We are having a good week. The December 2nd New York Times bestseller list has Terry Goodkind’s Confessor in the #2 fiction spot. Our Halo: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten is #5 on the trade paperback bestseller list, and then something I don’t believe has happened before at Tor—matching elevens—our movie tie-in editions of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend are in the #11 position on both the mass market and the trade bestseller lists.

Trade paper has never done better for us. It’s been growing steadily for years and it’s certainly nice to see two of our books on nationally respected trade paperback bestseller lists in any one week, but I am worried about mass market. So much of mass market is impulse and impulse is so important to the creation of new readers. The person buying a book from a wire revolving rack in a drugstore as he waits for a prescription, the person who buys a book from an attractive in-line display in a supermarket, in a shop in the hotel lobby, or at a newsstand in an airport or a train station is not necessarily a committed and regular reader. But numerous surveys have shown that if you please them often enough in impulse situations a meaningful number will be converted. These impulse sales are an important part of our outreach and we need to be sure there is a selection which will tempt that consumer. Nielsen surveys have shown science fiction and fantasy as high as 12.4% of fiction sales. If no science fiction is displayed a significant number of potential customers may not be tempted, the same is true of many other categories and in each case new readers will be lost.

Consolidation in the wholesale market has meant the closing of over 80% of our local, independent wholesalers over the last ten years. This has resulted in the loss of countless years of driver salesman experience. Most of the accounts they serviced used UPC scanning which showed only that a book had been sold at a given price. It did not record title or author and therefore did not provide title information by retailer which would allow a national wholesaler to make an informed delivery. The EAN scanning, coming into use, will provide such title information. But since the numbers we get will be based on these relatively uninformed distributions, corrections will take time—and where a category has not been distributed, we are back to square one. There is also the question of in-store service since the wholesalers who remain were forced by the large retailers to give up much of the margin which paid for that service.

The bookstore does a good job with the committed reader, but if we are going to grow the reading base we must reach out. It’s an important problem for those who care about an informed public, a reading public. This is a time of particular difficulty for our merchandise sales group; they deal with it on a daily basis and deserve recognition and support. These problems can be solved but it will take time, creativity, and a lot of work.

While we can’t recreate the past, we need to work with our accounts to make sure the mass market format is supported so we can reach every interested reader.

Tom Doherty is the President and Publisher of Tor Books

As we turn the corner of November into December as the holiday suggests, I take stock of what I am thankful for. There are many things, of course—not working in the sub-prime mortgage industry for instance—but here are a few others that are high on my list:

1. I’m thankful that “Black Friday” is finally here. For anyone who finishes their shopping by Halloween, Black Friday is the Friday following Thanksgiving when the holiday shopping season officially begins. For publishers it is when we start to breathe easier as we begin to see the long anticipated up-tick in sales on the many wonderful books that have been piled up in stores since October just waiting for some shoppers. It is reassuring to know that people, other than those in publishing, also think books make great gifts.
2. I’m thankful to work for a company who cares. Macmillan supports many worthy charities throughout the year—some literary and some not. We give away books, sponsor tables and write checks. But at the suggestion of our CEO, a week from now we will be holding our spring 2008 sales conference in New Orleans. We’ll be bringing about 200 people down over the course of week and doing our best to support the local economy, which by all accounts is still hurting. Normally at this meeting we would offer our sales people a free afternoon, time to golf or relax by a pool, or just get some sleep. But this year our “free afternoon” is going to be spent volunteering at a middle school in the Recovery School District. In New Orleans 80 schools are currently open and 57 remain closed due to Katrina. There is much work still to be done.Oh, and we’ve sent down a whole bunch of books, which are still needed, as have some generous friends in book retailing and at other publishing companies.
3. Finally, whether it is literature or history, fantasy or biography, manga or mystery, I’m thankful for readers, every one.

Alison Lazarus is the President of Sales for Macmillan

I’ve just come back from the celebration of the first hundred years of Mondadori, Italy’s largest publisher, with 35% of the market in their country. It was an elegant and exuberant occasion, capped by an extraordinary concert at the world-famous Teatro alla Scala which was attended by authors and publishers from all over the world—a stirring reminder of the central importance of publishing in the life of a culture. I think everyone who was there felt privileged to share in saluting this remarkable milestone.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. we have just had our own literary celebration—the 58th National Book Awards here in New York. The NBAs, too, draw attention to the vital importance of books in our culture. That is why the awards are National: they help us define what our country is really all about.

