gaiman assumed the publisher's cooperation). The winner, he said, gets an in-store author signing, and 10 runners-up will win "signed posters and other tchotchkes."

After Gaiman issued his challenge, Jon Scieszka, an honoree for Most Engaging Author (Knucklehead, Viking Children's Books), committed Penguin to a similar Knucklehead competition.

Annie Barrows

Annie Barrows, co-author with Mary Ann Shaffer of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Dial Press), winner for Best Indie Buzz Book (Fiction), said that indie booksellers made The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society into the phenomenon that it has become. She explained that the main character says books have a secret homing device that "brings them to their perfect readers." Independent booksellers, she said, are that secret device.

To accept the award for Best New Picture Book, Bats at the Library (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), author Brian Lies, who couldn't attend the lunch, spoke to booksellers via a video in which he stepped out of a jury-rigged batmobile and gave kudos to booksellers who introduced his bat books to kids nationwide, "from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine."

Sherman Alexie, who was honored as Most Engaging Author, said that since the time he was "just a kid" and doing his first tour, to 28 cities, for Tonto and Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven (Grove), independent booksellers have always shown him "amazing kindness," welcomed him, fed him, and gave him a "sense of tribe, in the best possible way."

David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Ecco), winner of Best Author Discovery, said via video that he was "utterly, utterly grateful" for all the support shown by indie booksellers, "the most informed and involved readers there are."

In another video, Sarah Vowell (The Wordy Shipmates, Riverhead), winner for Best Conversation Starter (Nonfiction), said she appreciated the "hard work and enthusiasm" that went into handselling her book. Her video included vignettes that demonstrated, in inimitable Sarah Vowell style, how virtually any office conversation could be parlayed into a discussion of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

This year, the first three books were inducted into the Indies Choice Book Awards Picture Book Hall of Fame -- Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins); Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey (Viking Juvenile); and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems (Hyperion Books for Children).

The Celebration of Bookselling also included an acknowledgment of Publishers Weekly's Bookseller of the Year, Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Women's National Book Association 2009 Pannell Awards winners: Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the General Bookstore category, and Mrs. Nelson's Toy and Book Shop in LaVerne, California, in the Children's Specialty store category. That Bookstore in Blytheville in Blytheville, Arkansas, was recognized by the Pannell Awards with an honorable mention in the General Bookstore category. --Karen Schechner