A review of My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop, edited by Ronald Rice.

I don’t normally like rap but I really liked this.

Last weekend, I attended BookExpo America in New York City. BEA is the premier book publishing event in North America, bringing together 20,000 publishers, authors, agents, bookstore owners, and librarians. The original purpose of the event was to give bookstores a chance to order books for the upcoming season. Now, the event has grown tremendously and serves as an opportunity for publishers to strike deals with buyers, create buzz about new and forthcoming titles, and showcase their authors. It was my first time attending, and only one of the few professional book events I’ve ever attended.

Spanning three levels, plus conference rooms, industry professionals stuffed themselves beneath the roof of the Javits Center. Between meetings and conferences, much of the day was spent waiting in winding lines between exhibits for galleys or advanced reading copies (ARCS) of highly anticipated new titles, hoping there will be enough left, and that the author will be there to sign.

For me, this event was a great opportunity to talk with other members of the book industry, but mostly to meet book lovers from all over the country. Highlights from my trip include:

This billboard, upon arrival. Thank you, Penguin.

A signed copy of TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, one of my favorite authors.

Getting to chat with him was a pleasure as well. His sister has the same name as me!

Walking around the city and browsing an outdoor market (another item on my bucket list).

Finding this awesome, antique cigarette tin at the market.

And this is, overall, measures the success of my day.

We all know about the news in recent years about the dying book business. However, in this Forbes article, Steve Cohen discusses the “contagious optimism” that radiated throughout the conference, claiming that with its embrace of technology and innovation, the book industry might just save itself. I am hopeful for my industry as well, and looking forward to attending BEA next year!

I was in Cobourg yesterday, the small town I was born in.  In my attempt to promote my novel, Baby! Baby? Baby!?, I contacted independent bookstores to see if they would be willing to stock my book with a consignment arrangement.  I couldn’t believe when I only found 4 independent bookstores suitable for my book.

Four bookstores. In the GTA.  The Avid Reader in Cobourg.  Furby House in Port Hope.  The Blue Heron in Uxbridge.  TYPE in Toronto.  That’s it.

While there isn’t a bookstore in Bethany (not that I know of – if I’m wrong, please correct me and I will visit immediately!) they do have a great library!

I love bookstores.  I have always loved Indigo/Chapters because of the selection, but more and more when I go in, I’m greeted with rows and stacks of stuff.  Non-book stuff.  Where are the books?  They have cards and gifts and dishes and baby toys and kids’ toys…there are stores for that other stuff!  Doesn’t Heather Reisman realize people go into bookstores for books?!?!?

You don’t get the other stuff in small bookstore.  You get books.  Good books.  More importantly, the stores are staffed with people who love books.  Granted, I’m sure you can’t get a job at Indigo without a love of books, nor should you want to, but walk into a small bookstore and you get interesting conversation, great reviews and suggestions.

There’s a kids’ bookstore in Toronto called Mable’s Fables that I love, because anytime I go in there, they can always point me in the direction of a book that is perfect for the kid I buy it for, either mine or someone else’s.  Normally, I don’t give books as gifts.  But when I do, it’s because I’ve put the most effort and thought into selecting the book.  For me, it’s one of the more meaningful gifts I can give a person.  These aren’t books off the Top Ten list either – I put time and effort into choosing them.  And help for this isn’t something you get at Indigo.  Going into a small bookstore, I’m confident of finding the perfect book, usually with the help of the staff, because they have the time and the love of books to make the extra effort, just like I am.  I always thought if I was to go back to work, I’d try a bookstore.  A small one.

But when I was in Cobourg, dropping off a copy of my novel so they could have a looksee, I got into a conversation with the woman who worked there.  I was more than dismayed to hear her predicting the death of the bookstore.

I could see her point about the small, independent bookstores.  In fact, I can see it.  If you want to buy a book, you go to Indigo – it’s cheaper, better selection (despite the other stuff), more convenient.  Or you buy it on line.

And I think that’s the problem.

I like on-line shopping as much as the next person.  Well, maybe not as much as some.  And I’ve bought my share of books on line.  Mostly books, not ebooks.  Maybe I’m a little late in joining the party, but I haven’t embraced holding a tablet to read a book.  I like book books.  I like the feel, the smell…everything about them.

Ebooks are impersonal.  There’s no physical connection.  And yes, I have a physical connection with all my favourite books.  I like to see them on the shelf, not the virtual shelf in my iPad.

And there’s my conundrum.  I’m a writer, an author.  I sell books – ebooks!  How can I sell ebooks if I’m against them?  Ugh!

But this post isn’t about my dilemma, but about me bemoaning how independent bookstores are a dying breed and in a few years might well be extinct.  If you’re a booklover like me, how do we help?  I’m not sure boycotting Amazon and Chapters.ca will help, but tracking down independent bookstores in your area might.  Visit them, and often.  Support your local businesses, but especially bookstores.

And keep reading.

According to The L.A. Times, the author made the decision last month to sell his latest novel, Joyland, solely as a physical book. King is generally considered a pioneer in digital books; he’s written a number of bestselling Kindle Singles and even helped Amazon’s Jeff Bezos introduce the Kindle 2 in 2009.

King said he’d rather have people go to an actual bookstore. It was a move that got a lot of praise from bookstore owners, who have seen their sales go down over the years thanks to an increase in e-readership. King is set to release another major novel later this year, but he hasn’t announced yet whether or not it will be available in e-book format.

Joyland was published by Hard Case Crime and was released just yesterday.

Get Joyland only in paperback for $7.30.

The wonderful staff at Mysterious Galaxy Redondo Beach

Last night Nalini Singh kicked off her book tour for the latest installment in the Psy/Changeling series, HEART OF OBSIDIAN, which hit stores yesterday. Her inaugural stop was at the wonderful Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in Redondo Beach, CA, where the fabulous staff did a stellar job making everyone feel welcome and setting the scene for a lovely evening. I’ll also add they stayed open far past their normal closing time for the event, including hanging around past 10pm so that everyone had a chance to get their books signed. They have some signed copies of Nalini’s older titles still on hand, as well as a great selection of all sorts of genre titles and fun book-themed gift items, so if you’re local to the LA area (or visiting), be sure to drop by.

Lisa Hoang of The Consummate Reader blog with books for signing.

Nalini spent about an hour doing a Q&A session for the packed audience and then went on to sign books and take pictures. Everyone was extremely nice and enthusiastic and it was a wonderful way to start the tour. Nalini’s off to New York next, so check out the full tour schedule to see if she’s going to be visiting your area.

The questions from the book “What’s really holding you back?”  are as follows:

Question #1 – What is creating frustration in my life? (p. 29)

• A lack of opportunity for advancement.  i.e. Dead-end job.
• Hitting a wall with my weight-loss efforts.
• Being afraid of math.  Holds me back from taking further classes.

Question #2 – What options have  I not considered?  (p.30)

• A career rather than a job.
• Go around the “wall” of weight-loss by refocusing my efforts on the last twenty-five pounds I have to lose.
• Regarding math I will start at the bottom (humility) rather than taking shortcuts that always frustrate me.

It was suggested to take one action today with what frustrates me most.  So I’ve intentionally eaten healthy the entire day.  Not a small feat after so much time returning to my comfort food ways.  So what’s next?  I have yet to register for Fall classes.  I think now would be a good time.  What are you frustrated enough to change in your life?  Do tell…

Memorial Day weekend I meant to write a post actually two,  but it was my birthday and my family decided what I needed was a big two day celebration. What I needed was to forget about it; this is my last year in the 40’s digits and I wanted to mourn them.

