All Things Do Conspire Against Me

I stayed in town late on Wednesday night, killing time at my desk before heading off to the class. Hooray for Battlestar Galactica previews on YouTube. The time came to face the cold. Went out, bought myself a cinnamon coffee, and hied on over to the CWE building.

The class was canceled. Sick instructor. Boo.

So, looks like I'll be trying again in January.

Still Alive!

I've been doing mostly non-booksellery things the last few weeks, including holiday stuff, writing, and putting in a floor in our kitchen.

However, I haven't been entirely inactive. Last Thursday, I went to an info session at the Center for Women & Enterprise to get an idea of the kinds of classes they offer. I've just signed up for another class that runs this Wednesday night, "Steps to Starting a Business."

It was described as a two-hour course that helps potential businesswomen get started, a kind of overview of things you'll need to take into consideration and what sorts of planning to be, well, planning.

I'm pretty excited about it. The instructor who led the info session seemed to know her stuff and was enthusiastic about the organization. I will most likely be signing up for other courses that they offer, which are longer sessions and spread out over multiple weeks. They run courses in semester-like cycles, so I believe there will be new classes beginning in January or February. Looks like I decided to get off my ass at the right time.

More to come...

One Small Step

I could swear I bitched about NPR's only linking to Amazon on their site somewhere around here, but I can't seem to find the post. Maybe I spent so much time composing it in my head, I never actually typed it out.

So, in a nutshell, for a long time, NPR has had links to Amazon alongside titles that have appeared on their programs. For an organization that relies so heavily on its communities, this always seemed a little off. I have NPR's books section as one of the RSS feeds on my google homepage. There are always titles mentioned that I'm curious about, but that little Amazon button has made me cringe. We've donated directly to NPR and WBUR during their fundraising weeks, so I certainly don't feel like I'm denying them support if I don't order from Amazon.

Recently, both NPR and The New York Times have added links to Booksense to their sites.

It's long overdue, but here's hoping it will catch on and other places will follow their leads.

New Year's Resolution

Okay, it's a bit early for one, but I've done a lot of rambling about books and bookstores recently, but not very much about what I'm doing to work towards actually opening one, which is, y'know, what this blog is supposed to be all about.

A friend of mine attended some of the programs at The Center for Women and Enterprise last year, and she loved it. I've been hemming and hawing and thinking about going, myself, but have yet to sign up. Mostly, I've been thinking that I have time, no worries. But, well, this blog's coming up on a year old, and aside from trying to pay down some bills, I don't know that I've accomplished all that much towards opening a bookstore.

It would be nice to post about something I've learned, or progress made - even though my job sends me to regional trade shows, I don't always have the time to attend the bookselling sessions. When prospective booksellers are sitting in a room learning about the perils and pitfalls of owning a store, I'm usually busy opening boxes with my Swiss Army Knife and trying to make the tables look presentable for when the floor opens.

Five minutes ago, I signed up for the December 6th info session. It's more than a month away, and I'll probably wait until January to take actual classes, but it's a start.

Oh, Good Lord.

The Harry-banning isn't over yet. A pastor at St. Joseph's School in Wakefield, MA, has yanked the books off of the library shelves because "themes of witchcraft and sorcery were inappropriate for a Catholic school."

From the Globe article:

"He said that he thought most children were strong enough to resist the temptation," said one mother who asked that her name not be used because she did not want her family to be singled out. "But he said it's his job to protect the weak and the strong."

Resist what temptation? There aren't exactly any instructions on, say "How to Hold a Black Mass" in there. Or "Host a Seance in 12 Easy Steps!" I can't imagine this pastor has actually even read the books. Does he think his students are going to run around, pointing sticks (eleven-and-a-half inches, birch and unicorn hair, springy) at doors and shouting "Alohomora"?

Okay, so they might. But they'd be pretending, because that's what kids do. You give them a book (or a TV show, or a video game) that stirs their imaginations and they'll play in that world. It's part of growing up. It doesn't mean they're sacrificing cats or trying to raise the devil.

What, is he afraid alohomora might actually work?

And why now, after the series is over? From this article, it looks like the series might have been featured in the sixth grade's summer reading list, but it's hard to believe he's only hearing about Harry Potter now, because of the reading list. The first book was published nearly ten years ago; they've been bestsellers from very early on.

When we heard the news report this morning, my husband and I figured it was more likely they were being pulled because of Rowling's revelation that Dumbledore was gay.** However, the banning happened a month ago, well before her announcement late last week. I'm guessing it won't help get the books back onto the shelves, but it wasn't the original reason. I'm not sure why it's taken a month for the story to break.

The parents seem to have mixed feelings about it - some are angry, some agree with the ban, some support "the spirit" of what the pastor did. I'll be interested to see what the kids' responses will be.



**The reason I didn't blog about that is because Neil Gaiman sums it up nicely over at his journal. Short version: there are always things authors know about their characters that don't make it into the books, and don't ever have to because those things aren't important to the story. Dumbledore's sexual orientation is one of those things.

What I Did on My Autumn Vacation

About a week and a half ago, my husband and I went up to North Conway, NH, for our anniversary. We did all sorts of neat non-book-related things that will eventually go up on the other blog. As Friday afternoon grew steadily more rainy and gloomy, we sought out White Birch Books. We'd been to North Conway once before, in mid-February a few years ago. Then, we'd walked all along one side of the street, poking our heads into the shops. Just as I thought my nose was about to freeze off and it was time to turn back, we stumbled across the bookstore.

Inside is gorgeous. I'm not sure if it was originally a house that was renovated to become a bookstore, or if it's always been a bookstore that looks like a house. I didn't think to ask while I was there. Check out the virtual tour and you'll see what I mean.

I hadn't brought a book with me for the trip. I'm sure I could have opened the trunk of my car and found any number of ARCs in there from previous trade shows, but I wanted something new. Starting at one end of the fiction section, I moseyed along, reading titles, peering at covers, sometimes picking a book off the shelf and looking at descriptions, but I had no idea what I was in the mood to read.

There was one book I happened across, paused to look at, and put back - its title had jogged my memory about another book I'd heard good things about, but - horror of horrors - the name escaped me. I continued poking along, and when nothing else really caught my fancy, I went back to the one I'd looked at for a while.

I took my copy of The City of Dreaming Books up to the register, and while they were ringing it up, I got to play a game of bookseller mnemonics.

"So, I'm looking for this book," said I. "I don't know if it was a bestseller, but I think it was a booksense pick a while back. I know it was about books, or about a bookseller, and it had the word 'glass' in the title."

They didn't remember it right off, but it sounded tip-of-the-tongue familiar, and came up with the title pretty quickly: The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. It's coming in paperback soon. Another to add to the to-be-read pile.

The City of Dreaming Books, by the way, is very good so far. I'm not quite sure what I'd call it. Literary fantasy? Years ago, the main character's authorial godfather (yes, godparents whose duty it is to give you a good background in books. DO WANT) was sent a manuscript. It was the best piece of work he'd ever read. He sent the author to Bookholm - a city devoted to all things book-related, with 24-hour antiquarian bookstores and catacombs of lost classics hidden underground - to find a publisher. The author disappeared. On his deathbed, godfather sends godson to find the author. I'm not terribly far in, but I'm hooked.

Oh,and by the way, the protagonist is a dinosaur.

How Cool is This?

Chronicle Books sent ten employees to New Orleans to work with Habitat for Humanity.

