Mother-daughter booksellers hit television jackpot

This is one week this particular family will remember for all their days. First we have Margaret Osondu, owner of Osondu Booksellers in Waynesville, N.C. She’s been campaigning for months to get Oprah Winfrey to visit her town and store, learn about the value of independent booksellers and promote indies when she promotes books. And though that may still not happen, Shelf Awareness reports that Osondu got an email from Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Entertainment, to send a video of her store & town.

“We’re so excited,” Osondu told Shelf Awareness. “We’ve gotten some form e-mails from Oprah, so I’m used to them and I almost deleted this one. But then I thought, this looks different.” The video should be sent by Thursday, so Osondu had a videographer come by last night to film an event in the store. There will be more filming today. “They said they will let us know in two weeks,” she added.

But that’s not all. Osondu’s daughter Amanda Lydon, manager of Good Yarns Bookshop in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., got a call from the Today Show, asking to film an event at the store tomorrow night. Abby Seixas, a psychotherapist and author of Finding the Deep River Within: A Woman’s Guide to Recovering Balance and Meaning in Everyday Life, will appear at 7 p.m. The interest, Lydon said, apparently “stems from a story they are doing on Abby about her grassroots publicity attempt to get herself book attention.

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