Briefs: Clinton Excerpt Recalls Trump As “Creep,” And More

Excerpts from Hillary Clinton‘s forthcoming What Happened were released to Morning Joe and played widely in the media this morning. Recalling the presidential debate shortly after the release of the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump, Clinton writes: “This is not OK, I thought. It was the second presidential debate and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.

“It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘back up you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.'”

People
At Random House Children’s Noreen Herits rejoins the publicity team as executive director, reporting to Dominique Cimina. She was previously director of marketing and publicity at Workman. Jillian Vandall has been promoted to senior manager of publicity.

Bookselling
Amazon will open their ninth and tenth bookstores this week, in Bellevue, WA and San Jose, CA. VP of Amazon Books tells the Seattle Times about the scope of their plans, “We’d like to be able to have as many stores as would make sense.” And she says asking for a local store is a top visitor request: “Half of our comments are people asking for our stores in other places.”

The story carries the usual explanations of what an Amazon Books store looks like, and how the company thinks it’s special by drawing on lots of data, interpreted by humans, to determine the very modest number of titles an average store stocks. (The implication is that other bookstores select titles…at random, or based on personal preference….?)

Cast says the new stores offer more space between aisles after customers complained about “butt brush” in some of the stores. And they continue to learn what’s obvious to other booksellers: “The Amazon Books team was particularly excited about the success of the kids’ section, which Cast said draws a lot of traffic for a bookstore that size. That’s a function of the way the books are chosen — only those that are highly rated on the Amazon site make the cut — and described by customer reviews. ‘Lots of parents come to malls to go into our store and buy kids’ books,’ she said.”

Features
The LA Times looks at how local publisher Colleen Dunn Bates at Prospect Park Books found success with careful publication of selected cookbooks and is the area’s “only independent publisher of cookbooks.” They note, “While her non-fiction and fiction catalogue expanded from two to 13 titles annually, she publishes only one cookbook a year, always by a local chef (or, in the case of ‘L.A. Mexicano,’ multiple chefs) with a following.”

Author Thomas Ricks writes in the Atlantic about how longtime editor Scott Moyers persuaded him to completely rewrite his recent book on Churchill and Orwell — and Moyers was completely right.