A lot of publishers will match their employees' charitable donations. This is a step above. I would love, love, love to do something like this.

Check out their blog from the experience. It's touching and funny, and reminds us that there is still a ton of work to be done, post-Katrina.

I don't know that I'd ever be able to do something on this scale when I open a store, but I will certainly support my employees' involvement in the community - local, national and global.

Nobel Prize for Literature - Doris Lessing

I've been hearing the announcements all week, and this morning, caught the news that Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She's the 11th woman to be awarded the prize, and in the committee's words is "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

I'm adding Mara and Dann to my to-be-read list (which is already several miles long, but still...) Hooray for more far-future/post-apocalyptic fiction!

Also, her agent said she was out shopping when the prize was announced. For some reason, this is making me grin - chances are, she was out shopping for food or clothes, but imagine being in a bookstore and hearing it there.

To Add to the To-Read List

November's Book Sense Picks have been announced. I very much need to get my hands on a copy of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, just from the title alone.

I very much wish that I could link to a blurb about the book over at Booksense, but unfortunately, the way the site is set up, you have to pick a local bookstore before you can see book info. If they ever do an overhaul of the site, that's the one thing I'd love to see them change - let us peek at the book, then choose a local store to buy it from. There might be rhyme and reason as to why it's not like that currently, but I haven't gone asking.

I owe so many book reviews on here. I haven't forgotten, honest.

Kindred Spirits Across the Pond

These two booksellers found out in August that the Waterstones they worked at was closing, and they decided not to let that be the end.

They put their heads (and a business plan) together and are in the process of opening their own bookstore. You can be damned sure I'll be following their progress.

Stephen King is a Wise Man

When I was looking for something to read on my way out to GLBA, I blinked up at the Best American Short Stories 2007 collection for a moment. Edited by Stephen King, how could I go wrong?

But I already had two books in my hands - Neuromancer and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The latter came highly recommended here, and since three of her favorite books - The Stand, The Time Traveler's Wife, and The Handmaid's Tale - also make my own top ten list,** I passed up King's choices for The Road. I wasn't disappointed.

King's piece in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review touches upon short stories in the present day, and how it's getting harder and harder to find them, or at least to find them easily accessible when you're poking about in a bookstore. Magazines that carry great fiction have been relegated to lower and lower shelves as flashier celebrity-filled pages demand more space.

It's something to think on, for when Books That Don't Suck opens its doors. Our magazine shelves at my old store had three sections. You could probably take a look at what was displayed where to see the interests of the employees - Fangoria and Zoetrope were in places of reverence, in the top two sections, while fashion magazines and things like Teen Beat hung out on the bottom shelves.

I know a hypothetical magazine section in a hypothetical bookstore doesn't do much for the state of short fiction collections right now, but this is definitely something I'll keep in mind in future days.

And I have to go pick up a copy of the Best American Short Stories 2007, sooner rather than later.

**The other three I just haven't gotten around to yet, but I loved Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, so we'll call it three and a half.

Banned Books Week

This year, Banned Books Week 2007 runs from September 29th through October 6th. We're two days in - my apologies for not posting on Saturday (I was off being a bookseller.)

These next few days celebrate our freedom to read and raise awareness about who would try and take that freedom away. Every year, all over the country, people are challenging books because they've deemed them inappropriate. Sometimes it's a parent who doesn't want his/her child reading a title for school. Sometimes it's someone who doesn't have kids, but wants to "protect" young minds. Others, it's not even a book on a school reading list - it might be a book that someone doesn't even want on the shelves of a bookstore for anyone - of any age - to read.

American Booksellers for Freedom of Expression has a list of banned books (and the stories behind the bans/challenges) here.

The American Library Association has their own page for Banned Books Week, and a list of events for Banned Books Week with a shiny interactive map for finding events in your area.

A quick list of ALA Banned Books links:

• The most challenged book of 2006
  
• The ten most challenged books of 2006
  
• The 100 most frequently challenged books, 1990-2000
  
• The most frequently challenged authors of 2006
  

If you haven't spent an afternoon in a bookstore this week, now's a good time to go to your local indie and ask them to recommend a banned book for you to go home and curl up with.

If You Don't Think I Suck

...and want to see non-book related ramblings, I've set up a little home away from home called L'esprit d'escalier over at my much neglected, never really used website. I figured since I'm paying for the hosting, it should maybe go to some kind of good (or at least mediocre) use.

That way, when I want to blog about things that have nothing to do with bookselling, I don't feel so guilty going off on a tangent here. So, there's not much there just yet, but go on over and take a peek if you'd like. You don't even have to bring a housewarming gift.

MORE Shiny

My productivity level is fast approaching zero, thanks to OfficerGleason over there.

Just before lunch, he introduced me to Goodreads. Now, I've been avoiding this kind of site - there's also the intriguing and Gaiman-touted Library Thing, and I'm sure there are others along the same lines. I suppose the user profiles at Amazon and the like count as well.

It's not that I'm avoiding them because I don't like them.

Quite the opposite.

I'm avoiding them because I love the idea of them - listing books I have, seeing what other people are reading, finding recommendations...

That noise you hear is me going "squee" (ignore the softer "thud" of my productivity hitting the floor - I'll clean that up later.)

So, now that I'm friended, well...

There's me. Just a list for now - far from complete, and still a work in progress. Reviews on some of them soon to come, I hope. I feel odd having so many that are four and five stars, but that's also because (I think) these are books that I do love, so of course my favorites are coming to mind. I'm sure there will be more twos and threes (and, yes, even the occasional one) when I'm actually sitting in front of my bookshelves and inputting from home.

The one complaint I have so far - always, with the links to the chains. Goodreads can even pull the list of things you've ordered from your Amazon profile, if you want it to. Part of me wants to boycott sites like this that don't link to indie stores, but that feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face.

I wonder how indie bookstores can best take advantage of sites like this. Most likely, the best way would be for a bookstore to start its own profile, and in every review, link to its own website. I'm just not sure how keen Goodreads would be on that - they very likely make a profit of books that are purchased through an Amazon referral. Something to ponder, at least, while I'm on my uploading spree.

Classics + Technology = WIN

I have this running list of classics I want to read that I didn't get around to in high school and college. Sometimes it feels like I'll never get around to them. My job requires me to live almost six months in the future when it comes to books - I'm reading and selling things that don't come out for another season. Plus, there are so many books by writers I love out on the shelves already, even when I'm reading current titles, I'm playing catch-up.

So, while I'm thinking half a year ahead and trying to keep up on good things from other publishers that are hitting the shelves now, I also have one eye on the past, and keep wishing I had time to read all the books that, for one reason or another, never made it onto my required reading lists in school. Part of that's my own fault - I spent most of my college years in the 17th century. So, Milton? Check. Shakespeare? Check. Jonson, Marlowe, Donne? Check, check, and check.

But Mark Twain?

*crickets*

I have no idea how I made it out of ninth or tenth grade without ever being assigned The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Now that I think about it, my high school English classes were a ton of Hawthorne, Dickens, and the Brontes. We read some of Twain's short stories, but never the books he's most famous for.

Then, once I started college, I took a course - British Authors to 1800 - with the most amazing professor ever. From there out, I tried taking at least one class of his each semester: The Metaphysical Poets, the Cavalier Poets, Shakespeare's Tragedies ("Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:/ Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so/ That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!"). I probably could have (and probably should have) added a concentration in that period to my major, but I never got around to asking what it would require.

