PW passes along the latest news from the bookselling front: bookstores report a 1.3 percent sales increase for March, with total sales of $4.46 billion for the first three months of 2008. The increased level of sales at bookstores continues to outpace the general retail sector.

If you saw this morning's item about Ron Paul topping the NYT bestseller list and wondered just how much The Revolution was outperforming John McCain's most recent book, Hard Call, at the bookstores, let's put it this way: The image at left isn't even to scale.

Accoring to Nielsen BookScan, which as we know accounts for roughly 70 percent of the market, The Revolution had sold 29,000 copies as of last Tuesday while the paperback edition of Hard Call had sold only 3,000. In all fairness, however, we should remember that this is a book McCain published in hardcover last year; that edition is reported to have sold 22,000 copies.

Remember last month, when I commented that Ron Paul's campaign book was about a year too late to do any good? Well, that doesn't seem to have stopped The Revolution: A Manifesto from hitting #1 on the charts: The Vanity Fair blog says it's #1 on next Sunday's NYT nonfiction list. Mind you, with "individual Paulheads buying as many as 'five, ten, fifteen' copies at a time at signings," according to Grand Central publicist Erica Gelbard, along with highly targetted online campaigns, and a significant number of bulk orders being reported to the Times, this shouldn't come as any surprise. In fact, Christopher Bateman suggests, "the question of whether sales are being artificially inflated by Paul's followers" is well worth asking.

TurnHere, Inc., the online video solutions platform, just announced the unveiling of the new multi-publisher book-centric network, Bookvideos.tv . The main page top spot at the moment goes to Chasing Harry Winston, the new novel by Lauren Weisberger and she talks about the huge role inspiration-wise New York City has played in her work in the book trailer. Below her are the other eight featured book trailers of the moment and the site includes author profile pages, news and information about publishers, as well as a Facebook page for the site's fans (sorry Myspace, you're out).
Bookvideos.tv, which initially offered book and author videos exclusively from Simon & Schuster, now also showcases works from Bantam Dell, Chronicle, Penguin Group (USA), Doubleday Broadway, Hachette Book Group, Loyola Press, MacMillan, Thomas Nelson and WW Norton on the updated site.

What's also interesting are the three buy links. The usual link to Amazon and Barnes & Noble is there, but instead of the obligatory (and useless for buyers) link to Booksense most sites have, it looks like Powell's is the independent store of choice for consumers to go to.

Last month, I told you about Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's plans to tap into the Latina bookbuying market with a nationwide chain of house parties to celebrate the release of Dirty Girls on Top. The Association of American Publishers and Borders are following suit, teaming up with Las Comadres Para Las Americas to launch a book club in 15 cities, primarily in the Southwest bloc from California to Texas but also in Florida, Illinois, and Masschusetts. Esmeralda Santiago will serve as the public spokesperson for the club, which she described in the press release as "an opportunity for Latinas nationwide as well as for book lovers across the country to experience the pleasures of books and reading" and "a forum that supports the high quality of literature by and for the Latino community."

The syllabus is tipped heavily towards Latina authors, at least for the first seven months. Beginning with Cristina Garcia's A Handbook to Luck in June, the club will then read books by Yxta Maya Murray, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Margo Candela before the paperback of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao turns up in October, and then it's on to Lorraine Lopez and Helena Maria Viramontes. Seeing that lineup gave me a weird idea, actually: could Oscar Wao, with all its emphasis on comic books and other geekery, be the book that finally gave "lad lit" artistic credibility?

The New York Center for Indie Publishing's website just published an "after the dust has settled" look at the Amazon-BookSurge gambit and public relations fiasco. The most fascinating aspect of the story is Lloyd Jassin's speculation that:

"If I had to guess, I'd say in the next 24-months Google buys Ingram (Googlegram?) for its digital group assets (including Lightning Source), and it out-Amazons Amazon by creating the ultimate digital warehouse/distributor in the sky.

If Google were to exhibit digital favoritism, it would steer book buyers to its wholly owned and super-efficient Lightning Source imprint. Amazon owns the online store. Google owns the web. Amazon merchandises books. Google sells them contextually. Balance is restored to the planet."

Meanwhile, the Washington Sate Attorney General's office has given up on the Amazon/Booksurge antitrust suit saying "It appears that the markets involved are national in scope. Thus, it may be more appropriate to refer this matter to one of the federal antitrust agencies for review." Angela Hoy over at Writer's Weekly is outraged, and asks "Was the Washington State Attorney General's Office Bamboozled."

