8 months ago
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
NEW YORK - Challenged by a new digital landscape and a tough economy, booksellers are touting a promising fall lineup featuring Dan Brown's first novel since The Da Vinci Code and a posthumously published thriller by Michael Crichton.
"This is the wealthiest fall for titles I've seen in a long time," Barnes & Noble's Sessalee Hensley said at BookExpo America, the annual three-day trade show that ended Sunday.
Buzz is building for two thrillers: Brown's The Lost Symbol (Sept. 15), which follows 12 hours in the life of Code's Robert Langdon, and Crichton's Pirate Latitudes (Nov. 24), which was found in his computer after he died in November.
"We didn't have to change one word," said Crichton's publisher, Jonathan Burnham.
Sure bets as non-fiction best sellers include Mitch Albom's Have a Little Faith: The True Story of a Last Request (Sept. 29) and Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory, about Pat Tillman, the football star killed in Afghanistan (Sept. 15).
At the downsized BookExpo, author and editor Tina Brown, whose latest venture is the website The Daily Beast, warned of "volcanic changes" facing "an industry challenged on every side."
There was much talk of e-book reading devices and social networking, with mentions of "the tweetersphere" and "the need to leverage digital connects."
"We're all waiting for the next thing - whatever that is," said novelist Richard Russo, who won a 2002 Pulitzer for Empire Falls and has That Old Cape Magic out Aug. 4. Meanwhile, he's writing "until they tell me I'm obsolete, or maybe they won't."
BookReporter.com's Carol Fitzgerald complained that too much attention is going to "devices and formats and digitizing, instead of books and authors, which is what people care about."
But there was plenty of that, at least for the hottest titles touted by Borders, Barnes & Noble and independents:
?Novels:Pat Conroy's South of Broad (Aug.11), Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry (Sept. 29), Patricia Cornwell's The Scarpetta Factor (Oct. 20), John Grisham's Ford County (Nov. 3), Stephen King's Under the Dome (Nov. 10).
?Non-fiction: Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan's TheNational Parks, a companion to their PBS series (Sept. 8), Timothy Egan's The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America (Oct. 19).
?Memoirs:Ted Kennedy's True Compass (Oct. 27), Jeannette Walls' Half Broke Horses (Oct. 6), Mary Karr's Lit (Nov. 3).
?Multimedia:Level 26: Dark Origins by CSI creator Anthony Zuiker (Sept. 8).
?Sleepers: David Small's Stitches, a graphic memoir about surviving cancer and worse as a boy (Sept. 8), and Leila Meacham's Roses, a novel about a Texas family (Jan. 6).
Brown, with 81 million copies in print worldwide of The Da Vinci Code (2003), looms over every other author. Other publishers are timing their publication dates to get out of the way of The Lost Symbol's release.
Pete Dexter, who won a National Book Award for Paris Trout, noted that his novel Spooner (Sept. 24) follows Brown. He joked to booksellers that "if you have a few extra covers," they could disguise Spooner as The Lost Symbol.
And not that it would make any difference in sales, but Dexter also said Brown "can't write a line."
Contributing: Jocelyn McClurg