I did take other lit courses, including at least one in American lit, but again, no Twain. Maybe the professors figured that we'd already studied him a thousand times and wanted to expose us to other writers - I have no issue with that. (Although, if there's one work I was assigned more than any other, it's Beowulf. I swear I read that for at least one class a year from freshman year in high school up through my college graduation.)

So, because there are apparently other people in the world like me - wanting to read these things, but never enough time in the day - the folks over at Daily Lit have come up with a brilliant plan. They've broken up books into 500-word chunks. You choose a book,they'll email a fragment to you each day. You can set it to arrive daily, weekdays only, or Monday/Wednesday/Friday. If you read your piece and have time for the next one, you can have it sent immediately.

I have the first installment of Tom Sawyer sitting in my inbox. Time for a test drive.

A Failed Attempt at Humor

This PW poll on banning books made me twitch.

I assume it's supposed to be a light-hearted sort of question: if you could ban a book, which would it be and why? Whoever came up with it is playing off of the OJ controversy and (it would seem) is not a fan of Rosie O'Donnell, either.

Normally, that sort of thing is a party game, an icebreaker, or something you do to allieviate boredom on a long car ride - if you could have dinner with any historical figure, living or dead, who would it be? If you were trapped on a desert island and could only take five CDs, which would you choose?

But... "What books would you ban?"

It chills me to think someone in the industry is entertaining the idea at all, and encouraging others to do so. The majority of the responders seem to be as horrified as I am.

Not only is it an invitation (no matter how tongue-in-cheek) to promote banning - some people will take it as an endorsement of such - it's also mean-spirited, calling on readers to throw out titles of books they didn't like and presumably trash them.

I know. The name of this blog is "Books That Don't Suck." Chances are, at some point, I'll say something mean about those books that I believe do suck. I hope that when that day comes I can balance my snark with honest criticism, not just bitchiness for bitchiness' sake.

Actually, as the title states, I'd much rather talk about books that don't suck - titles I enjoyed, that I think others could fall into and pass around ("Hey, have you read this? You should!")

But I will never, ever, encourage the banning of a book. Will I question why this or that got published? Or why fifty thousand readers are drooling over something I find to be complete drivel? Yes. I still won't suggest a book be banned, no matter how bad I think it is. Chances are, if I think something's bad, it's either poorly written (by my admittedly snobby standards) or in poor taste.

Perhaps the person who thought up this question for the daily talkback poll thought readers would chuckle and have a good time with it. What he or she neglected to consider, though, is what banning a book implies.

If you ban a book, you're saying no one should be able to read it. No one should be allowed to crack it open, read the words, and make their own decisions about the material contained within. You're saying it shouldn't be in libraries, it shouldn't be in bookstores, it shouldn't be in any place people can find it. You're deciding what is appropriate or inappropriate for someone else, taking that choice away from them.

Had the poll question been "Which book do you wish you'd never read?" I wouldn't be so peeved. There are several books I've read where I've turned the last page and said, "I want those six hours back." But for someone to ask us to suggest that books should be banned because they weren't to our liking? Never.

That's not okay. That's not cute. That's not funny.

Till Shade Is Gone, Till Water Is Gone

The sf/f world suffered another huge loss. Robert Jordan died yesterday. He'd been fighting amyloidosis and was, as he said in his blog posts, determined to beat it and to finish the series that's held so very many fans' imaginations over the years.

According to the webmaster of one of his biggest fansites, the series will still continue. What form it will take remains to be seen. Right now, the community is busy grieving its loss and celebrating his life.

I picked up the Wheel of Time series in college because my friends were all talking about it. They had theories about what would happen in the next few books and kept censoring themselves or referring to things in the vaguest sense they could so they wouldn't spoil it for me. It must have been either just after A Crown of Swords was published or in the months leading up to The Path of Daggers - by the time tPoD hit the shelves in hardcover, I was all caught up and theorizing right along with them.

Back then, I wasn't much of a fantasy reader, unless it was an Arthurian setting. I was a horror girl, burying my nose in the newest King (and tossing out Dark Tower theories the way the guys did with WoT), tearing through anything that might give me a scare. People had been recommending Jordan to me for years - there were a couple of avid fans among the bookstore employees and customers who insisted I'd enjoy them. So, when I finally broke down and started reading The Eye of the World, I didn't know if I'd like it.

Turned out, my friends, co-workers and customers were all right. I was hooked. The Arthurian references were probably a help - characters named Elayne, Gawyn, Galad, Lan, Nynaeve, Morgase, a city called Caemlyn. A sword in a stone. By the time I finished the first book and moved on to The Great Hunt, I was enthralled by the characters, the story and the world.

My favorite book in the series was the sixth, Lord of Chaos. Egwene, easily my favorite female character, comes into her own. Nynaeve finally breaks through her block. The next few books bogged down for me. I won't pretend that I've loved them all or that I haven't bitched about too much time spent on clothing descriptions, or that I wasn't tired of the Aes Sedai acting like frightened novices when other women stand up to them. The later books got slow. The world is huge; there are more than five main characters now. What started out as the story of Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene and Nynaeve has expanded far beyond them. There are whole nations and factions swept up in the plot, and I can't imagine being able to keep a tight rein on them when they're all vying for a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter of their own.

Even with my nitpicking, I'd have been in line for the final book's laydown to find out what happens to the world that first pulled me back to fantasy. He's had the last chapter written since the book began, and reportedly recorded many, many notes. Perhaps I'll still see that book.

If I hadn't read Jordan, I don't know that I'd have found George RR Martin, or Steven Erikson. Both came highly recommended from the fans at wotmania. I read the RJ newsgroup for a while, and from there discovered Making Light.

I'm not sure what it is that sets the sf/f community apart from other fandoms (although, perhaps I should expand this out to mean the whole speculative fiction world, because I don't know that I'd call Stephen King an sf/f author, even though the Dark Tower books and The Eyes of the Dragon are certainly fantasy, not horror...). Other bestselling authors, who are what I guess you'd call mainstream, sometimes forget that their readership makes them successful. There are nightmare stories about these men and women being horrible to booksellers, fans, anyone, simply because they're rockstars in the world of popular fiction.

But then you look on this side of the fence, and there are people like Martin, King, Michael Connelly, Christopher Moore, and, yes, Robert Jordan, who are so very involved with their fans and are so very beloved for it. You can tell the difference between authors who see fans only as "people who buy my books" and ones who remember that we're real people.

It's been a long time since I've really kept up with the WoT community - I was always a lurker, never a poster - but I'm there today, reading the condolences and farewells at Making Light and Wotmania and Dragonmount, and getting teary when I see how positively he affected peoples' lives. Some people met their spouses through the community, some people were having tough times in their lives and the books helped them through. That, right there, is the greatest measure of his success.

I know I'm about to echo what I said last week, for Madeleine L'Engle, but I've nothing more eloquent to say:

Farewell, Mr. Jordan. And thank you.

And the fire with all the strength it hath

I am currently in a bit of a funk.

Madeleine L'Engle has died.

I remember picking up A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door and losing large chunks of my days as I devoured them. It was summertime when I discovered them - I remember sitting on a chair in my mother's office, reading while she did her work. I had to have been... ten? Twelve? I couldn't have been much older than that, or I'd have been allowed to stay home by myself.

