"I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require. I altered events and details all the way through the book. . . . I made other alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which portrayed me in ways that made me tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am. . . . My mistake, and it is one I deeply regret, is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience."--James Frey, from the author's note that will now accompany A Million Little Pieces, as posted on Random House's Web site.

Lambda Rising Bookstores, which saved New York City's Oscar Wilde Bookshop from closing in January 2003, has sold the store to long-time manager Kim Brinster. The sale was effective yesterday.

Deacon Maccubbin of Lambda Rising, which has stores in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Md., Rehoboth Beach, Del., and Norfolk, Va., said that the company, Brinster and staff have brought Oscar Wilde "back from the brink and restored financially sound operations. This is an exciting time for New York's favorite and oldest gay bookstore."

Maccubbin was encouraged to open Lambda Rising after a visit to the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in 1972. (The store was founded in 1967.) "Oscar Wilde was an important inspiration to me," he said in a statement, "and it has been very gratifying to return the favor by keeping the store open. It is fitting that we now return it to local ownership."

Books & Books, with four stores near Miami, Fla., is making "an exception" to its usual approach of recommending only books and putting in a good word for a documentary film, Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family, directed by Susan Kaplan, owner Mitchell Kaplan's sister. The film opens tomorrow at the Regal South Beach Cinema near the Miami Beach Books & Books. Susan Kaplan will attend the 7:25 showing each day and speak afterwards; moviegoers can redeem their ticket stubs for a 20% discount at Books & Books.

Three of Hearts, which has played at a series of film festivals, chronicles the "new kind of family" established by New Yorkers Dr. Steven Margolin, his life partner, Sam Cagnina, and their shared wife, Samantha Singh.

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Today is the pub date of Dope by Sara Gran (Putnam, $21.95, 0399153454), the book that led to the "unmasking" of Mad Max Perkins, whose blog about publishing had intrigued so many people. (Of course, as everyone now knows, Mad Max is Dan Conaway, Gran's editor.)

Thanks to Carl Lennertz and his blog for a reminder about this book, which he and many others are already raving about. Also on his site, Carl mentions another interesting site: Neglected Books, which has "lists of thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste." Check it out.

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Sales of A Million Little Pieces dropped for the third week in a row, the Book Standard reported. In the week ended January 29, sales were 58,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, reflecting a steady drop in sales from 145,000 in the pre-debacle week ended January 8.

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Yesterday Amazon.com officially launched its Amazon Connect program, under which authors' comments will be posted on an Amazon customer's home page--if the customer has bought the author's work in the past or signed up to receive comments by the author.

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Just a week after donating $200,000 to the Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon, which last year raised $4.1 million to fight pediatric cancer, Barnes & Noble College Booksellers has donated $300,000 to support the Penn State Forum Speaker Series, Penn State Live reported.

The speaker series is a lunchtime event co-sponsored by B&N and the Penn State Faculty Staff Club, at which "leaders and policy makers" speak. The gift is intended to keep the 11-year-old series active for at least another decade. B&N manages the bookstores on 23 Penn State campuses.

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Karen Cross, most recently executive v-p of marketing at PGW, has been named v-p of publisher relations for Ingram Publisher Services, Ingram's distribution subsidiary that now has 18 publisher clients. Cross will be based in the San Francisco Bay area.

Cross will "lead our publisher relationships and will be a key part of assisting our clients in developing their sales, marketing and positioning strategies," Phil Ollila, senior v-p of IPS, said in a statement. She will also work with publishers on business development and help sign up new clients.

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The nominees for the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America, can be seen at the MWA Web site. The winners will be revealed at the MWA's 60th Gala Banquet on April 27 in New York City.

In our coverage yesterday of the Oscar nominations, we forgot to mention that Tsotsi, based on the 1980 novel of the same name by South African playwright Athol Fugard, has been nominated for best foreign film. The movie opens nationwide February 24, and Grove will publish a new edition of the book, Fugard's only novel, on March 2 ($13, 0802142689).