The books chosen this year vindicate that assertion, I think. The winner in children’s literature, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, is a powerful novel drawn from the author’s own experience that has already won a wide and admiring audience. Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, a devastating history of the CIA, won in non-fiction. Robert Hass, a former US poet laureate whose work has helped define the preoccupations of a generation, received the poetry prize for Time and Materials. And the fiction award went to FSG’s novelist Denis Johnson for Tree of Smoke, a deep and intense novel about Americans in Vietnam which the judges called “a careening journey into our national subconscious.”

I’m particularly proud to add that FSG had three other nominees this year: Mischa Berlinski’s first novel Fieldwork and Lydia Davis’s story collection Varieties of Disturbance, her fifth book with FSG, were also selected in the fiction category, while Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, published by our Hill & Wang imprint, was nominated in non-fiction.

All of us have reservations about awards, and not only when our own favorites don’t win, but in a certain sense it’s not really who the winner is that counts in the end. What matters is that we take time to celebrate the centrality of writers and their work in our national life, calling attention to how books help us to understand and feel more deeply the lives we are living. Publishers need extraordinary interventions today—from other media, from trusted public figures, from new retailing opportunities, and from prize juries, too—to break through the swelling background noise of the ever-increasing claims on our attention. Prizes, if they’re done right, can help get really good books noticed and sold in great quantities today—as we see in Britain with the Mann Booker Prize, the Prix Goncourt in France, and the Premio Strega in Italy.

I think all of us would like the NBAs to gain in prominence so that they have the kind of broader recognition that, say, the Pulitzer Prizes do, and there are ongoing debates about how to achieve this. My own feeling is that the NBAs should not try to become more popular, but to seek to single out the best as it is understood by the writers selected to be judges in a particular year. No decision of any jury is ever going to please everyone, but if the awards are honest and thoughtful, as the NBAs by and large have been, they will continue to gain in authority over time. Harold Augenbraum, who directs the National Book Foundation, deserves recognition and support for his dedicated and imaginative approach to administering these important prizes and for working with publishers to help them achieve the greater public recognition they deserve.

Jonathan Galassi is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux

As a children’s book publisher ‘lo these many years, I consider myself a kind of expert in knowing what children will read. That’s not the same thing as knowing what books librarians will choose for their award lists, what teachers are recommending for the classroom, or what parents remember from their own childhoods.

Having been the architect and creator of some of the bestselling children’s books and series of the past two decades, I have an instinctive appreciation, understanding and respect for this audience that lives between the ages of 0-14. The Feiwel and Friends publishing list, which was officially launched just this last month, is about finding books that kids will want to read and we hope will be books that will leave a lasting impression. While other publishers may be looking for the next wizard, the next brand, the next blockbuster, we believe in building a program book by book, and sticking to the enduring categories in children’s reading.

And what might those be? I used to rely on three words that seemed to me to capture my editorial philosophy. That was blind/orphan/pony. In those three words was a lot of editorial information. Blind meant a story about struggling with some kind of disability or difficulty. And let’s face it, Helen Keller was the only biography that seemed forever popular. Orphan meant kids operating without parents—living independently. Parents didn’t necessarily have to be dead (like in The Boxcar Children or Bambi), just conveniently absent (as in the Babysitters Club). And pony, well, kids love animal stories of all kinds. That editorial guideline served me well for many years. But over time I have expanded the definition of my publishing (which does still include blind/orphan/pony). It is now about tried and true themes that endure in children’s reading regardless of how hurried their childhoods and how much more sophisticated and media savvy they are. Children are children.

The books I publish fall into the tried and true categories: fiction and non-fiction about animals, friendship, sports, school, holidays, seasons. Stories that make you laugh and cry. Oh, and let’s not forget those scary stories which allow kids the opportunity to feel scared but be safe at the same time. Books can do that.

There are more than a few books I would want to share with you from our list (and I hope you will visit us at our Feiwel and Friends website to find out about what we’re doing—you can also visit with Holden Caulfield, our Newfoundland team mascot). But please be sure to check out Ballerina Dreams by Lauren Thompson and James Estrin, a picture book and a true story about dreams coming true that will be featured this next Friday, November 16 on the “TODAY SHOW.”

You’ll laugh and cry—and I promise you won’t forget it.

Jean Feiwel is the publisher of Feiwel and Friends.