My father worked nights so he'd be home when I got out of school. He was home all day during the summer. But some days, he'd be gone before we woke up, off to drive the trains for overtime pay. I'd pack a pile of books and make sandwiches for my mother and I, and go into the office with her. I spent my day reading or helping her with some of her duties - faxing, filing, photocopying. There was this old typewriter at one of the desks, mostly used for invoices that needed carbon copies, but no one ever really needed it.

When I started reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I spent an afternoon on that thing memorizing Patrick's Rune and banging it out on the keys. I think fifteen-year-old Charles Wallace Murry might have been the first character from a book I had a crush on. (I'd say he was my first crush on a fictional character, but I'm pretty sure I had a thing for Green Lantern when I was a wee lass watching Superfriends. Shut up.)

Somehow, other books came along and pushed Madeleine L'Engle off my radar - I read Arms of the Starfish some time later, and then no more of her books for at least a decade.

Only a year or two ago did I learn there was a fourth book in the Time Quartet. I know, I should hang my head in shame. I was afraid that something would have changed from when I'd first read her books, way back in elementary school, that now that I was somewhere in my mid-twenties, I'd find the books childish, that some or all of the magic would be gone. I opened the pages of Many Waters with a mix of excitement and trepidation, not wanting a fond memory to be tarnished.

Turns out, I had nothing to fear. The twins Sandy and Dennys transported me along with them to the days before the Great Flood. I was just as enraptured by her words at twenty-seven as I was at ten.

I realize, too, that I have yet to read the last book (as far as I know) of the series, An Acceptable Time. It was rereleased earlier this year, and I'll be picking it up this weekend. Actually, I'm fairly certain I gave away my copies of the whole series a long time ago, so I'll likely be buying several of her books.

Farewell, Mrs. L'Engle. And thank you.

So Much for That

Oh, well. Barnes & Noble is selling it after all.

It's in response to customer demand - the book was up at the top of the preorder list on their site, so it follows that they'd see a reason to bring it into the stores.

And since this seems to be the first time Beaufort has done anything this on this scale, I can also understand wanting to get the books in stores for the first wave - yes, publishers can get reprints in pretty quickly, but for someone new to the game, better to have it in stock to start than wait while everyone else sells it.

Still, though, I'd appreciated what seemed like them taking a stand of a sort.

Now, granted, it's awfully hard for a national corporation to declare itself on one side of an issue or another - the last thing a retailer wants to do is alienate its customers. Some places can - you can see CEOs endorsing candidates, or making donations to a cause in the company's name - but for a bookstore, where you're supposed to be able to walk in and find shelves and shelves of information, it's an interesting conflict.

Do you refuse to stock books whose views you disagree with and, in a sense, prevent your customers from deciding for themselves on an issue? Or do you carry them and put money in the pockets of people you sneer at when they're panelists or guests on news shows you watch?

Indies have a bit more leeway with that - there are bookstores across the country whose whole existence is based on a political leaning. They're situated in communities who share similar views. B&N, Borders and Amazon can't do that - and really, their employees are scattered all across the country; there's no way to declare a corporate stance without potentially alienating your staff as well as your customers.

So, nice try, B&N. I won't say I agree with the decision, but I understand.

Still Doing It

I know, the play on the title's getting old. I'll stop, I promise.

Anyway, color me surprised: Beaufort's announced a 125,000 copy first printing on the OJ book. For reference - 125,000 is a large first printing, something about on par with other celebrity books. Expect bestselling authors like John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks or Stephen King to have between 500,000 and a million for their first printings. A new, unknown author could call 10,000 to 25,000 very respectable. A book from a small press might have around 5,000 for a print run, or maybe less. There's no shame in any of those numbers - just showing that 125,000 is nothing to scoff at.

And considering one of my first reactions to the announcement was "hey, smartass, what's your announced first printing?" I thought I should address it. (And hey, I was close - I guessed 100K.)

However.

He also claims to have 116,000 preorders, despite the fact that Barnes and Noble won't carry it.

That loud clanging you hear is my bullshit alarm going off. Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? I have to say no. There are some books whose demand will far exceed their first printings - if you were a bookseller looking for a copy of America: The Book when it first came out and you didn't order enough, you were SOL for several weeks while the publisher scrambled to get reprints in. But there are other titles whose hype far overreached the actual interest in the book, and they've tanked.

As I've said, all of Kampmann's claims and statements so far have made me raise an eyebrow. Publishers don't disclose how many copies of something one store or another ordered - I don't know if it's a legal thing or something that is simply not done, a taboo along the lines of asking an acquaintance how much they make in a year - so unless Borders and Amazon and the big wholesalers admit how many they're taking, we won't know until press-time whether or not this 116,000 is real.

Different Planets

It's a sobering thing to see that one in four adults read no books last year. The idea of going a month – hell, a week – without reading is completely alien to me.

Unless I'm reading it wrong, or the article doesn't mention it, this poll takes into account only literate adults, which means that it's not people who can't read that aren't reading; it's people who just don't care to. The idea of it boggles me. I've always surrounded myself with people who like to read. Every time there's a gathering of my friends or family, there will at some point in the evening be a book discussion - what I'm reading, what they're reading, what we liked or disliked about certain books. It's not uncommon for those of us in the middle of a series to sneak off into another room and discuss theories about upcoming books.

But then there are statements like this one: "Richard Bustos of Dallas, Texas...a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool."

Uh, why not read while you're poolside? The two activities aren't mutually exclusive.

And this one: "'Fiction just doesn't interest me,' said Bob Ryan, 41, who works for a construction company in Guntersville, Alabama. 'If I'm going to get a story, I'll get a movie.'"

Pardon me, what?

Now, I understand there are people who prefer non-fiction to fiction, just as there are people who prefer, say, Westerns to mysteries. Maybe Ryan is one of them. Although, most of the time, movies lose something in the translation from page to screen. Even Stardust, which I thought was wonderfully done, is less than the experience of the graphic novel.

Reading is more active than watching a movie. You have to do some work - letting the author lead you around while he or she reveals the story, imagining the characters and settings, hearing their voices. But done right, when a writer transports the reader, it's ten times better than anything on the screen. A hundred times.

The average person read four books last year. Or, excluding the ones whose total was zero, the average number is seven. How much of this can be attributed to there being more and more demands on peoples' time? More responsibilities at work, kids' extra-curricular activities, shiny new technology, things like that? Is there a measurable number of people who once spent their lunch hours reading and now poke through blogs instead? How about the amount of people who work through lunch because their jobs demand it?

Here are the rest of the AP-Ipsos Poll results for the curious - I don't think I can link directly to the PDF file, but it's easy to find. Go take a peek.

There will always be readers. So many people aspire to be writers, and part of what sparks that desire, more often than not, is their own love of reading. Bookstores aren't going to go away, publishers aren't going to shut down their presses. Maybe as the kids who grew up with Harry Potter achieve the august title of Adult, the next poll will show an increase in these disheartening numbers.

So, informal poll here, for the hell of it - how many have you read in the last year? Do you think you read more or less than you used to? What's changed?

If They Actually Do It

OJ's getting published after all. Ugh.

Although, it seems like we might be able to put published in quotes. Like this: "published."

When Sharlene Martin, the agent, announced that a New York publisher was interested and a deal had been reached, I wondered who on earth would pick it up, after all the hell that was raised when Harper tried putting it out late last year. I couldn't imagine, even in these days where any sensational news story seems to lead to a book being crashed into the list, that any of the big five would go anywhere near it.