Tsotsi follows a week in the violent life of a Johannesburg gang leader.

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In other Oscar news, Newmarket Press has tie-ins to eight of the nominated movies:

• Good Night, and Good Luck: Bringing the True Story of the Legendary Edward R. Murrow/Joseph McCarthy Broadcast to Film, with the screenplay by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Q&A with Clooney and Heslov, essays by Fred Friendly and Joseph Wershba, archival photos and film stills ($19.95 trade paperback).
• Capote: The Shooting Script, including the screenplay by Dan Futterman, a foreword by Gerald Clarke, Capote's official biographer, Q&A with Futterman and director Bennett Miller, notes on In Cold Blood and an excerpt from Clarke's book, photos ($19.95 trade paperback).
• The Constant Gardener: The Shooting Script, including the screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, a foreword by John le Carre, an introduction by Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, photos ($19.95 trade paperback).
• Memoirs of a Geisha: A Portrait of the Film, a lavish title with photos by David James, introductions by Rob Marshall and Arthur Golden, a brief history of geisha culture ($40 hardcover).
• The Squid and the Whale: The Shooting Script, including the screenplay by Noah Baumbach, an introduction by Wes Anderson, Q&A with Baumbach, photos ($19.95 trade paperback).
• War of the Worlds: The Shooting Script, including the screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, an introduction by Koepp, Q&A with Koepp, photos ($19.95 trade paperback).
• Cinderella Man: The Shooting Script, with the screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman, introductions by Hollingsworth, Goldsman, director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer, photos ($18.95 trade paperback).
• Tim Burton's Corpse Bride: An Invitation to the Wedding, a behind-the-scenes account of the making of the animated film ($19.95 trade paperback, $29.95 hardcover).

Today on the Early Show, Con Coughlin speaks out his new book, American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror (Ecco, $26.95, 0060731265).

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Today KCRW's Bookworm gets graphic: John Carlin and Art Spiegelman on Masters of American Comics (Hammer/MOCA/Yale). As the show puts it: "Curator and comics expert John Carlin joins Art Spiegelman in a lively discussion of this sumptuously illustrated volume that contains essays by Jules Feiffer on Popeye, Matt Groening on Gary Panter, Jonathan Safran Foer on Art Spiegelman, and more."

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Peter Guralnick, author of Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke (Little, Brown, $27.95, 0316377945), performs today on the Leonard Lopate Show.

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show, Robert Wilson uncovers the Indiana Jones of the 19th century in his new book, The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax--Clarence King in the Old West (Scribner, $26, 0743260252).

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Today on NPR's On Point en point: French journalist Bernard-Henri Levy, whose new book is American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Random House, $24.95, 1400064341).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Robert O'Harrow Jr., the Washington Post reporter and author of No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society (Free Press, $15, 0743287053), now unveiled in paperback.

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, February 4

7 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment first aired in 1994, John Leo, a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, talked about his book Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police (S&S), a collection of columns addressing racism, censorship and political correctness.

Sunday, February 5

9 a.m. Public Lives. During an event held at the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vt., Bill Lofy, author of Paul Wellstone: The Life of a Passionate Progressive (University of Michigan Press, $19.95, 0472031198), discussed the late Senator from Minnesota. The author worked on Wellstone's staff and is communications director for Wellstone Action, an organization that provides training and leadership development for progressive activists and politicians. Includes Q&A.

10 a.m. After Words. During an event hosted by the Cambridge Forum in Massachusetts, professor Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco, $25.95, 0060766905), talked about Lewis's life and his influence on scholars.

12 p.m. In Depth: Taylor Branch. The third and final volume of his biography of Martin Luther King, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (S&S, $35, 068485712X), appeared last month. Viewers can join the discussion by calling in during the program or by e-mailing questions to booktv@c-span.org. (Re-airs Monday at 12 a.m.)