So, because I was not allowed to have a pity party I made the best of it. This was to be my year of birthday books! It’s funny, my family always asks what I want for my birthday, and I always roll my eyes; hello, I’m a reader, what do you think I want? I mentioned to my son that I thought it would be fun to spend some time in a funky used bookstore. He took the hint (finally) and mapped out a couple of bookstores he thought would suit my needs.

We met up early in Reno and hit the town!

I’ve always meant to go into Zephyr Books as it’s not far from my son’s home. But every time we stopped by for one reason or another they were closed. On this day we lucked out, they were open. Our bad luck was that they were going out of business. But, hey, all of their hardbacks were $2.00. What reader wouldn’t melt at this news? I sauntered in ready to spend some money!

On the outside the bookstore looks like a dive. It is (was) housed in an old strip mall on the edge of downtown Reno. I am sure at one time this was downtown, but now it’s mostly ethnic restaurants and tattoo parlors. The inside, though, oh, was amazing! Tardis like amazing! It was much bigger than it looked. In its glory it must have held thousands of books. Sadly it was very picked over, but I still managed to find a couple of gems. The owner told me she was retiring, well not really retiring, she is now playing the violin in the Reno orchestra. I asked if she had tried to sell the bookstore; after all, it was huge and obviously had a large clientele. She said yes, and was sad to find no takers. My heart sank. A few years ago I was in the position to buy a business and have a go at it; I’ve owned a store before, and it is a dream of mine to own a bookstore, but in this economy there is no way I could risk it.  We chatted awhile and she was kind enough to give me the names of a couple of little known bookstores. I’m going to seek them out on my next visit to Reno.

Grassroots Books is in an even worse location! How anyone stumbles upon it is beyond me. Surly they are in business only by word of mouth. I was very dubious when we pulled up to a small white warehouse looking building, tucked behind two car lots. What could this small rundown looking store have to offer?

Well again I was shown looks are deceiving. Walking into Grassroots was like coming home. The walls are painted a bright sky blue, making the white shelves really stand out. Not an inch of space is wasted in this store. I found books stacked on the floor, on chairs and on tables. The clerks must be art students, as they had done a wonderful job displaying books with the brightest covers. You get a sense of carnival as you pick your way through the isles. In order to really convey the experience I have to tell you about another bookstore, one I used to haunt in California.

Treehorn Books is in the middle of downtown Santa Rosa. It is still in business and it’s the first place I hit when I go back home. It holds a sense of wonder for me. In the 80’s I went on a regular basis and no matter what I was looking for, I always found it at Treehorn Books. If someone mentioned an obscure book, I’d find it there. When I was studying Buddhism, I’d go to the store and start looking in the religious section, and I kid you not, a book would fall from the higher shelf and lo and behold it was a book in the exact subject I was looking for! I never walked out of there empty handed. Once I asked if they had heard of Stephen King’s My Little Pony (a hard book to find in those days). Not only did they have two copies, one was signed by King! If there were a used bookstore in Diagon Alley it would be Treehorn Books.

So there I am in Grassroots, and in every section I explored, I found a treasure. They have a medieval history section! No used bookstore I have ever been in has one of these, yet here it was, my favorite time in history. I cruised the fiction section, looking for something, anything to grab my attention when I spotted a lone book, as if someone picked it up and decided not to get it. The title “My Life with Corpses” made me pick it up: This alone was worth buying it. As I stood there marveling at such a large selection in such a small space, I wondered if they would possibly have Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in hardback. I have yet to see a used one. They had three!! This is my new favorite bookstore.

I ended up coming home with 11 books and had an Amazon package waiting for me.  A couple of days earlier, JoinBunch, decided to award me with a $200.00 gift certificate for my hard work and dedication to the site. Of course I had to use some of it, right? After all it was my year of birthday books!

My list of birthday books

My son gave me Neil Gaiman’s Unnatural Creatures.

Amazon

Wayne Hill & Cynthia Ottchen: Shakespeare’s Insults

David & Ben Crystal Shakespeare’s Words

Zepher Books

G Kitson Clark The Making of Victorian England

G M Trevelyan A Shortened History of England

Winston Churchill The Birth of Britain

The Oxford Shakespeare King John

The Alice B Toklas Cookbook

The Arden Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Timothy Ferris The Mind’s Sky

East Comics

Kill Shakespeare The Tide of Blood v 1,2,3

Grassroots Books

Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses

Wylene Dunbar My life with Corpses

Joseph Dahmus Seven Medieval Kings

BOOK BUSINESS 2:00PM Balancing Creativity and Commerce in Caribbean Literary Expression   Marva Allen - CEO of Hue-man Bookstore, and co-publisher of Open Lens an imprint of Akashic Books Crystal Bobb-Semple – owner of Brownstone Bookstore Ron Kavanaugh – founder and managing editor of Mosaic Literary Magazine, exploring the literary arts created by writers of African descent Summer Edward – founder and managing editor of Anansesem, Caribbean children’s literature ezine Victoria Brown, author, Grace in the City – Moderator   YOUNG READERS 3:15PM Culture Making – Literature that Defines Us  (Under 8 yrs) Shabana Sharif (US/Guyana), “Ins and Out of Queens” Tiphanie Yanique (Virgin Is), “I am the Virgin Islands” Ibi Zoboi (Haiti), “A is for Ayiti” 4:30PM Memory and Myth – Rooted in history and the fantastical (8 – 15 yrs) Tracey & Harmony Pierre (US/Haiti) Clyde Viechweg (Grenada), “CaribbeanTwilight; Tales of the Supernatural”  5:40PM Off Island – Journeys in time and place  (Teens – Young Adults) Zetta Elliott (St. Kitts-Nevis), “Ship of Souls” Devon Harris (Jamaica), “Yes I Can” Workshops & Special Presentations Illustration, Graphic & Costume Design, Steel Pan Demonstration; Storytelling ADULT BOOK WRITERS 3:15PM Where We’re From – Identity and Influence Carmen Bardeguez-Brown (Puerto Rico), “Straight from the Drum” Etaniel Ben Yehuda (US/Trinidad & Tobago), “The Chronicles of Air, Water, and the Source” Anna Ruth Henriques (Jamaica), “The Book of Mechtilde” Monica Matthew (Antigua & Barbuda), “Journeycakes:  Memories with my Antiguan Mama” 4:30PM Memory and Myth – Our History Clings to Us   Keisha Gay Anderson (Jamaica) Lynn Grange (Trinidad & Tobago), “Freedom and the Cashew Seed” Petra Lewis (Trinidad & Tobago), “Sons and Daughters of Ham” Bernice McFadden (US/Barbados), “Nowhere is a Place” 5:40PM Off Island – Migration and Displacement   Elsie Agustave (Haiti), “The Roving Tree” Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad & Tobago), “Boundaries” Sandra Ottey (Jamaica), “Runaway Comeback” 7:00PM Get Up Stand Up – Texts of Empowerment   Deborah Jack (St Martin/St Maarten) Rosamond King (US/Gambia/Trinidad), “At My Belly and My Back” Hermina Marcellin (St. Lucia) David Mills (US/Jamaica), “The Sudden Country” Ras Osagyefo (Jamaica), “Psalms of Osagyefo” Jive Poetic (US/Jamaica) Maria Rodriguez (US/Puerto Rico)   Program, schedule and writers subject to change without notice. BECOME A FRIEND

  

Union of Jamaica Alumni Associations (UJAA)

But yes, I have been to many bookstores in many cities, and have a few that I’ll always remember. Each person remembers different parts of their holidays, and a nostalgic part of my holidays is walking down streets I’ve never seen, not being able to read a word around me, not having much of a clue if I’m headed in the right direction, and seeing all the buildings around me, the people doing their own things, looking into store windows at food I want to eat but never will as I’ll never be on that street again, and just being impressed by pretty much everything because it’s new to my eyes.