Turns out none of them did. The book is being published by Beaufort Books, a small press who, up until this book at least, splits the cost of publishing with the authors.

Splitting the cost is a pretty way of saying the authors pay to be published. Yog's Law: Money flows toward the writer. (Yog is author James D. MacDonald, who is always watching out for new writers in danger of being scammed over on the Absolute Write forums.)

It seems pretty shady - they took the splitting-the-cost blurb off of their website. The publisher, Eric Kampmann, won't even throw out a ballpark number for the announced first printing when asked in an interview with Publishers Weekly. Something like this, I'd expect at least 100,000. I don't know how many Harper pulped, but it was at least that.

I have immense respect for Denise Brown. How Kampmann could sit beside her on The Today Show and not be horribly ashamed, I can't even begin to fathom.

The next question is, what are booksellers going to do with it? It's a tough question for all of them - whether or not to carry it, and if they do, how many copies? Should it stay behind the counter or be put on display? If they choose not to bring it into the store initially, will they be willing to special order it for customers?

There is absolutely a morbid curiosity factor to the whole thing. I'd imagine there would be a good chunk of customers who would come into the store, flip through to the chapter where he describes the murder, and put it back on the shelf without buying it. I also wonder how many people who would normally buy books from their local indie would instead order it through Amazon or B&N rather than be seen purchasing it.

This book was a bad idea. It's still a bad idea, no matter how much they're trying to spin it as benefitting charities and becoming the Goldmans' book. Personally, I wouldn't bring it into my store, if I had one. I think I would special order it for interested customers, simply because I hate the idea of telling people what they can and can't read, but I'd be uncomfortable doing it.

This Takes Some Serious Balls

Or, How Not To Run a Bookstore

Quick summary - an Australian bookstore chain is demanding that small publishers pay the store ridiculous sums of money to keep their books in stock. Small publishers' reponse: "Uh, no. Idiot." Only much more eloquent.

I don't think there's anything I could say on this any better than Michael Rakusin, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and the commenters on Making Light. Just go read.

It's going to take more than a wee bit of google searching, but I'm fairly certain I remember a U.S. publisher doing something along these lines ten years ago or more. I want to say it was McGraw-Hill, or MacMillan, but I don't remember which and I don't remember what the demands were. I just remember Laurie running a report and pulling every book that we carried from that publisher off the shelves and returning them.

Vague recollections are making me think they sent a letter saying "As of X date, we're not selling to independent bookstores anymore." If they were going to sell exclusively to the chains, that would have prompted Laurie to pre-empt them and send their titles back at least a month or two early. (Thinking about it, I also realize there's an easier way to find this old information than a google search - I have some booksellers with long memories. I'll ask one of them today.)

A Ramble Before Caffeine

Poking about a bit and updating the links over to your left there. I'm trying to keep a blogroll that has sites I actually trust and read on a fairly regular basis. Resisting the urge to fill it with every blog/site that makes me go "Ooooh, shiny" is tough. So, if there's a site you think is missing, or one you'd like me to peek at, please holler. There are tons and tons of book blogs out there and I'm trying to find the gems.

One thing I realized was missing was a link to American Booksellers for Freedom of Expression. They're fighting not only against banning books, but also against the USA PATRIOT Act and other legislation that threatens free speech.

I used to have this bumper sticker which read "Free people...publish books, buy books, sell books, read books...DON'T BAN BOOKS." I actually still have it somewhere because when I found it, I was driving this monstrosity that was just waiting to head off to the junk yard and couldn't bear to put it on a car I knew I wouldn't have for long. The sticker is from a long ago Banned Books Week and was most likely my first exposure to ABFFE. 2007's Banned Books Week is just over a month away. Expect ramblings and recommendations.

Three-quarters of the way through King Rat by the way. Over half of that list read...now I have to actually review them.

Housekeeping

Before I digress, an update on posts to come:

1. On On Writing: never before have I underlined so many passages in a book, thinking to myself, "Yes, oh, he's so very right." I've loved King's writing since I was in junior high, so maybe I was predisposed to clicking with the book, but still. He is a genius.

2. I do not recommend reading King Rat when one is eating. The book is brilliant, I love Mieville's descriptions. However, I was having lunch while reading about Saul's first breakfast. Eep.

Okay, now I digress.

In part of my crusade to get more things accomplished, I'm trying to keep on top of housecleaning. I live in a perpetual state of clutter - junk mail waiting to be shredded or used as fuel for our chiminea, books that need to be put away, comics waiting for a new long box, clean laundry waiting to be folded, stuff everywhere.

I have in my mind this idea that everyone in the world is neater than I am, and while I know it's not true, going to family parties and seeing spotless houses doesn't help. (Yes, deep down I know that chances are the place was a mess twenty-four hours before, and the host/hostess frantically shoved anything that doesn't have a place into closets and under beds to be dealt with later, but still.)

Which means that this post from Bitch, Ph.D and the resulting flickr community make me feel a whole lot better.

Now, I know that having a neat house won't magically open a bookstore for me, or make a manuscript spring forth, complete and edited, from my forehead, but it's strangely related in my mind. Get the house in order, other things fall into place. Plus, if there's nothing to clean, I won't be vacuuming cats when I should be writing. No, I won't be abandoning that hour of writing I mentioned in the last post, but I will be tacking some extra straightening up onto the evenings.

As a matter of fact, I can tie this into bookselling. At the end of the night, when the store is quiet, you straighten the shelves. Walk around, look for the books that have been shoved back in on top of the others, alphabetize, find the stack of books someone left on a stool and put them in their rightful places. Replace the books that have been bought from displays and fill in gaps. Sweep the floor. Clear away the coffee cup that someone left balanced on a shelf - whether it was forgotten or left because he or she couldn't be bothered to find a trash can, it's trash now.

You do that because it's your store, and you're proud of it. When books are in their rightful places, you can find them for customers without having to cast about muttering, "It's supposed to be right here..." A cluttered store isn't very inviting.

So, without a bookstore to straighten, looks like it's the house. And the same philosophy applies: I straightened one section at a time - what good is it to alphabetize the top shelf and walk away if the six beneath it are still a mess? So. One section at a time, one room at a time.

Onward.

Devil's in the Dreaming

Five years since I last worked there, two years since it closed its doors for good, and I'm still having Booksmith dreams.

Usually it's the one where I want to close the store but I can't, because there are still customers browsing. There's probably some deeper meaning to that, something about unfinished business or things getting in the way of stuff I want to get done, but I never really stop to examine what's going on in my life when I have them.

Last night, though, it was about going back to work there. I was in the back room, and Pat was sitting at the supervisor's desk doing something. Laurie was standing on the stairs, or maybe she was over by the back door, receving books. Maybe both. I don't know. Dreams are fluid like that.

I stood there shooting the shit with Pat and pulled the schedule (a hand-drawn, photocopied grid on an old clipboard, which was suspended by a rubber band hanging on a nail) towards me. There were empty spots on it, places where I knew they needed someone else on the shift, and I said, very casually, "You want me to come in? I can."

That was it, really. Nothing exciting, just me offering to fill in some shifts, come in 6-9:30 some nights, or work Saturday mornings.