More as this story develops.

John Scalzi considers the market numbers on who's buying fantasy and science fiction:

"I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title."

Our own Nielsen BookScan tipsters filled in the info on those titles. The images above are not uniformly to scale—Jim Butcher's Small Favors sold about 4,700 reported copies during the week in question, which is clearly dwarfed by the 22,700 or so for Erin Hunter's Outcast, but it still actually outsold Scott Westerfeld's Uglies by twice as many copies, which in turn outsold the classic Orson Scott Card novel Ender's Game by, as Scalzi says, 3-to-2. (And that raises an interesting question: Why are the bestselling science fiction books for both YA and adult readers older works? One could also point out that the primary audience for Ender's Game in the 23 years since its publication has shifted towards the adolescent market, but that would just be twisting the knife.)

"As a final kick in the teeth," Scalzi observers, "YA SF/F is amply represented at top of the general bestselling charts of YA book sales, whereas adult SF/F struggles to get onto the general bestselling adult fiction charts at all." The overall effect? Adult readers, he proposes, "are missing a genuine literary revolution in their genre because the YA section is a blank spot on the map to them, if not to everyone else."

We just like to revel in the fact that the bestselling fantasy book in the country last week was about cats.

Today in weird: Recently, there's been an outbreak of would-be hoaxers calling up California bookstores pretending to be authors who are booked for reading events -- then hitting up the friendly booksellers for small amounts of cash. Petty crime or pomo art project? It's hard to say! One recent caller pretended to be debut novelist and litblogger Mark Sarvas, whose new book is all about a dude who gets himself in sticky situations by spinning elaborate and unnecessary falsehoods. "So even though I think it's a little weird that he's asking me to help him get his car out of impound, I'm also thinking, 'Well, it's Saturday night, maybe he couldn't reach anybody, and you know, I'm going to see him on Tuesday. . . .' And he didn't say anything about money for a really long time," Skylight Books' Kelly Slattery told the LAT. Slattery didn't ultimately fall for the ruse.

Book Soup's Tosh Berman, who dealt with a hoaxer pretending to be Nick Hornby, speculates that there's a 'gang' on the loose that "has several members -- one black man, one English guy, one woman -- to make impersonation easier. 'It's like the Mod Squad or something.'" This is a dastardly gang indeed. Like booksellers don't have enough problems!

I would have visited Dutton's Brentwood Books while I was in town for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books no matter what; my relationship with the store, and its role in shaping my career, is pretty well documented. And I knew going there this last weekend was essential, because of the store's impending closure this Wednesday. Still, I was emotionally unprepared for the "final days" atmosphere when I arrived: The north wing of the store, which used to house the serious nonfiction and the classical music CDs, was already shuttered, with much of the remaining inventory shifted to the west wing—where there was plenty of room because they hadn't been stocking new releases for a while now.

I sifted through the remaining paperback fiction, trying to remember various authors I'd been meaning to look into for a while now, and though owner Doug Dutton was obviously distracted, he was able to give me one last bit of advice about a CD I was contemplating. And then there was the two-volume Herman Melville biography by Hershel Parker—not only did they have it in stock, they had multiple copies, probably the only place outside the John Hopkins university bookstore that would! I snagged the least shopworn copies and added them to my pile...

I was heartened later that evening, at the LAT Book Prizes, when Kenneth Turan started the evening with a tribute to Dutton, which drew the only standing ovation of the evening. (Not even Maxine Hong Kingston, receiving the Robert Kirsch prize for American writing in the west, got quite as enthusiastic a response.)

Bookstores may have posted an 11.3 percent gain in sales for February, but the members of the Association of American Publishers are only reporting a 4.8 percent increase for the month. When you look at January and February together, though, the gap shrinks considerably: The Census Bureau's survey of bookstores shows a 6.7 percent rise compared to the first two months of 2007, the AAP says 6.2 percent.

You might recall my open-ended inquiry about the book(s) that could be responsible for that strong uptick at the bookstores—if the AAP numbers are anything to go by, it probably wasn't an adult hardcover (sales down 26.4 percent), but it might have been a trade paperback (sales up 30.8 percent). Children's and YA books are both hanging in there; hardcover was up 8.1 percent in February, and paperbacks are up 7.2 percent.