The marketplace made the right predictions on the two highest-profile National Book Awards, as the fiction prize went to the book that has sold the best, both overall and (overwhelmingly) in the four weeks since the nominations were announced: Colum McCann's LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN (Random House). Nonfiction also saw the book that has by far sold the best win, with the award going to T. J. Stiles' THE FIRST TYCOON: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf).

Conflict issues raised online by Janice Harayda and echoed by the NYT over nominee David Small's relationship having illustrated a book for one YA judge fell away as Phillip Hoose won the award for CLAUDETTE COLVIN: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus).

The poetry award was given to Keith Waldrop for TRANSCENDANT STUDIES (U. of California Press).

The special 60th anniversary "Best of the National Book Awards Fiction" prize, voted on by the public, was given to THE COMPLETE STORIES, by Flannery O'Connor.

For those keeping track, nine of the 20 twenty nominees were women, but all of the honorees were men.

Danielle Perez is joining New American Library as executive editor, where she will acquire commercial fiction and nonfiction, starting January 4. Perez has been at Bantam for 11 years.

Michelle Brower is joining Folio Literary Management as an agent, after five years with Wendy Sherman Associates.

Kristin Lang has joined Audible as director of editorial business development. managing the growing fiction publishing program and developing and acquiring new and innovative audio projects. She was editorial director at Macmillan Audio, overseeing the selection and acquisition of over 100 titles annually.

Tangentially, Moby Lives speculates on a number of potential candidates for the open Paris Review editor's job.

The AP covers a report from the NYC comptroller's office that says the metropolitan area has lost about 15,000 communications jobs in the first eight months of this year, adding to a longer-term shedding of 60,000 jobs in the field since 2000. They maintain that nationwide, book publishing employment peaked in 1997.
AP

Clay Shirky wrote interestingly, if at excessive length about local bookstores and what they might need to do in order to survive and prosper. You can skip a big chunk of the first part of the essay... The crux is "the local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether its providing community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings, or putting benches out in front of the store. Local writers, harried parents, couples on dates, all get value from a store's existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books."

But "the store doesn't get paid for this value."

What will stores need to do "if the profits or revenues of the core transaction fall too far: collect revenue for the side-effects. The most famous version of this is bookstore-as-coffeeshop, where the revenues from coffee subsidize the lingering over books and vice-versa, but other ways of generating revenue are possible. Reservable space for book clubs, writers rooms, or study carrels; membership with buy-back options for a second-hand book market run out of the same space; certain shopping hours reserved for members or donors; use of volunteer labor, like a food coop; sponsorships from the people or businesses in the neighborhood most interested in the social value of the store and most interested in being known as local machers."
Shirky

Elsewhere, Walmart.com's ceo says "we've been the price leader in books for months before that program [deep-discounted pre-orders] was announced" and their pricing is not an "illegal predatory practice since they are not "intending to use pricing to drive someone out of business."
Bloomberg