It's pretty obvious that I miss it a hell of a lot, but it's more than that, too. I seem to start feeling restless over the summers, like there's more I could and should be doing. I like my current job very much - good people, a place I know and a company that treats its employees well, customers I get along with. The only thing dragging me down is all the lost time - I leave my house at 7AM and don't get home until 6PM. That's an eleven hour day, and I only get paid for seven.

It's the kind of job where I could absolutely justify working from home two or even three days a week. Hell, I could argue for working full-time at home, but I'll admit it's helpful to be able to get up and walk over to the credit department, or our shipping person, or someone in customer service, and get an answer right away. I know that it won't happen; it's wishful thinking.

That desire to work from home, or closer to it, makes me start poking through the classifieds. There are a couple of small presses near where I live. Sadly, there are no indie bookstores close to home (until I open one...) Nothing, though, compelling enough for me to put in a resume.
Another thing that probably prompted the dream was that I am, finally, reading On Writing. Stephen King had short stories published before he was out of his teens. I'm fast approaching 30, with lots of things started, a couple things finished, and nothing submitted. Believe me, I am not wearing rose-colored glasses and thinking I could make a handy bit of pocket cash through writing. I know it doesn't work that way. You write for love of the craft, not for the piles of cash you might rake in if you get lucky. Same thing with bookselling - you don't do it because you're going to make millions.

But if I have to have a part-time job, it's going to either be in a bookstore or sitting my ass down and writing more.

Do I need a part-time job? No. We do all right for ourselves. It's simply something I toy with from time to time. Money is one of those worries always hanging out in the back of my head. What if...? What if...? What if...? My current job prevents me from working in a bookstore - it's considered a conflict of interest. And really, even if I could, where would I find the time? I know there are people who do it all the time, working 40 hours at one job and 20 at another, or working one job during the week and another on weekends. That's not something I'm willing to do right now.

Which leads me right back to writing more. My availability might suck for a retail position, but dedicating an hour or two a night to writing, that I can do. Plus, it's something immediately tangible: this is what I've done today, this is the progress I've made towards a goal. It's hard to measure my progress towards opening a bookstore in any sort of terms besides "Sent in monthly student loan/car payment." Writing - whether it gets published or not - feels like doing something.

Two different goals, but the rewards of one - the sense of accomplishment I get from writing - will help make the other seem more achievable.

On Spoilers

I'm not quite ready to review the last Potter book (notice how I haven't quite lived up to my other self-imposed reviews. Must structure time better...). However, this time last week the issue of spoilers came close to rivalling, if not overshadowing, the book's impending release.

Fans asked that people keep the details to themselves. J.K. Rowling asked that people let those who have waited ten years for this book find out how it ends on their own. Bookstores, newspapers and online newsletters made pledges that they'd avoid spoilers. And yet, when it came down to keeping that promise or getting the scoop, many chose the scoop. Most often, in the follow-up apologies sparked by the fans' outcry, the contrition has an asterisk - "We're-sorry-but..."

"We're sorry, but we didn't think any of what we said was a real spoiler."

"We're sorry, but why are you even reading reviews if you don't want to know what happens?"

"We're sorry, but this is news."

The parties in question seem genuinely surprised that anyone got offended, including at least one industry publication which sent out its newsletter with Harry's fate in a headline and quickly sent another message warning people not to open the first one.

And of course, all over the internet, people are gleefully spoiling the books - threads on forums with plot twists in the titles, sneakier ones where the subject seems innocent, but the message inside holds the revelations. What's the point of it? I suppose the cynical answer is simply that some people are jerks. What I really need to do is rephrase the question.

Why is it that this series in particular draws such maliciousness?

Is the amount of people looking to ruin the ending for others disproportionately large, or does it just seem like there are more because of all the hype and because the series is so successful?

I don't remember anything like this happening when Stephen King finally released The Dark Tower VII. I never felt like I had to hide myself away from message boards and media in the days and weeks leading up to its laydown. Granted, the audience for the Dark Tower books is very different - you probably wouldn't want your ten-year-old doing a book report on it. (I read The Gunslinger for the first time when I was twelve. My mother was afraid one of my teachers would see me reading it and take it away.)

When the season finale of Battlestar Galactica aired, I was away from home and the hotel didn't get Sci-Fi. It was only a day's wait for iTunes to make the episode available, but I wasn't worried that anyone would post the names of the Final Five on any websites I frequent - at least, they wouldn't post them without hiding them behind spoiler warnings. I know that, again, the audiences are very different between Battlestar and Harry.

Are there any better examples? Did this happen with the last Lemony Snicket book? What other series might have the same potential for asshattery in the future?

Still mulling this over. Thoughts and theories welcome while I better flesh out my own.

Cue Queue*

All right, so the list is a wee bit overdue. I have so. many. books. on my shelves (still not organized) that I've finally decided to suck it up and pick five - the three that always seem on top of my mental "I'll get around to it" list, one lent to me that has to get passed on in a timely manner, and one that's currently being buzzed about - sure, I have five years of catching up to do, but by the time 2012 rolls around, I don't want to say I skipped the books that were hot in 2007...

1. Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rackhoff. I'm slightly cheating here, as I'm already about halfway through it.

2. King Rat by China Mieville. I started it a long time ago and had to put it down for other things, but I know I was enjoying it.

3. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. We had a book club at work several years ago. It met three times and then never again, although the books and the people were excellent. The first book we read was Murakami's Underground, a non-fiction examination of the 1995 sarin gas attacks in Tokyo's subways. I ride the trains to work every day. It was a sobering, chilling book, especially in the wake of September 11th. Murakami's coverage made me a fan.

4. On Writing by Stephen King. I own it. I've read passages of it. I can tell you any number of points he makes in the book. I've never read it cover-to-cover. King is one of my favorite authors - I was remarking the other day that I haven't reread The Stand in far too long. I hang my head in shame.

5. The Kite Runner by Kalid Hosseini. I mentioned it in the "hot books I haven't read" post, and it just came out in paperback.

So, there's my next month's worth of reading. Well, I'll read more books than the ones on the list, but those are the ones I'm promising to write about. Keeping it simple to start. My literary preferences are probably pretty easy to figure out, although I'll try to mix it up a bit, read outside of my genre every now and then.

I'll let you know what's good and what sucks.

*the gamers that read this are wincing.

Lilacs: A digression

My bridesmaids held a trivia contest at my wedding shower. It was a game of "How well do you know the bride?" and they set up a list of twenty or so questions about me. I don't remember very many of them - did they ask what my favorite book was? Anything about music? I don't even remember who won. But there's one question I always remember at this time of year.

After everyone had filled out their responses, the bridesmaids plunked me down in a chair facing the room and asked me for the answers. I was a bit flustered by this day full of people fawning all over me, and there I had something like fifty relatives staring.

They wanted to know what my favorite flower was.

I forgot. And, in a panic to say something, I blurted out "Calla lillies." They were what I wanted in my bouquet, and I do like them. I heard my mother-in-law squeal at getting it right.

My dad sat at his table, grinning and shaking his head. (It was a co-ed shower - most of my friends are male. Thank god for my bridesmaids and my mom insisting it was okay to invite the guys.)

"Not a Calla lilly?" I said.

"You know what your favorite flower is," he said.

Still, I drew a blank.

"What do we have growing right beside the house?" he asked. "What kind of bush?"

It dawned on me. "He's right," I said, "It's lilacs. Purple ones."