I guess that’s a part of my love of visiting bookstores around the world, the walking and the unknown. Normally the unknown wouldn’t be associated with a bookstore, but it is. You never know how the bookstore will be designed, what range of books it will have, which authors will be favoured and which won’t be, who the person behind the counter is and that perhaps maybe you may end up in a back room with them writing a short romance story (Aye, it’s a good thought. Buying a book, chatting up the assistant, impressing them enough with your knowledge and love of books that out comes their junk and then the bumping of uglies occurs. And I don’t just mean a male customer and female assistant, can work either way, that’s why none of the terms are gender specific.).

Going into the unknown, and finding a decent bookstore is always something very fucking decent to me. The first overseas bookstore I fell in love with was this small one somewhere in Budapest, Hungary. I was really fucking baked most of my time there, so I don’t remember the name, or where it was, but I remember the journey to the bookstore and the store itself. Walking through the cold, as European winters are (And as I am stupid enough to go to Europe in the middle of its winter.), with the snow around my feet, two pairs of socks on as Goddamned cold feet fucking suck, a frozen mouth that can’t smile or move because it hurts, the sun being low in the sky and dying each afternoon quicker than you realise it’s day time, and being stoned, there is no sense of time whether the sun’s up or down. The time when you’re stoned is awake time, time before being stoned time, the being stoned time, the time passed out and repeat. Something happens when you’re not stoned, but you’re not too sure what it is. Something happens when you’re baked, but you’re not too sure of that either. It does add something to the memories though, even if it takes much away. In my mind, it’s added an air, a mist around the memories, which in this instances works well in a Hungarian winter. Memories that match the weather.

Rambling to the friends I made in the hostel who are on a journey as well, following them as I have no idea where I’m going but in my mind I know they do (Even if they don’t know, I like to believe that they know.). I just end up babbling things and making them laugh, or just myself laugh in hysterics while waddling along.

But yes, this bookstore in Budapest that I don’t know the name of, or where it is, I loved it. Aye, you don’t need to know the name of something or someone to love them. They are what they are without a label, they are who they are without a name. It was small, very cramped, and filled with bookcases and books. This was (And still is, if the store is still open.) an English bookstore. It was second hand, and had many books that piqued my interest. I don’t think I had been some impressed by a bookstore in the quite the same way ever before. It didn’t just have whatever was selling the best at the time and a few classics that every bookstore has, it didn’t have obscure books that are obscure for a reason, it just had good books and from the selection that I knew, it seemed to me to be a bookstore where I could buy any book and enjoy it. It was a bookstore that was my flavour, seemingly built and designed for my tastes. It’s not that my taste in books is that different or unique, but it’s more a little off the regular. I love Kerouac, Orwell, Thompson, Bukowski, Asimov, who are quite popular and well read. Oddly, it’s hard to find these authors in Australian bookstores. I’ve had sales assistants ask me who Bukowski is when I’ve asked them if they have any Bukowski (If you work in a bookstore and don’t know Bukowski, you are shit.), gone on massive journeys across Sydney to find certain authors and only found their major work or a one of their shittier works, but rarely the inbetween. Not that I complain about the journey, I fucking love that. But, I dislike the fact that Australian bookstores suck, for the most part. I have a few in Sydney that are the shit, and I’ve found one in Brisbane that I think is fucking awesome (I got Asimov’s Foundation series, Robot series and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And will read all 1000 plus pages, and enjoy it. I’ll also want to shoot myself in the head, as that time and place was seriously fucking messed up from all sides, whether it’s the Nazis, the Soviets, the French, US, UK and allies. Of course the western powers will appease Hitler and the Nazis, the war will make some of them very fucking rich, and the population will have little say and will happily have their freedoms take away in exchange to not have their freedoms taken away… But that’s not about a bookstore at all.).

I don’t remember what books I bought, but I know I bought books. I know I read the books, and I’m pretty sure one of them was J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye, oh, and The Dice Man by Lu8ke Rhinehart. There was a lot more, but no idea what they were. I did enjoy them, though, and my memories of sitting in a chair in the 11^th Hour Cinema and Hostel, being baked and drinking tea are ones that I’ll always have.

A world tour of bookstores would be a dream for me. Some people want to climb mountains, or get wasted and fuck, or never stop for 6 months so they can see everything (No one ever does, which is why I just chill the fuck out on my travels. I look back on what I experienced, and felt, not what I didn’t experience and feel.). I like being baked, and going to bookstores, and walking around, eating at random places and foods that I don’t actually know what it is, and conversing with people from all over the world.

And, that’s my story about visiting bookstores.

I had no concrete plans when I went to California. That is, I didn’t have a set itinerary at all. In some cases that’s terrible vacation planning, but on the other hand it’s perfect. I had optimal time to visit with my grandfather whom I haven’t seen in seven years.

The only plans I really had in California (besides visiting family, which I did all 3.5 days I was there) was to go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and be a tourist:

Which I did,

Happily.

and go to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena.

Which I also did,

Again, happily.

Both of these things I did Monday afternoon with enough time to visit my grandfather one more time (even though I had seen him that morning) before my brother dropped me off at the never-confusing LAX airport.

Besides placing my hands where Judy Garland had placed hers almost 60 years ago (and finding out our hands are the same size!) and seeing the newly unveiled star for the Backstreet Boys (yay for getting concert tickets!), I really wanted to stop by Vroman’s. If I had to cut anything out of the non-existent itinerary, it would’ve been the Walk of Fame.

I researched bookstores and author graves I wanted to visit out in southern California. There is Book Soup in West Hollywood; Chaucer’s Bookstore in Santa Barbara; Skylight Books and The Last Bookstore both in LA. But there was something about Vroman’s. Besides it’s perfect location (to where we were staying and visiting), Vroman’s is the oldest and largest independent bookstore in So Cal. Established in 1894, Vroman’s has a perfect location on Colorado Blvd.

When my brother and I walked in from the back parking lot, it felt like the main entrance. I was too excited deciding which direction I wanted to go, but my brother put both our awe into words: “For an old bookstore, this place does a great job feeling modern.” And it did. I didn’t take any pictures inside, except for the one above, but my brother was right. Despite Vroman’s being almost 120 years old, it felt alive. There weren’t that many people walking around (It was also 6pm on Memorial Day), but there were still enough employees to cover registers in the front, the back and I believe it was a gift registry section (or something similar). Besides the books (obviously), there were Vroman’s novelty items and knickknacks, as well as Out of Print t-shirts and merch.

Initially I planned on buying a book from Vroman’s just to say I did, but after having spent a chunk of change at Barnes & Noble the day before at Americana, I told my brother to make sure I didn’t. Now, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you yet: My initial instinct is to always go toward the fiction section and find all the Joyce Carol Oates books. of her 150+ titles, I believe there were only 5. A little disappointed, I meandered toward other shelves. Behind me was the recently released books. What tipped me off on that tidbit was seeing two or three shelves of Dear Lucy by Julie Sarkissian, which is on my reading list. The further I wandered into that aisle, I saw Oates’ latest book The Accursed. Okay, fine. I have plans on reading it anyway, but since it’s the last book of a series I wanted to hold off. Alas! The book sitting right in front had a sticker on it: Autographed Copy.

There was no way I was going to pass this opportunity. My brother could see it in my eyes how badly I wanted this book. I was near tears at the thought of owning, let alone holding, a book that Joyce Carol Oates had signed. Yes, I know, a little dramatic, but I’m a girl so I can get away with that, right? …

Behold, my newest prized possession:

The only way this could have been better is if I actually asked her for her autograph. But for now, this’ll do.

Needless to say visiting Vroman’s was the best decision of my LA adventure in addition to visiting family, of course. And seeing Star Trek. Star Trek was awesome.

