Some of what we saw at BookExpo in New York this week:

• Fox Chapel Publishing, which inherited a license with grill maker Char-Broil for recipe books when it bought Creative Homeowner, has placed a seasonal standalone display for the books chainwide at Lowe’s, its first sales through the home improvement retailer. The 329-page book features 300 recipes. Meanwhile, the company signed a deal with Epic Rights for Woodstock Music Festival journals featuring a range of cover designs. The line is aimed at expanding Fox Chapel’s presence in gift stores, says Fox Chappel’s Christopher Reggio. The company also is readying eight journals featuring cover art from Brooklyn, N.Y. pop artist Dean Russo.
• Under a license with Pantone, Brown Trout Publishing will ship 160-page daily planners with sunset yellow, lime green, island aqua, ultra violet, charcoal gray and tomato red covers. The 16-month planners, which will begin being sold in August, will be joined by a 2019 calendar and journals. Brown Trout also will ship a planner later this year based on Pantone’s “color of the year,” which is typically selected in June, says the company’s William Wagner. It also signed a license with time management training company Franklin Covey for a line of 2019 daily/monthly, weekly/monthly and one-year monthly planners that will ship later this year.
• Looney Labs will launch sales Aug. 2 of classic Star Trek and Star Trek Next Generation versions of its Fluxx card game. The 100-card game features 25 different designs and deepens Looney’s licensed card game business, which also includes Dr. Who versions of Fluxx. Looney also is readying a version of its Loonacy card matching game featuring designs by graphic artist and children’s book illustrator/author Mary Engelbreit for release in September.
• Nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s is a key driver of licensed book sales, with titles tied to Dungeons and Dragons leading the way, said Amy Cox Williams of Ingram Group during a panel on  “What’s Trending: Insights and Observations.” All Minecraft-related books also “continue to do well” as the fan base for the Microsoft-owned mobile game grows, Williams said. She also noted sharp spikes in sales of books that have been transformed into feature films occurring when the films’ trailers are shown in theaters and online — sometimes six months before the film’s release date. For example, sales of the 2011 Ernest Cline novel  Ready Player One jumped 60 percent when trailers for the Steven Spielberg-produced film version began appearing, Williams said. And in the run up to the February, 2017 HBO debut of “Big Little Lies”, a Liane Moriarty novel first published in 2014, sales of the book tripled, Williams said. Sales of Moriarty’s other novels also jumped 600% as the series’ fans sought out the other books she had written, Williams said. Another new development she pointed to relates to a variation on normal distribution timing. “The Weight of Gold: Winning is Only the Beginning,” written by snowboarder Shaun White and Neil Strauss, will launch as an audiobook on Amazon in November before becoming available as a hardcover book, the reverse of the typical distribution path, Williams said.

Contacts:

Brown Trout Publishing, William Wagner, National Accounts Mgr., 424-290-6102, wwagner@browntrout.com

Fox Chapel Publishing, Christopher Reggio, VP Content, 717-283-2802, reggio@foxchapelpublishing.com

The Ingram Group, Amy Cox Williams, Content Management and Merchandising Dir., 615-298-8200, amy@theingramgroup.com

Looney Labs, Kristen Looney, CEO, 301-441-1019, Kristin@looneylabs.com