I don't know why I love them so much. Whether it was a little girl obsession with anything purple, or whether it was simply their scent that attracted me to them, they've remained my favorite part of spring over the years. Partly, they remind me of home - my parents still have the bush of purple lilacs beside the house, and another bush of white ones in the far back corner of their yard.

I know they make my dad think of his own mother, who also loved them. She died in May, when I was small. His last call to her was on the way to go see her in the hospital. He told her he was bringing her lilacs. She was gone when he arrived.

We have a bush here, at our house. It takes me by surprise every year - suddenly there's this burst of color in the back yard, and there they are. I noticed it Saturday morning, while sweeping pine needles, and put the broom down to go see. They're not fully open yet, but it didn't stop me from cupping one in my hands and inhaling its scent. I'll take a cutting soon, when they're fully bloomed, and set it on my desk.

Certain things signal the seasons for me. It can't be Christmas until I hear the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" on the radio. Fall doesn't have a song or a flower, but a feeling in the air - a change in temperature, the earlier fading of daylight - one day it's summer, the next, something in the breeze tells me to dig out the jackets and give up sandals.

Spring's not real for me until the lilacs bloom - even though they don't come until it's nearly summer. The equinox is at least a month gone by then. Leaves are coming back on the trees. They just don't seem as green until there's that burst of purple to go with them.

The lilacs are here. Spring has arrived at last.

Still here, still planning

Now that the nice weather is finally rolling in, I might see productivity increase. I got hit hard with a case of the winter blues that pretty much lasted into and through April. I don't usually get them; I don't know why this year was different. I can't really call it any sort of real depression (not that I'd even know how to diagnose it), just... a general feeling of being down.

It didn't help that winter stayed through April, and just when it should have started getting sunny and warm, instead it was cold and rainy for what felt like weeks on end. We had a few bouts of nice weather, but the best of those came when I was stuck inside at sales conference for four days - in rooms with no windows, or when there were windows, the views were of other buildings.

I was sad without a reason to be, and it got all the more frustrating because every time I tried to put my finger on why, the best I could come up with was clouds-and-rain. How do you say to friends who have much more tangible problems, "Listen to me bitch - I'm sad because the weather sucks?" You don't. Or I don't, anyway. I'm reluctant to cry Seasonal Affective Disorder - like I said, this isn't a recurring thing. Whatever it was, though, it killed my desire to get moving on things - planning, writing... hell, I haven't read nearly as many books as usual.

Enough of the woe-is-me. This is about bookselling.

I've recently done a whole flurry of housecleaning - call it the spring cleaning I've been postponing for a few springs. In the room I call my study (which feels kind of pretentious, but "office" doesn't quite fit), I have three huge bookshelves. Two I sanded and stained myself last year, one's a Wal-Mart-special sort of deal. I transferred books from smaller shelves to them, but I'm only just getting around to the books that sat in bags, or on various piles on the floor.

My big accomplishment last week was getting them out of bags and off the floor, but they're not yet sorted on the shelves. As a matter of fact, looking at them makes my inner-bookseller cringe. Things stacked, not in any sort of order, spines turned towards the backs of the shelves. I need to take an evening and go through them - what to keep, what to give away, what to sell.

I know there are books in there that I bought with excitement and never got around to - one of the curses of my job is having so little time to read other publishers' books. At my desk, I have a journal of sorts with titles of books I want to read. Some I've purchased, some I'm telling myself I need to wait on until I have time to catch up.

Part of being a good bookseller is not just knowing what's hot right now, but also being well-versed in older titles. Frontlist's great, but how many frontlist titles make the transition to successful backlist? If a customer comes in and buys The Book Everyone's Reading This Month, what can you suggest that they read after? Sure, there are always books trying to cash in on the success of what's popular - not necessarily copycats, but books published to tie-in, or ride the other bestsellers' coattails. Take a look at how many pirate-themed books are out this summer.

But when someone's read all of those, and wants recommendations, a bookseller needs to be able to fall back on her knowledge of what's come before. I figure I have about five years' worth of lost time to make up for. I could spout backlist titles from this company, but what have I missed from outside while most of my reading has been within the same ISBN families?

I haven't read The Kite Runner. Or The Secret Life of Bees. Or The Dive from Clausen's Pier. Sure, I've made time for new Harry Potter books, and A Feast for Crows. I read Cell but not Lisey's Story. Would I have read any of those first three, were I working in a bookstore? I don't know. But at the very least I'd have a better grasp on them than simply knowing their titles.

The plan is this: at least one book a week from outside of my company, starting with the things on my shelves I've been putting off, and working through the journal of stuff to read. Continuing to books I've missed. I'll review them here, and I reserve the right to say "This sucked. I don't know what everyone was thinking."

I'll digress a moment and explain that last sentence. One of my pet peeves about some of the review sites out there is that they love everything. Not a single "the plot was weak." Not a hint of "The dialogue tags ripped me out of the story." Just praise, praise, praise, because (I suspect) publishers are swamping them with advanced copies, and who wants to piss off the publisher and stop receiving books?

So. Here, I'll let you know what I'm thinking about old books and new, as I read them. While book reviews aren't really getting me closer to owning a store of my own, they're at least tangential to the purpose of this blog. Because, really, what right do I have to call myself a bookseller if I don't know anything about the books I'm selling?

I'll post a list of titles in the queue when I've stared at the shelves and chosen some.

Sunlight. Warmth. Getting back into the swing of things. Clock's a-ticking.

Progress, of a sort

I have this habit of making a list of all the things I want to accomplish, trying to attack all of them at once, and getting (unsurprisingly) overwhelmed. ("Let's paint the kitchen! And hang curtains in the living room! And clean out the garage! And bring about world peace! Let's do it on Saturday!") This ambition (foolhardiness?) doesn't mean that at some point I up and abandon all of the projects, but it does mean that I'm likely to procrastinate on one or all, and let one or all of them slip by the wayside for a while.

Until I pick them up again in another moment of frantic energy and I-think-I-can optimism.

This five-year-plan for opening a bookstore makes it at least a little easier to deal with. I have five years to clean up finances and save money, five years to cobble together a business plan and learn all I can about...well, everything. Still, it's daunting. Most likely, it's a case of Winter Blues talking (I know, it's April, but right now, I can see snow coming down outside), or a bit of self-doubt rearing its head, but I find myself wondering how much of it is just a pretty dream.

Now, that's not me being defeatist. I will still go through with it - it's way too early to walk away from, and truly, the idea of giving up hasn't crossed my mind. Wanting something like this for ten or fifteen years means it's a pretty hard dream to shake. I'm just saying that there's this little part of me that wonders if I have the stuff.

I'm pretty sure I do. I know that bookselling isn't all warm and fuzzy connecting people with books, or intriguing conversations with brilliant customers. There's credit and accounting, stacks upon stacks upon stacks of catalogs and trying to pick out which books are going to be sleepers, and which you really can skip even though your sales rep says you need at least three (no, really, you can skip it.)

Bookselling is hard. I know that, and I'm ready for it. It's funny, I feel ready for the future, even though I'm aware that I certainly don't know everything about running a store.

What I'm bemoaning is the now. The waiting. Knowing that I'm not ready, really, to start thinking about small business loans (not in the sense of filling out and handing in the paperwork, that is) and setting up accounts with publishers, and deciding what kind of shelving I need, or what inventory system I'll go with. All I can do right this second is read the books I bought on small businesses, and save money where I can. Paying off bills is a long, slow process. I know I'm getting there, but watching month to month feels useless.

