Publishers Weekly Editor to Run Costa Mesa Store

The special 292-page issue of Publishers Weekly magazine, considered the bible of the book trade, offers some practical advice for the 20,000 people coming to the American Booksellers’ Assn. convention this weekend in Anaheim:

“Before packing your bags for Anaheim, spend some time with PW’s 1988 convention guide,” writes Allene Symons, the issue’s editor. “This year’s ABA may be at the epicenter of the West’s family entertainment zone, but California also has a rich and eccentric literary legacy.”

Symons, a novelist as well as a senior editor at PW, has obviously been taking her own advice.

After spending considerable time working on the issue, but before packing her own bags, she decided to make what some might call an eccentric literary move: She is trading in her high-profile job in Manhattan to manage Rizzoli International Bookstore in Costa Mesa.

In whatever spare time she can muster, the 43-year-old Long Beach native also hopes to follow her 1982 work, “Vagabond Prophet: A Novel of Nostradamus and His Time,” with a nonfiction book on retirement abroad.

Besides preparing the special convention issue for the last five years, Symons has been editing the 117-year-old magazine’s weekly section on bookselling and writing a monthly column on marketing. When she takes over next month at the Costa Mesa bookstore, she will remain on PW’s masthead as a contributing editor.

Extra Copies for Convention

Each year, work on the summer convention issue begins in the autumn. Thousands of extra copies are printed and distributed at the convention, although many of those attending bring their own.

“It’s a massive project to pull all this information together and then to boil it down,” she said.

This year, the sudden opportunity to return to Southern California “came all in the middle of this,” Symons said, tapping the magazine.

Despite the short notice, the shift from writing about the book trade to being a part of it is not daunting, she said.

As part of her PW reporting beat, she said, “I’ve been visiting the best bookstores in this country for six years. I’ve been immersed in this.”

The job at Rizzoli will be especially challenging, inasmuch as the competition at South Coast Plaza includes B Dalton, a chain outlet; Brentano’s, and, to some extent, even Scribner’s, a division of Rizzoli, in the Crystal Court.

Doubleday, another venerable name in the publishing industry, has a bookstore in Fashion Island at Newport Center.

Book Project on Back Burner

Managing the bookstore and gallery, Symons said, will be her “No. 1 priority,” with any work on her book about retiring abroad to be done sometime in the future, after a period of immersing herself in the store.

Symons said she saw this latest move as her completion of a circuit:

“I started in book retailing in Southern California and went to New York. Now is a good time to use that publishing overview as a bookseller back in Southern California.”