Although I wasn’t able to hit up the other literary “hot spots” I had hoped, I’m beyond happy with Vroman’s. And I didn’t even see the whole bookstore yet! That only means I’ll have to visit again soon. Maybe next time I’ll give my relatives and friends a heads-up too.

1. Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley
Legendary bookstore on Berkeley’s equally legendary Telegraph Avenue. (Note: Telegraph Avenue is also the name of a recent Michael Chabon novel, though the release party was a few blocks up and over on College Avenue—see #6.) The first day I went to Moe’s, there was a fire down the street. It was my birthday, November 20^th, 2011. I had just moved to Berkeley, and my dad, who went to UC Berkeley in the 1970s and lived right off Telegraph, claimed there were two bookstores you needed to go to in Berkeley, and one of them was gone (Cody’s). Moe’s was the other. I guess my point is, it was a fateful, apocalyptic-y day– and Moe’s did not disappoint. There are four floors of books—and before floor two I was already bowled over by the critical theory and music sections on floor one. Fiction and history reside further up, and on the top floor is an antiquarian bookstore, something I have no use for as a consumer but I love to look around in anyway.
PAIR WITH: Amoeba Records and some low-end college grub (which abounds).

 2. Half Price Books, 2036 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley
Half Price is part of a massive nationwide chain, headquartered in Dallas of all places, so I was hesitant to put it here. But because it’s a used bookstore and because I’ve gotten a whole freaking lot of use out of it, I decided to bestow it with second place recognition. I literally end up here all the time. It’s huge, spacious, utilitarian, unpretty, and full to the brim of cheap and completely serviceable books. Just today I popped in with no intention to buy and was sorely tempted by a $5 Emily Bronte, a $6 Lorrie Moore, and a $7 Henry Miller. (Only left with Lorrie Moore.) If you’re more concerned with quantity of books than quality of space, go here. It’s worth it. Though I hear their buy back rate is pretty abysmal.
PAIR WITH: Phil’s Sliders and a nerd visit to Games of Berkeley.

Photo credit: Berkeley Heritage.

3. Walden Pond Books, 3316 Grand Ave., Oakland
This used-and-new bookstore is just right. Not too big, not too small. Not too esoteric, not too mainstream. With just the right dash of Oakland-style anarchism. It’s one of those bookstores where, wandering between the stacks into some hushed, dusty back corner, I’ve become quietly enchanted—a bookstore it factor. Walden Pond has it. (That’s no small compliment.) Speaking of Oakland, if you’re one of those folks who thinks Oakland is scary and inaccessible, 1) you’re wrong, and 2) this is one of the dozens of areas you should come to to be proven wrong. The Grand Lake area has a historic theater, charming restaurants, and a good mix of yuppie chains and indie storefronts, plus a big ass lake for your lake-related activities pleasure.
PAIR WITH: A long stroll-slash-hike around Lake Merritt.

4. Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley
Pegasus is a lovely three-location East Bay chain, though I’ve mostly frequented this one in downtown Berkeley. The Shattuck location feels like a very large room and the outside is electric blue. I always head straight for the raised loft-ish area in the back, which carries fiction, history, social science, and ethnic studies—in addition to my regular reading, I’ve found at least two straight up historical, as in pre-1910, printings here for my collection. One of these was discovered in a bargain box sitting outside of the store. Also, last time I was there, they were selling a complete World Book encyclopedia collection. Bonus points for nostalgic elementary school library flashback.
PAIR WITH: Buttermilk fried chicken and mashed sweet potatoes at Angeline’s Louisiana Kitchen (maybe browse here while waiting forever to get seated?)

5. Shakespeare & Co., 2499 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley
Of course this doesn’t come close to its namesake (?) in Paris, which I had the great honor of visiting in January 2012, but it does to an extent replicate French Shakespeare & Co.’s musty old library aesthetic. Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t let me bring my coffee in (but there’s a Peet’s right across the street—bookstores and coffee go together!). This version is also slightly more spacious-feeling, in that it has tall ceilings and you can spread your arms without hitting a bunch of super old books. But there’s just enough of that old timey old book charm to make it worth repeated browsings.
PAIR WITH: Peet’s (after you’re done) and a thrifted sweater from Buffalo Exchange.

Photo credit: Telegraph Shop.

6. Diesel Books, 5433 College Ave., Oakland
Diesel, located in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, has a hip, urban feel to it, and the space is clean and decidedly unhaphazard. I chalk this up to its SoCal roots (the only other two locations are in LA)—following this logic there must be an aesthetic break between North and South, where NorCal favors things like wood and block letter prints and messiness while SoCal/Diesel favor industrial flooring and tidy arrangements. I prefer the former, but the latter is still nice. I was first introduced to Diesel because they temporarily transformed into “Brokeland Records” for the opening of Berkeley resident Michael Chabon’s new book Telegraph Avenue, so they clearly have some cool author and book events too.
PAIR WITH: Upscale window shopping, wine bars, and Zachary’s Pizza

7. Builders Booksource, 1817 Fourth St., Berkeley
Builders Booksource is an art and architecture bookstore, and I am neither artist nor architect. Yet I enjoy every visit. In one of those visits, I purchased one of the few “art” books I actually own, a photography collection called Paris in Color. Builders recently downsized to half of its original space, but continues to hold strong on Berkeley’s bustlingly adorable Fourth Street. Every time I pop in, I’m inspired by something or other—last time it was a photography collection of Islamic-inspired architecture in America. Road trip idea!
PAIR WITH: Chartreuse and orange furniture browsing at CB2, Crate & Barrel Outlet et. al., a structured/deconstructed top from Anthropologie, and a slice of pizza margherita from Bette’s To Go

Photo credit: Merchant Circle.

8. University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, Berkeley
This long, narrow little bookstore across from the UC Berkeley campus has a great selection of university press (hence!) books, with tall, impressive bookshelves and an academic air. Having once aspired to work at a university press (Stanford or University of California would have sufficed, though Columbia would be a dream), I find their entire premise exciting. The website notes that they aim to stock “an intellectual and literary realm of infinite richness, ever renewing,” which is also pretty exciting. In short, good finds.
PAIR WITH: A walk to and from the Campanile and a classical music-scored coffee at Musical Offering

9. A Great Good Place for Books, 6120 LaSalle Ave., Oakland
Besides having a great good adjective-laden proper-English-be-damned name, A Great Good Place for Books also has a sweet little space in Oakland’s tony Montclair neighborhood, a super helpful staff, and an adorable small-town local feel (when I was there, a little girl came in to find a gift for her friend, and the cashier said, “Oh I can tell you what she has, she was in here yesterday”). It’s very small—basically a long room laden with a fiction/nonfiction wall, and then a quaint back area for children’s books—but they make the most of their space. Also, side note, all of the storefronts in this area have thatched-ish European-y Disneyland-esque roofs. Too cute.
PAIR WITH: I haven’t been, but “The Montclair Egg Shop”? A must try. Also several cute ice cream places in the vicinity.

10. Books Inc., 1760 Fourth St., Berkeley
This Bay Area mega-chain was also on my San Francisco list, mostly because they are ubiquitous and reliable and still smaller than Barnes & Noble. My personal Books Inc. is the one on Fourth Street, simply because it’s close to my house. It’s small but inviting, with large glass doors and very helpful clerks who make reasonably good recommendations. And they don’t mind all the (countless) times I’ve come in “just to browse.” Down side: I’ve had a Frequent Buyer card for over a year and still haven’t gotten a free book. Can they lower the “buy ___, get one free” threshold just a bit?
PAIR WITH: Travel luggage ogling/trip fantasizing at Flight 001, then picking up some handmade ravioli to take home from The Pasta Shop

Just for Fun

Bookstores

Indie Book Sellers Are Still Around

You’ll get a kick (and heave a sigh of relief) at Tim Sunderland’s post on the rise of the independent book sellers! And get a touch of insight on what not to do—Barnes & Noble? Are you listening?