Barnes & Noble has announced the finalists for its 2005 Discover Great New Writers Awards. The winners in each category receive $10,000 and a year of additional promotion from B&N. Second-place finalists receive $5,000, and third-place finalists, $2,500. Winners will be announced March 1.

Fiction

• Kitty Fitzgerald for Pigtopia (Miramax Books), "an ambitious and inventive tale of a growing friendship between a misunderstood teenage girl and a social outcast with a porcine predilection."
• Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins), "a hair-raising novel of survival, narrated by a young boy conscripted into a ragtag guerilla army" in western Africa.
• Catherine Tudish for Tenney's Landing (Scribner), "a timeless collection of the subtly intertwined stories of the inhabitants of a Pennsylvania river town."

Nonfiction

• Louise Brown, for The Dancing Girls of Lahore (Fourth Estate), a "haunting foray into the lives of the women who ply an ancient trade in modern-day Pakistan."
• Nathaniel Fick, for One Bullet Away (Houghton Mifflin), "an inspirational account of his service as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps."
• Martin Moran, for The Tricky Part (Beacon Press), which raises questions about "the consequences of sexual abuse, and the possibility of forgiveness."

This year's fiction judges were Carrie Brown, Howard Frank Mosher and Samrat Upadyay. The nonfiction judges were Debra Dickerson, James Frey (!) and Tom Groneberg.

Like so many retailers, booksellers participating in the ABACUS financial benchmarking study continue to battle to boost gross margins and control expenses. Among the highlights:

The adage that the biggest stores make the biggest profits is not necessarily true, according to ABA's Avin Domnitz, who noted that "an economy of scale kicks in at the $1 million-$2.5 million range" of sales. At that level, the gap between gross profit and operating expenses is largest. And even as low as $750,000 in sales, stores have a "window for significant profitability."

The average net income for stores reporting to ABACUS in 2004 was -3.43%. But when stores with sales under $100,000 were excluded, average net income was -0.72%, still negative but less severe.

Sales per square foot of $250-$300 are a good goal for stores.

The top 30% most profitable bookstores reporting to ABACUS have an average profit of 6.6% and hold operating expenses at 42.3%.

In the third year of the ABACUS study, 256 stores reported; 90 have reported in each of the first three years. The next ABACUS study can be filled out online with a form that calculates automatically.

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In a session on budgeting, ABA's Avin Domnitz made the following observations:

Stores must be "conservative when budgeting sales. The worst mistake is to be overly aggressive on the sales budget because you will build the expense budget on those sales. The worst you can do [forecasting sales] is guess low."

Inflation is 4%-6% in the book business, which is greater than the overall inflation rate. (Domnitz predicted that the gap will lessen in the next few years.) Taking into account that level of inflation, many stores are probably selling the same number of units from year to year. "Units are the real measure of growth," he stressed.

Budgets should try to anticipate events and trends, but booksellers should know that there will always be unforeseen events that affect budgets in negative and positive ways. "Life is what happens when we're making budgets," he said. "You need a capital budget for when things go wrong."

To illustrate the need for context in budgeting and measuring a store's performance, he said the when he was co-owner of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, Milwaukee, Wis., one year, when Borders and Barnes & Noble began adding 80,000 square feet of book retailing space to the Milwaukee area, "we lost $100,000 and we were ecstatic. We had thought we would go out of business." Other years, the stores made $100,000, and "we knew we blew it," Domnitz continued, "because the ground was ripe to do far better than that and we didn't."

Cash payable management is "an important part of the business. You don't want to be paying bills too fast but you don't want going-on-hold calls."

There is "nothing deader than a dead book," he said, assuming that publicity and other factors are no longer helping sales. "If a book's not working, get rid of it." Sales trends "start slowly and end slowly."

Budgeting is about "how much cash your store needs to generate to meet obligations in a timely manner. . . . Budgeting asks this question: how much money will I need so I can write a check for everything that is due and owing when it is due and owing and pay it and have a balance of zero or above zero at the end of the month?"