So proclaims a full page, full color ad on the back of the art section of today’s New York Times. Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig is the powerful companion novel to Margaret Mitchell’s classic Gone With The Wind. (You heard it on MySpace first!)

It hits bookstores tomorrow (Tuesday, November 6, 2007), and has been well worth the wait for millions of devoted “Windies” who’ve always wanted to know more about that dashing, mysterious Rhett Butler.

In a world where Hollywood pushes out sequels and spin-offs practically before the popcorn is even swept out of the Multiplex, Rhett is big media news. The biggest movie of all time, based on one of the biggest books of all time. . . and we have to wait 70 years to hear Rhett’s story? What’s that all about? The answer is simple. The Margaret Mitchell estate, St. Martin’s, and Donald McCaig wanted to make sure that it did literary justice to Gone With The Wind. And it does.

So a major ad campaign is certainly a fitting way for its proud publisher (St. Martin’s Press) to launch Rhett Butler’s People. On the heels of terrific reviews, including one in the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, our print ads will certainly help to get the word out.

But if you are like most people in the digital era, chances are that you heard about this book long before today. And chances are that you did not hear about it first in a newspaper ad or from a book review. In the age of Facebook, people learn about music, movies, books, and games from a million sources. They learn from websites, social networks (e.g. MySpace and Facebook), blogs, bookmarking sites, widgets and, most of all, from each other. The speed of the social network is incredible. Old fashioned word of mouth, but on steroids.

So, to launch Rhett, our brilliant publishers went to work early. They wanted to create buzz, but where to start? First, they created a beautiful site for the book (www.RhettButlersPeople.com) so that people had a place to go to experience a taste of the book. They created an online excerpt and promoted it with a newsletter (The Rhett Watch). They created a content widget so people can put Rhett on their own sites all over the Web. They ran pre-publication ads on Yahoo for two weeks to drive people to www.RhettButlersPeople.com. They used an online publicist to blog and twitter about the book, as well as post video content all over the Web. They even encouraged Rhett and his friends get his own MySpace page. Which they did.

I particularly loved the little note that “Lauren” from Washington D.C. (who appears to be a vampire) sent to Rhett on MySpace last week saying “Can’t wait for your new book this weekend!” As a publisher, that makes me very, very happy. (Note to my friends at the Barnes and Noble in D.C.: Watch your necks tomorrow night.)

The result of all this is that ads in the New York Times are the culmination, rather than the start, of the promotion of Rhett Butler’s People. In the old days of publishing, buzz began in the industry and among booksellers. In the Facebook world, we spread the content out there in cyberspace and hope that readers like what they see. If they do, the buzz takes care of itself.

It seems to have worked for Rhett.

Brian Napack is the President of Macmillan.

You can hear change too. After twenty years of giving voice to great characters, Audio Renaissance is now Macmillan Audio. We’re celebrating our platinum anniversary with a new name and a celebration of the art of storytelling.

On November 6, St. Martin’s Press will be publishing the hardcover of the long-awaited novel, RHETT BUTLER’S PEOPLE. Authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, this novel by award-winning author Donald McCaig parallels the Great American Novel, Gone With the Wind. Macmillan Audio has created and is publishing an unabridged audio edition of the novel as well.

But who do you hire to give voice to such an iconic character as Rhett Butler? The casting process is one of the most interesting and crucial parts of audiobook publishing. Certainly the casting discussions are the most spirited segment of our staff meetings. For every book the debate will rage: single voice or multi-cast? Male or female? Young or old? Gritty or smooth? And what about accents?

But back to Rhett. We needed an actor who could use his voice to create the atmosphere of the American South before, during and just after the Civil war; could portray the many characters who shaped the personality of Rhett – from his unyielding father to the overseer’s daughter Belle Watling to the former slave and Rhett’s best friend Tunis Bonneau to, of course, the headstrong and vivacious Scarlett O’Hara; all the while revealing that dashing scoundrel, Rhett Butler. Our producer Laura knew she wanted an actor with a “leading man” voice. So she turned to stage, film, and television actor John Bedford Lloyd, whom AudioFile Magazine has described as “a commanding reader with a voice that grabs the listener by the throat.”

We think he’s done a great job giving voice to this epic character. Click here, sit back, and close your eyes. I think you’ll be transported to a world of plantations, duels, blockade runners, and legendary love stories.

Mary Beth Roche is the Publisher of Macmillan Audio