California

Shelf Awareness informs us that “DIESEL, A Bookstore, will be opening a new store in Larkspur, California in the Marin Country Mart complex at 2419 Larkspur Landing Circle.

BookSmart Books and Toys opened a second location at the New Park Mall in Newark.

Maryland

Edgewater Books opens this summer on Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, Maryland. The owner, Ken Kennedy, plans on a Spanish storytime and will stock “foreign-language books for kids, as well as eco-friendly stuffed animals and educational toys”.

“Edgewater Books is already working with its local TD Bank on its summer reading program” – “the bank deposits $10 in a new savings account for each child who reads ten books between now and the end of September. Kennedy is planning to add an additional $5 and invites those looking for book suggestions to contact him through the store’s new Web site.” Parents, get clickin’!

Massachusetts

June 1 is the grand opening for “the expansion of Park Street Books & Toys owned by Jim James in Medfield, Massachusetts, which sells new and used books for kids along with space for “classes on sewing, knitting, and science, along with pottery parties and summer camp. It’s where he launched the Pottery Place (a space within the story where visitors can paint a selection of pottery)”.

Michigan and Elsewhere

Per the Detroit News, Books-a-Million is opening stores right and left across the country with “two stores in Detroit (and “plans an aggressive search for more brick-and-mortar properties here”), Beverly Hills, Macomb Mall in Roseville, Traverse City, and Monroe.

New York: Brooklyn’s Bookstores are Expanding

Judith Rosen at Publishers Weekly reports that Community Bookstore is taking over Babbo’s Books 500-sq-ft space in Windsor Terrace and renaming it Terrace Books to open the first week in June. And they’ll be honoring Babbo credits and gift certificates.

Three other bookstores which have expanded in the neighborhood include Powerhouse Arena with its last-year-new Powerhouse on 8th, a small general bookstore; Word plans “to open a second store in Jersey City in July”; and, BookCourt is both adding a second location and raising funds to buy Bibliobarn.

Queens will have a new bookstore mid-August when Astoria Bookshop at 31-27 31st Street has its grand opening. The store “will offer a full line of titles and sell ebooks online — as well as host readings, children’s story hours and book groups”.

And David Gutnick of CBC News writes of yet another success story for Sarah McNally of McNally-Jackson Books in Soho in Manhattan who has just opened a second bookstore, Goods for The Study, and doing very well. Woohoo!

Fortunately Beach and Rourke found a landlord who wants a community bookstore in Astoria. The bookshop will be next door to Petals & Roots.

Read more from Stuart Schuffman at Lonely Planet about “a selection of some of the wonderful but lesser-known bookshops where New York City’s locals go (and tourists should go) to get their fill of the written word”.

North Carolina

Jessaca Gigli with the News Observer notes that So & So Books is a new independent bookstore opening in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, “in the front of the in situ studio architecture firm on Person Street”.

Pennsylvania

Main Point Books opened in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on May 28 per the Philadelphia Business Journal. Read what Jeff Gammage at The Inquirer has to say.

eBookNation

“The Nation has announced the launch of eBookNation.” The Nation is putting “original works by Nation writers, and collections of essays and articles from the Nation Digital Archive” into a digital format” for “readers on tablets, smartphones and computers”.

The debut title is Gore Vidal’s State of the Union, Nation Essays 1958-2005. Later titles will include the essays of Molly Ivins.”

Rowman & Littlefield Launches eBook Store

Rowman & Littlefield, an independent publisher and distributor in North America, has launched an eBook site with 12,000 titles and seems to intend to convert new titles into eBooks as the new titles are published. “Libraries can buy e-books only for single use, but the company said it is working on a plan to be able to sell e-books directly to libraries which can then be loaned to patrons.” I may not have interpreted this accurately, so you may want to read it yourself.

Libraries

Libraries Evolving in This Digital Revolution

Digital Content: What’s Next?, “examines how libraries are evolving in the digital revolution, from e-books, to licensing, to developments in self-publishing. The supplement also details progress made by the ALA’s Digital Content Working Group.”

A view among some publishers (and indeed some authors as well)…most commonly expressed when they are talking privately among themselves…is that circulating libraries are thieves.

I particularly liked that the “State Library of Kansas captured attention when it launched a Facebook page that lists ebook titles that publishers refuse to sell or license to libraries”. It also points out the issues encountered by school libraries when it comes to eBooks. This section in Digital Content: What’s Next? continues with a call to action by the public. Complain to the publishers who won’t allow eBooks in libraries. (I’m working on a post that will list the publishers so readers know who to target.) If you can’t find a title in the eBook section of your library, it could be that the publisher refuses to sell or license that title to your library. It may not be—as I’ve whined in my head!—that the library didn’t have the funds for it, but the publishers’ greed! Wankers!

The notion that you buy an ebook or own an ebook is a great marketing lie.

Another section points up what libraries have learned from their interactions with publishers. That the Big Six (Hachette, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster) don’t want to sell to individual libraries (they prefer to sell to consortiums such as Overdrive), but “the medium-sized and small presses were receptive to doing business with [libraries]“.

Ran across an interesting web page at the ALA on marketing books to libraries. There are tons of links with all sorts of information.

There’s a useful bit on the nondisclosure clauses the Douglas County Library (DCL) uses to reassure publishers and authors on how their work will be protected. DCL also provides a “Buy” button for each digital book, so a reader can purchase without waiting. Hmmmm, I like that!

There’s an excellent summary of what libraries need from a publisher regarding digital books from MARC files to why ONIX and Excel are a pain.

Did you know that there is a law that “forces” publishers to allow libraries to buy printed books but it doesn’t cover eBooks (and their license agreements)? Can I say how disgusting I find it that we have to have a law about this?

Publishers can “opt not to do business with libraries (by not allowing circulation as a permitted activity under the license offered) or charge libraries at differential (much higher) rates, as well as manipulating availability (for example, no bestsellers in the library till a year after consumer release). Some major publishers severely constrain which titles and libraries have access to their e-titles; some are charging very high prices or renting books to libraries for a limited number of loans or a limited time period, or both.

Have you ever whined about the labyrinthine process of finding and then borrowing an eBook from your library? Yeah, well, it turns out…don’t blame the library. Blame the publishers. They don’t want to make it easy for you to “borrow” a book, not when it is soooo much easier for you to click a button and…”buy” it instead. Grrrr…

Hmmm, it seems that Amazon (I assume other eReader manufacturers have the same ability) can remove books you’ve purchased whenever it likes…

There’s a section in this report on the library as publisher. This is a trend I’ve been reading about recently—”Libraries Become Publishing Portals?” In some ways it seems as predatory as a regular publisher, and in others, it seems like a great idea.

Digital Content mentions the two-day summit in February 2013 in which the W3C—the web standards organization—met “with the Book Industry Study Group and the International Digital Publishing Forum entitled “Ebooks: Great Expectations for Web Standards”, intended to discuss how open web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG, XML, and RDF could be further integrated into ebook production”.

Publishers versus Libraries

And now Connecticut lawmakers are jumping in with concerns about illegal practices. Read the article, “Connecticut bill would study library access to e-books“.

Eric Heredia at My Record Journal says this bill passed March 12 and “requires publishers of eBooks that sell or license to the general public to offer all such products to Connecticut libraries at a fair price…YEAH!