Ah, well. Patience and virtues and all.

I should think instead of actual tangible things I've done, and start considering them as progress, no matter how insignificant they seem to me.

So, look out, I'm going to give this a try.

-Earlier this year, I paid off two credit card bills. Two down, two to go.

-I actually cracked the covers of one of the small business books and started reading. Now, the first chapter devotes a lot of time to people who don't know what kind of business they want to run, and helping them figure that out.

Chapter two is a brief look at money - finding out where you stand now, personally, and ways to fund starting a business. I'm fairly certain it will go into more detail later on in the book, but one exercise I know I need to do in there is the worksheet of income vs. expenses. I'm putting that off for the moment because I know looking at those numbers is going to depress me and discourage me. I'd like to be on better footing before I actually do that. I know I'll have to do it soon enough, just...not right now. I do still have time, and I'm aware that I need to save more. That'll have to be good enough for today.

Chapter three gets into mission statements and business plans. I'll be going over that in the next couple of days, and posting my rambling reactions to them. Somehow I doubt rejected mission statements will be a source of high comedy (or any entertainment, really), but again, it will feel like I've done something.

Four years, eight months to go.

Oh, Murphy, You've Done It Again.

This is exactly the kind of thing I need to join and get involved with. When I saw the link, and read about the first gathering, I started making plans to go. The booksellers involved in this are names I've known for a long time - they've always been heavily involved in the bookselling community and own/have worked at incredibly successful indie stores.

"I shall go," thought I, "and glean knowledge from giants."

Then I realized I'm away that week.

If there are any good cloning programs out there, someone let me know.

For now, I'll have to hope that the first is a success so there'll be a second.

Too Long

Just realized it's been a month since any kind of post on here, and even though there isn't a whole ton to report, I was aiming for something a bit more regular.

Of course, this is the time of year when most New Year's Resolutions have fallen by the wayside. It's probably helpful that Lent falls around now - so those of us who gave up our resolutions can use the forty days while we're waiting for the bunny and the dying on the cross to happen (not to mention the rock rolling away from the tomb) to pick back up on the things we've let lapse.

Or something. I haven't given anything up for Lent this year. I figure, instead of dropping bad habits, it might be better to pick up good ones. (And come on, am I really going to go forty days without swearing? coffee? Chocolate's always a wash - the best damned candy of all only comes out this time of year. Cadbury Mini Eggs, o heaven, o stars...)

So, better habits, then. Continued thinking and planning about the future-store. Writing, writing, writing. Possibly poking at my resume, since I'm not entirely convinced I'll still be here in a year (hooray for my incestuous industry. We're #5, which means #1-4 are always eyeing us and our distributees like vultures).

At the very least, for positive things, I was able to pay off two bills at the beginning of the month. Neither of which were very big, but both being gone will let me throw some extra cash towards the larger ones. Faster those are gone (or more manageable, anyway), the sooner I can start saving more towards the grand opening party.

Which, even though it could fall in January, will have Cadbury Mini Eggs.

Bookseller Mnemonics

All right, enough of this easing into the new year. It's nearly February.

Robert Gray writes an article for Shelf Awareness about the strange kind of free-association booksellers have to hone when finding books for customers.

You must be able to play "the game" to work in a bookshop, and here's the first rule: When a customer has a specific title request, assume (but never let the customer know you assume) that the information provided is flawed. In any three-word title, at least one word will be incorrect; sometimes two; sometimes all three. I've heard titles that were close (Snow on Shingles for Snow Falling on Cedars) and not so close (Peggy Sue and the House of Hair for Patty Jane's House of Curl).

It's one of those skills that sets good booksellers apart from great booksellers. It's not a matter of figuring out the right title in the blink of an eye, or even getting it right every time, but being willing to give it a shot in the first place.

When you're around books day in and day out, you tuck away little bits of information even if you're not reading every title. You know which books are in the news (because even if you don't see the news report, you can bet a customer will come asking about it). You know what's on the bestseller lists, what's on local school reading lists, and which book Sawyer was reading on Lost last night. You learn cover art and author photos and subtitles, and where customers will "reshelve" books they decide not to buy. (Could you kids please stop putting The Necronomicon next to the Bibles?)

There are doomcriers out there, suggesting that with the advent of Amazon and other online bookstores, bricks and mortar stores will become obsolete. The actual experience of walking into a bookstore and simply being surrounded by all those pages is another rant. What's relevant here is the advantage that flesh-and-blood booksellers have over every search engine out there.

As Gray says: "A lot of time and money is invested in some very powerful search engines, but even high tech logic often meets its match when confronted with the low tech intangibles of consumer bewilderment and impatience."

One night near closing time, a gentleman came into the store and did the circuit of the shelves. He wasn't walking like he was browsing - he was scanning, looking for a particular title, but determined to find it himself. Eventually, he gave up and made his way to where I stood beside the inventory computer.

"I know this sounds weird," he said, "but I'm looking for a book that was on the bestseller lists a couple of years ago."

We went through the usual - no, he didn't know the title. No, he didn't know the author, or even the subject matter. He couldn't even tell me what color the cover was.

"All I know," he said, looking chagrined, "is that there's an E in the title."

Before I could even start wracking my brain for likely candidates, my co-worker Ted looked up from his pile of shelving and said, "The Celestine Prophecy?"

I thought the customer was about to hug him. That was it exactly.

Try Googling that.

Those requests are the most satisfying. They test your knowledge of the world at large and your intimacy with your store and bookselling as a whole. And when you match your customer with the book, you know exactly why you're in this business.



(Robert Gray's blog is Fresh Eyes Now, and his Shelf Awareness articles are here.)

4 Years, 361 Days to Go

The holidays sort of broadsided me this year, hence, the unexpected hiatus. I could wax all poetic on Christmas in a bookstore, but I'll hold off on that. Christmas is over. It's January, which means resolutions.

Although, I thought I gave up making New Year's resolutions for Lent a few years ago. Hmm.

Ah, well. Semantics making all the difference, I won't call them resolutions, but instead...housekeeping.

1. Time to take a serious look at finances - I know that I have three years to go on my student loans and almost two on my car, and then comes everything else. Things aren't getting paid off any faster through sheer willpower (wouldn't that be a great superpower, though?) - what can I put more money towards, and what can I start saving?

2. Suck it up, get out a highlighter and a cup of tea, and start reading those books I bought on small businesses.

3. Mailing lists. Newsgroups. They're out there, filled with booksellers talking shop. I just have to find them. "Shelf Awareness" and "PW Daily" are great starts, but bookselling is about communities. If you're going to make it, you need the support of not only the community in which your store is built, but of other bookstore owners as well. I could, very easily, ask two or three of my buyers to mentor me. When I'm closer to actually opening the store, I will. But for now, a place to lurk and see what other indie storeowners are saying would be good.

4. It follows from #2, but... write a business plan.

5. Attend BEA or a regional show as a bookseller, not a publisher rep. Go to the workshops and classes for booksellers. The question is whether or not my work schedule will allow for that. This year? Outlook seems hazy for BEA. Soon, though.

Just a handful to get working on. I'm sure there are more things that will occur to me, but I don't want to get overwhelmed, either. Number 1 is scary enough as it is.

However - I can dream of the future and sigh over old memories all I want, but not much will happen if I don't start doing something tangible.