No. 1 Bestseller!

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DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT was listed today at No. 1 on the Barnes & Noble Top 100 bestseller list for Baseball, and it has moved up to #13 in Sports, passing Tom Brady & Shalene Flanagan. Thanks to everyone who is enjoying this new book from me and Blue River Press, with a Foreword and inspiration from the great Brooks Robinson. See the BN Sports Top 100.

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Milestone with a marker

Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue signing on Dec. 21, 2017

Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue signing on Dec. 21, 2017

Wednesday's signing at Barnes & Noble Court Street in Brooklyn was the 39th BN store across the country I have hit on the DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT book tour since our October launch, and Thursday was the milestone 40th at the BN Fifth Avenue location at 46th Street. You can visit the Book Tour page here at marknewmanbooks.com/tour and see the stops.

Thanks to all of the amazing BN team members I have met along the way, starting with our launch at the Evansville (IN) location, followed by The Grove in Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale and St. Louis and New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delware visits as well. That's a lot of signed copies of the book Cal Ripken called "the perfect gift for any baseball fan," and I also want to say thanks for everyone who has gone to those stores and snapped them up! Please make sure you like the official Facebook page at facebook.com/MarkNewmanAuthor and follow instagram.com/marknewmanauthor so we can share our experiences with the book!

Signing at Barnes & Noble Court Street in Brooklyn on Dec. 20, 2017

Signing at Barnes & Noble Court Street in Brooklyn on Dec. 20, 2017

Over the river and through the woods, to BN stores we go

Barnes & nOBLE STATEN ISLAND BOOK SIGNING ON 12/18/17

Barnes & nOBLE STATEN ISLAND BOOK SIGNING ON 12/18/17

UPDATED 12/19/17.
BOOK TOUR PAGE JUST UPDATED - 38 BARNES & NOBLE APPEARANCES AND COUNTING...


From Friday through Monday, I signed each day at Barnes & Nobles stores throughout New Jersey and New York, bringing the total of BN stores visited to 38. This past weekend included a Barnes & Noble author event at Paramus (NJ) on Friday night, then the third consecutive weekend of #BarnesandNobleStormingTour store signings within the Northeast, then a meet & greet event at Barnes & Noble in Nanuet (NY) on Sunday, and then a visit to Staten Island to sign many books they have in stock. That was pretty cool, considering I usually am running over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the opposite direction for the NYC Marathon! Great stores!

The first #BarnesandNobleStormingTour across 9 Connecticut BN stores was such a success, the Jeep made the trip on the next weekend through crazy snow and to 10 BN stores throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. This #BarnesandNobleStormingTour went to: Clifton, Clark, Edison, East Brunswick, Princeton, Moorestown, Cherry Hill (all in NJ on Saturday), then Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia (after 20-minute MLB Network Radio appearance to talk about the book while parked outside the Philly store!), Concord Pike in Wilmington, Delaware, and finally Freehold (NJ).

See the @MarkNewmanAuthor Instagram page for all the posts with a ton of pics and videos, and thanks to the BN stores that also posted about the signings! This has been an incredible journey, not just getting a book from manuscript to market, but this holiday season of helping to put DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT into eager baseball fans' hands for gifts!

All those stores now have signed copies waiting for you, at least while they last. Give them sticker copies for a gift!

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On TV: Beyond the Game

Thanks to John Vorperian for having me on for an episode of his respected and long-running TV/Internet show "Beyond the Game" in White Plains, N.Y. It was fun to talk baseball and DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT in the studio. CLICK HERE TO WATCH.

The show originally aired on White Plains Community Media for Westchester County viewers on Nov. 3 and 4. If you want to see it there on TV, it will air again on Friday, Nov 24, at 9 p.m. ET, on Fios 45 and Altasce 76. Then it will air on Saturday, Nov. 25 at 1 p.m. ET.

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Thanks, Evansville!

Thanks to a standing-room-only crowd that came out to Barnes & Noble in Evansville on Saturday for a fantastic book launch event! We teamed up to raise funds for Public Education Foundation of Evansville, and I am especially thankful to PEF Executive Director Amy Walker for speaking to the audience about PEF's mission, and to Kathy Singer of PEF and Mariana of Barnes & Noble for organizing such a beautiful and memorable afternoon. Here's a slideshow of the afternoon!

One takeaway: People are buying DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT not just as a single copy, but in batches as gifts for so many people from all walks who love baseball, no matter what your team or town.

We're off and running! Looking forward to many more book signings and readings to come! Please be sure to LIKE the official Facebook page for our book at facebook.com/MarkNewmanAuthor! Ask your local Barnes & Noble if they have the book yet, and please leave a review if you order it online, as that will help us appear in search results. Thanks!

Book Review by Perfect Pitch

Thanks to Susan Spector -- Met Opera oboe, longtime Mets season ticket holder with husband Garry, and staple of the MLB.com/blogs community for a decade -- for her review of DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT on the Perfect Pitch blog! Please visit Susan's blog and check out the review. Great custom beret, too! Here's an excerpt:

      Fans, the media, statisticians, bloggers, and baseball historians have time-honored criteria for quantifying or qualifying an individual athlete’s performance relative to his peers.  They are also afforded their respective platforms for self-cultivated “highlight reels” of their own selection.  Some of the crowning points shared with Mark by these ballplayers might be seen as relatively unremarkable, from a strictly baseball point of view; what is noteworthy is the reason why this is the hit selected by the player himself and given its own chapter in Mark’s book.

     The subject of each chapter is certainly a measure of athletic accomplishment, but more often a player’s selection had more to do with the context in which the hit was made. Mark skillfully weaves together the specifics of the play with anecdotal information from the player.  Reading these vignettes, one can easily visualize the whimsical grin playing across the face of a player or the slight misting up of a player’s eyes involved in the hit’s memory and his retelling a story that, for that player at least, has obviously become the stuff of myth or legend.  The inclusion of each player’s “back story”, the opportunity for him to “set the stage” and to add personal embellishments to his saga:  this is what makes the book fascinating reading.

Click here for the full review >>

Barnes & Noble book signing / USA launch

I am proud to be launching DIAMONDS FROM THE DUGOUT in my hometown of Evansville, Indiana, at the Barnes & Noble on Green River Road. The book signing is from 1-2 p.m. CT on Saturday, October 14. Please buy the book there, because part of the proceeds will benefit the Public Education Foundation Evansville. I became a reader and writer in the Evansville public school system, and my parents worked for the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp. Evansville is home to Don Mattingly, one of the 115 legends included in the book. Hope to see you there!

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