Joe Konrath, Blake Crouch Selling to Libraries

That boy is such a radical…! Now he and Blake Crouch are selling their eBooks directly to libraries at excessively reasonable rates…excessively!!! Hmmm, I wonder if my library would consider it…

Social Book Sites

BookLikes Goes Live

On May 14, 2013, BookLikes has launched its service: “a blog platform for book lovers with strong social component lets users create a personal webpage with blog, virtual bookshelf and reading timeline. It’s a mix of a Tumblr-like blog platform, book cataloguing site and social network which provides new possibilities for book lovers.” Susan Lulgjuraj at TeleRead has a brief review on BookLikes.

Goodreads Alternatives

Judith Rosen at Publishers Weekly has a post on a variety of alternatives for Goodreads from Riffle, Zola, and Bookish (now allowing imports of Goodreads shelves) on to BookLikes.

Digital Book World notes that The Reading Room, a book-focused social media site, has entered the eBook publishing market earlier in 2013, and is now entering the print market as of June 1.

Publishers Setting Up Their Own Online Communities

Jane Tappuni has contributed a guest post at Publishing Perspectives on “Number of Publishers’ Branded Reader Communities Set to Explode“. She points out that, “due to the decline in library purchases and the closing of bookstores over the last few years, publishers have devoted more of their marketing budget towards building a direct relationship with their customers. The creation of online communities has been central to this.” …with “the number of publisher-owned online communities is set to more than double over the next two years. The study, which focused on US and UK publishers in both the trade and academic markets, found that two-thirds of responding publishers currently host reader communities, and that this number is set to rise to over 90% over the next two years.”

Awards

2013 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

“Howard Jacobson wins this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for his novel Zoo Time” (Telegraph).

2013 Orwell Prize

“A.T. Williams won the €3,000 (about US$4,590) Orwell Prize, which recognizes work that comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’, for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa.”

Lydia Davis Wins Booker Prize

U.S. writer Lydia Davis gets €60,000 Man Booker International prize for “achievement in fiction”.

2012 Nebula Winners

• Novel: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Novella: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress
• Novelette: “Close Encounters” by Andy Duncan
• Short Story: “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard
• Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin, director, and Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Abilar, writers
• Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book: Fair Coin (Coin, 1) by E.C. Myers
• 2012 Damon Knight Grand Master Award: Gene Wolfe
• Solstice Award: Carl Sagan and Ginjer Buchanan
• Kevin O’Donnel, Jr. Service to SFWA Award: Michael H. Payne

2012 Plutarch Award

Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 4) “won the inaugural Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2102. The award is voted on by members of Biographers International Organization.”

Winner for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker, a Dutch author, (translated by David Colmer) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and €10,000.

Innovations in Reading Prizes

The National Book Foundation announced the winners of its It seems that the 2013 Innovations in Reading article from the mid-May Hodgepodge missed a couple winners. “Reading is the Way Up…which has placed over 170,000 books into the hands of students. …through strategic partnerships with Barnes and Noble and Reading Is Fundamental, with the goal of promoting book ownership.” The second one is “Little Free Library…which started in Hudson, Wisconsin, with one little box labeled “Free Books… Books became the currency of friendship, and constructing the free neighborhood book exchanges themselves emerged as a new American folk craft.”

Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism

The New York Public Library’s $15,000 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism went to Katherine Boo for Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. “Boo announced at the awards ceremony that she will be donating the money to the community in Mumbai that was the subject of her book.”

Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reporting

The Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reporting went to Ed Vulliamy for his book Amexica: War Along the Borderline.

Romantic Novel of the Year Awards

The Romantic Novelists’ Association hasn’t named this award very well. There are actually five categories in the Romantic Novel of the Year…awards… I gotta say their website really sucks in terms of trying to find out who the winners are in what categories. I’ve been clicking all over the place; finally found some information buried in one article, then on the page with the winner announcements, they couldn’t be bothered to include the winning titles…WTF? Instead I had to go hunting within the small print on several different pages. Never did find out who won two of the awards. Maybe there weren’t any contenders, and I was not inclined to hunt ‘em down. I mean, If the RNA isn’t fashed enough to care…

• Romantic Novel of the Year: Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams by Jenny Colgan
• Contemporary Romantic Novel: You Had Me At Hello by Mhairi McFarlane
• Epic Romantic Novel: Dearest Rose by Rowan Coleman
• Historical Romantic Novel: The Apothecary’s Daughter by Charlotte Betts
• Romantic Comedy Novel: Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams by Jenny Colgan
• Young Adult Romantic Novel: Witchstruck by Victoria Lamb
• Joan Hessayon New Writers’ Scheme Award: A Conspiracy of Alchemists (The Chronicles of Light and Shadow, 1) by Liesel Schwartz
• Katie Fforde Bursary: title by author
• Elizabeth Goudge Trophy: title by author
• Rose Award: Beneath the Major’s Scars by Sarah Mallory
• Outstanding Achievement: Sophie Kinsella

Flicks from Books

Divergent

Sara Vilkomerso from Inside Movies brings you up-to-date with Tris going ‘Dauntless’ in the upcoming Divergent movie from the book by Veronica Roth.

Christopher Robin Coming to the Screen

Andreas Wiseman at Screen Daily writes that a period drama, Goodbye Christopher Robin, about A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, and his son, Robin Milne, the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh, is scheduled to start filming in 2014 with Damian Jones and Pinewood Films’ Steve Christian teaming up with a script written by Simon Vaughan.

Salinger Preview

A taster of this fall’s upcoming movie, Salinger, about J.D. Salinger (author of Catcher in the Rye) is being previewed at the Cannes Film Festival per Charlotte Higgins of The Guardian.

Fun Wine Glass Charms

I love it! Using Scrabble tiles as the base for a “book cover” wine glass charm!

Artful Book Bindings by Richard Tuttle

Not that practical, but absolutely inspiring artistic book coverings with yet more examples at Franklin Books‘ website. I do like his imagination!

6 Brilliant Portrayals of Editors on Film

At Word & Film, Dan Ozzi writes of “6 Brilliant Portrayals of Editors on Film“, and they’re a pip.

Books That Are More Filling Than Food

At NPR, Jessica Sofer talks about “What’s Cooking? 3 Books That Are More Filling Than Food“, and the sad emotions that go with these stories.

It has got me thinking of other books in which food plays a part. The most recent is S.M. Stirling’s Shadowspawn books in which the evil characters’ senses are so heightened that they can’t tolerate anything but incredibly fabulous food. Janet Evanovich’s earlier books in her Stephanie Plum series almost requires you to pick up donuts, subs, pizzas, and birthday cake along with the latest novel, and J.D. Robb’s Eve has to be enticed by Roarke into eating. With him, it’s a gourmet feast, on her own, Eve eats the worst of vending machine and street vendor foods. Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate; Peter Mayle’s Year in Provence; Joanne Harris has some good ones including her Chocolat series, Blackberry Wine, and Five Quarters of the Orange; Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast is a classic; Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café; Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; and, Diane Mott Davidson’s Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery series…I’m not even going to attempt all the mysteries that revolve around food! Does anyone know the name of the book about the Chinese family and food…?

What food-fixated novels have you read lately?

Fun and Funky Book Furniture

Fun and Funky Baby Bookshelves

My Tiny Nest at Project Nursery has gathered a few cute bookshelves—there are a couple I wouldn’t mind for myself—for the baby’s room. Or anywhere you need to corral a small collection.

String ‘Em Up!

Then there’s the bookcase that uses thread to hold each book in its place!

Awesome Bookish Lamps

Derek Attig at Book Riot has a post of fun and funky book lamps! I do love that poetic curl…

HowStuffWorks Coming to You as Interactive eBooks

This should be fun! Claire Kirch has an article at Publishers Weekly about three new Discovery/HowStuffWorks eBooks which are being released on June 4 by Discovery/HowStuffWorks. The titles include Stuff You Missed in History Class; The Real Science of Sex Appeal, which will include ‘Stuff Mom Never Told You’”; and, 50 Amazing Facts from Josh and Chuck.

