Physick Book display

The long-awaited release of Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (see review posted 01/09) finally arrived last week! It is the #1 Indie Next Pick for June, and is presently #4 on the Indie Bound Bestsellers List for hardcover fiction! We set our display in a prominent location using a subtle pentagram formation. Along with the hard cover and audio versions of the book we are promoting I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Conde (University of Virginia Press, $16.50), Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies (Oxford University Press, $29.95), and Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $18.95) and a selection of Wicked themed books.

Visit the book’s website, the author’s Facebook page, or read Katherine Howe’s guest blog on Powell’s.com for more about this tremendous debut!

Extreme Pumpkins

I may be the only blogger out there still writing about Halloween on Election Day, but I voted early on Halloween, so the swap makes sense!  Besides, who really wants to read anything more about the campaign beyond which candidate finally silenced the other?  Personally I’m hoping the results resemble the cover image of this book, but that’s more than enough about politics!

Every year our store hosts a pumpkin carving contest with some pretty impressive results, so this year when my Penguin rep Eric Boss, a carving enthusiast himself, showed me Extreme Pumpkins and the follow up Extreme Pumpkins II I knew I had the makings of a solid promotion.  Fans of Tom Nardone’s website are already familiar with his creative carving, but books based on websites work for cats, so why not pumpkins?  I brought in good quantities of both titles which sold so well off of our counter that I had to reorder to stock the actual display.  Sales actually slowed between the transition from counter to display, but we had a nice seasonal promotion, complete with more free t-shirts!

The Genius Is In

Today our computer department is hosting one of its’ Apple Tax Free days.  They already sell Apple products at discounted academic pricing, but on certain outstanding occassions Apple is magnanimous enough to pay the sales tax on purchases in the store.  These are obviously significant events, drawing so much traffic from all over the university’s campus that additional shuttle buses are scheduled to handle the demand.  The timing of today’s event is advantageous for us, as we are promoting John Wiley & Sons new line of Portable Genius books for Apple products!  We ordered sizable quantities of the five titles currently available to create a display with enough impact, and our rep Tom Carney provided the finishing touch: free t-shirts!  These highly coveted black t-shirts with the slogan “The genius is in” are free with the purchase of any portable genius book.  No sales tax and a free t-shirt?  You don’t have to be a genius to take advantage of an opportunity this appealing!