Southern Bookselling’s Jewell, Back in Place

Wanda Jewell (center) caught up with her brothers, Steve and Wayne, at last weekend’s annual trade show for the Southeast Independent Booksellers Alliance in Greenville, South Carolina. According to Julie Schoerke, an independent publicist and occasional GalleyCat correspondent, attendance was up at this year’s event, and the attendees were thrilled to see Jewell, SIBA’s executive director, in such good health after undergoing breast cancer surgery earlier this summer. One of the highlights of the weekend, Schoerke adds, was a charity auction in which bookstore owners bid for dinners with guest authors at Greenville’s best restaurants: “Unfortunately, one of the buses carrying the authors and winning book sellers to the downtown restaurants hit a car which delayed the party for a while,” she tells us. (Nobody in the bus was hurt, though). “The trolley, carrying the rest of the group, got side tracked and some of the riders decided to take their chances, walking the rest of the way in the rain, which just added to the stories the next day on the tradeshow floor.”