“Two HowStuffWorks e-books will be released on July 9, including Future Tech, Right Now; and, Lightsabers, Batmobiles, and Kryptonite: The Science of Being Super, which will include information on the technology and science behind gadgets used by super-heroes and their villains.

Priced at $4.99 each, the “HowStuffWorks e-books will feature interactive quizzes, four-color photographs, and audio and video clips from HowStuffWorks podcasts, as well as sidebars, diagrams, and interactive timelines providing related factoids and anecdotes. The e-books will also include ‘Top 5′ and ‘Top 10′ lists pertaining to that e-book’s theme, such as ’5 of History’s Biggest Lies’ and ’10 Star Trek Technologies That Came True’.”

Might be worth picking one or two up to get ideas for your own books…

eReaders

NOOK’s Simple Touch Gets an Upgrade

Darrell Etherington at Tech Crunch notes that the Nook Simple Touch line of e-readers are getting an over-the-air update starting June 1 to allow these eReaders to access the Internet, email, and an update store app.

Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader reports that NOOK (and Barnes & Noble) didn’t even have a booth at BookExpo America. This does not bode well for the NOOK continuing…

Kobo Unveils Latest eReader Model

Kobo “announced its limited-edition Kobo Aura HD E Ink eReader…has the highest resolution 6.8-inch E Ink display available on the market today” with a dpi of 265 and 30 percent more reading surface, 25 percent faster due to the 1GHz processor which is supposed to make the pages fly (oh man, I could use that!), 4GB of storage expandable to 32GB, and a battery life of up to two months.

You have a choice of 10 fonts in 24 adjustable font sizes and can access the Internet to browse the Kobo eBookstore—that seems to indicate you can’t simply browse the Internet. You can pre-order it for $169.99.

Google Play Upgrades Again

Harrison Weber at The Next Web notes that “Google Play Books has received a redesign on both iOS and Android, and now allows you to upload your own PDF or EPUB files for reading” plus a few other improvements.

Sony’s Plans for New eReader & More

Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly has a post, “E Ink, Sony Debut New Flexible Screen Technology” that sounds promising for schools…and a lot of fun!

“E Ink is working with Sony creating “a device…designed specifically for classroom curriculum materials.”

• Developing a large-screen display e-reader for the education market
• Extremely thin e-reader about the size of a sheet of 8½ x 11 paper
• 1200 x 1600 screen resolution
• 16 level grayscale
• Handwriting recognition that allows users to make normal notes right on the screen as if it were paper

E Ink Excited About Three Colors and Freezing

E Ink must be feeling the pinch when they’re getting so excited about having added red to their E Ink displays with the E Ink Spectra. When it comes down to it, the red is all about being able to use that red to draw attention to special sales, etc. while the E Ink Aurora is about their shelf labeling technology working in a freezer.

The Spectra could be useful from an author/publisher’s marketing standpoint while the Aurora seems more of an expansion of E Ink’s appeal outside the eReader market as tablets continue to grow in popularity.

Kindle Fire HD Dropped in Price

The 8.9″ Kindle Fire HD—the big one—has dropped to $269 for the WiFi version and $399 for the 4G version, and is on sale now in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan.

Amazon to Sell Kindle in China

Catherine Shu at Tech Crunch reports that “Amazon Kindle e-readers and tablets will reportedly be available for sale in China on June 7″.

Kids’ Stuff

Kids and the Pros and Cons of Digital versus Print

Charlotte Williams at the Bookseller has a conflicting post, “Children reading more on screen than print“, in which the National Literacy Trust has found that more kids are reading on screens, but that kids who read print books are stronger readers. And like reading more!

Summer Reading Ideas

Shelf Awareness has created a list of summer reading for kids and teens while Margaret Bristol from Bookish has suggestions for teens.

The Things You Can Read has a very useful post for parents concerned about their kids reading over the summer—along with reasons why they should be reading over the summer! Check out “Summer Reading Resources” and discover a variety of ways to entice your child! I love her “Demonstrate the Power of Words” info box with its great tips and suggestions!

Another Book Subscription Service for Kids

Sarah Perez wrote about Sproutkin back in March. Now she’s writing about Zoobean, another book site which offers the choice of subscribing or buying online. Started by parents, Zoobean has “nearly 1,500 books for sale, all of which are parent-recommended, curated by a team of parents, teachers, librarians and others, and which are cataloged more extensively with topics, characters’ backgrounds, recommended ages, keyword tags and more”.

Artemis Fowl’s Top 10 Picks for Nasties

Eoin Colfer lists his top ten villains, and it’s an interesting list. Two of his nasties I haven’t yet read…they’ll be going into my TBR!

Read to Your Kids

I love Katherine Stone’s post at Babble on “7 Reasons Why You MUST Read Aloud To Your Kids At All Ages“, and I thoroughly agree. I know that my reading as a kid helped me a lot with school and getting into university. And think of all that lovely bonding time with the kids, time invested that may make problems that crop up in the future easier to deal with!

Top 10 Picks for Young Detectives

Kate Pankhurst notes her top ten picks for young detectives.

YA Readers in Social Networking

Parents who have kids interested in blogging about books may want to explore this article by Matia Burnett. Yes, it’s long, but it does have some useful suggestions about blogging and reviewing books for kids of all ages. It’s never too early to encourage kids to follow their hearts!

Artist’s Way for Parents

Things You Can Read tipped me off to this offshoot from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way except this version, The Artist’s Way for Parents, is suggestions for parents on how to encourage artistic talents in your kids. I haven’t read this one, but if it’s anything like Cameron’s original…you can’t lose. Read Cynthia White’s review for yourself.

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables in eBook

Sally Lodge at Publishers Weekly reports that Sourcebooks will be releasing paperback and eBook editions of the six novels in the Anne of Green Gables series in February 2014. Which is a bit confusing as Goodreads lists eight books… Ldoge goes on to report that Sourcebooks has acquired the rights to other L.M. Montgomery titles as well as the Emily of New Moon series.

LA Review of Books Going Online

Wendy Werris at Publishers Weekly notes that the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) will now have a print edition as well as their existing online version. The LARB “plans to make it a perfect bound quarterly that will be offered as a premium to kick off LARB’s major membership program in June”.

A Publishing Cinderella Story

You may have heard about this book, Isabelle and Isabella’s Book of Rules created by Isabelle Busath and Isabella Thordsen, as an attempt to teach their younger siblings the ropes. “They had been coloring with crayons and one of the younger kids wrote on Isabelle, so one of the rules became ‘Don’t color on PEOPLE’.”

It’s a cute story as related by Sue Corbett at Publishers Weekly on a par with Lana Turner being discovered at Schwab’s!

Travel: Does Your Hotel Have an Ultimate Library?

Ultimate Library provides subscribing hotels, such as the Hilton, Sheraton, Westin, Aman Resorts, Swire Hotels and the Savoy, with an up-to-date library for the use of their guests. Check here for a list of favorites.

eCooking

Cooking Tablet

Jack W. Perry over at Digital Book World writes about the new “ChefPad [from Archos], a tablet designed specifically for Foodies. The tablet curates apps so that only Cooking ones come up. It has a waterproof protective cover, built-in stand and front & back dual cameras.

There have been quite a few articles about it. Two of the better descriptions are from CNET and Nate Hoffieder’s excellent review at The Digital Reader.”

Betty Crocker as eRecipes

“Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced the release of The 20 Best e-book series which will feature 20 original e-books, each containing 20 recipes from its Betty Crocker cookbooks.”

Is Internet English Debasing the Language?

As Steven Poole at The Guardian says, “Some of the prose on the web is dreadful, but some is as good as anything on paper”, which is what one could say about print books as well. It’s a fun article (well, for those of us fascinated by words and language, anyway…*grin*…

Sadly

Author Obituaries

Children’s Author, Bernard Waber Dies

Bernard Waber, the creator of Ira Sleeps Over and Lyle the Crocodile, died on May 16. He was 91 years old. Click here for a list of his work.

Historian, Penry Williams Dead at 88

Penry Williams, an Oxford historian who wrote political books about the Tudors and others, died last month at age 88.

Are Children’s Books Reinforcing Materialism?

Alison Flood posts an excellent question from Rachel Franz about children’s books in this Guardian article: “How do picture books potentially deter or reinforce materialism and consumer involvement in young children?” Oh, boy, I have to confess that I never thought about the many ways books can be used to affect children’s behavior from bullying to greed to tantrum-like behavior. It continues with obsessions about appearance, long before Barbie appears to reinforce this earlier childhood message. Parents, you may want to read this if only to ensure you’re making good choices in the books you bring home for your kids!

Borders Class Action Suit Denied

Judith Rosen at Publishers Weekly reports that
holders of Borders gift certificates were denied participation in a class action suit to redeem their certificates because they filed too late.

It was impossible to tell from the post if this means the entire class action suit got tossed or what??

Barnes & Noble Practicing Censorship

I first heard about this in Maya Cross’ blog over on Goodreads. And it doesn’t bode well for independent authors of books that a small group of readers decide is “bad”. At first I thought, ooh, sour grapes…but Hugh Howey also has a post on this issue of B&N cutting off or hiding “questionable” books. The primary victims appear to be erotica, but other genres have been targeted as well. Most of them are self-published or published by a small press. This is wrong from both an author’s standpoint, but also smacks of censorship with B&N deciding what you as a reader should be permitted to buy. It appears to be worse in the UK.

Authors I currently know of who are affected are Maya Cross, Selena Kitt, Gail McHugh, Cassia Leo, and Liliana Hart.

Seems Amazon is wielding the same blackout per an article by Kerry McDermott at the Daily Mail in “Amazon accused of censoring erotic fiction by ‘hiding’ titles so they don’t show up on searches“.

More Poetry Plagiarism…

Alison Flood at The Guardian notes that “Another plagiarism scandal hits poetry community, and David R Morgan admits to passing numerous works by other people as his own and says he is ‘truly sorry’.” Yeah, I’ll bet…sorry that he got caught!

South Africa Printing Out eBooks

In South Africa, booksellers are finding that as democratizing as eBooks and Wikipedia are, if you don’t have Internet access, you are falling behind.

Arthur Attwell, founder of Paperight states that “The irony of the digital revolution is this: as it democratizes publishing, it widens the gap between those with Internet access and those without. For instance, take Wikipedia: this is perhaps the most useful collection of human knowledge ever created. And it’s wonderfully democratic. But where a few years ago you could read a relatively up-to-date paper encyclopedia in your local library, today you can’t — because of Wikipedia. Up-to-date encyclopedic knowledge now exists only online, and if you don’t have Internet access, too bad. The gap between the Internet-haves and the Internet-have-nots is getting wider.

That gap in turn will translate into an education gap, an economic gap, and a healthcare gap.”

One thing that Paperight is doing to help combat that is “putting ebooks back on paper, because for most people in South Africa, paper is just easier and cheaper. We do this by printing them out, on demand, in regular photocopy shops”.

It’s a sad state of affairs in some ways that making information and knowledge available to all is backfiring. Then again, it’s nice to think that printed books are still a possibility…

Getting a Donation from Your Local Bookstore

Josie Leavitt makes some good points that are applicable to any charitable organization requesting donations. Read it and pay attention!

Writing Tips

Characters

Kristen Lamb’s Talk is Cheap

Okay, Lamb makes an excellent point in this post in which she carries on from her earlier post and rams it home about externalization. Yeah, it’s a tough one. But if you think about the stories that really grab you, it’s the ones where the characters get pushed or do push it.

Use Your Character’s Core Problem

Kristen Lamb addresses finding that core problem for your character and forcing it into the open.

The Sympathetic Bad Guy

Tim Sunderland has a summarized list of 11 points on how to create a bad guy that your readers can sympathize with—critical to making your story even more interesting—based on a more elaborate explanation by James Scott Bell on the KillZoneAuthors.

The Harry Potter Spreadsheet

All right, y’all, ya ain’t got no excuses about tracking your timeline or characters…not after looking at J.K. Rowling’s handdrawn spreadsheet!

Writer’s Block?

50+ Things to Blog About When You Have Writer’s Block

Caitlin Muir at Author Media has some useful suggestions on topics that could kickstart a blog post whether you’re into fiction, non-fiction, a public speaker, or just need something to tweet about.

Inspirational Nudges for a Stuck Writer

These are some fun ways to regenerate your writing engine: Easy Street Prompts; SMITH Magazine with its 6-Word prompts with tabs for Life, Advice, Questions, Teens, and more; Creative Writing Prompts has hundreds of possibilities—just hover over a number and choose; and, the pretty prompts from Pinterest.

Be a Children’s Writer & Feel the Love

Elizabeth Bluemle at Publishers Weekly wrote a lovely post, “The Company of Writers“, about the caring and support children’s writers and illustrators provide each other.

Steve Jobs and 5 Tips for Being a Successful Author

Kristen Lamb makes use of “Steve Jobs and 5 Tips for Being a Successful Author“, and I thought it was very inspirational. I love his comment on piracy and excellence—always more fun! Then it’s followed by simple, love, and, sigh, failure. And it’s true…if you don’t try, you won’t fail, but you won’t get anywhere either.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. ~Steve Jobs

5 Things Indie Authors Do Very Well

Dr. Alison Baverstock, a woman who has been in the publishing business and academia, has written a fascinating article at the Indie Reader on her observations on the truth behind self-publishing authors. And, dang, read this and feel proud!

How Do You Know When Someone Steals Your Content?

Ginny Soskey at Hubspot has a, unfortunately, useful post on “Are People Stealing Your Content? How (and When) to Fight Back” with a lot of good tips and suggestions.

Analogies Defined

Pee before reading…

Jeff Wysaski at Pleated Jeans has an hysterically funny post on “Really Bad Analogies Written by High School Students“. Better than a definition any day, LOL.

Short Story Written on a…Stamp!

Dublin teenager Eoin Moore wrote an entire short story on a stamp commissioned to celebrate Dublin’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature. Check it out on The Journal. Not quite what I was expecting, but nicely done.

Words that Squick: Return of the Moist

Natasha Carty at Heroes and Heartbreakers is feelin’ the “Return of the Moist” in words that just squick her out. I gotta admit, I’m definitely with Carty when it comes to panties. I flash between imagining granny panties or kids’ panties with little trains on ‘em…and, ewwww… Be sure to read her sample paragraph at the end…and howl with laughter.

Analyzing Stephen King’s Themes

Okay, this is interesting. Aaron Stanton of BookLamp has done a visual analysis of how themes flow in Stephen King books.

EPUB3: One File, Many Ebooks

Deanna Utroske at Digital Book World has assembled a post on the virtues of ePub3, which can be summed up by Liz Castro (tech expert and author) as “A single EPUB3 file can be used to create an ebook for all e-readers”. (It’s a bit like Kobo being an eBook seller to a variety of devices—no discrimination!). Well worth reading this short post if only to be aware of some of ePub3′s extras.

Upcoming Writing Conferences

I’m not endorsing these, I’m simply relating the information.

The Publishing Business

Avoid OMICS Publishing Group

Okay, I gotta get my snark out first…If ya wanna make us think you have a case, get an editor before sending such a letter!

I feel better now…Ken White at Popehat “is in trial preparation mode” regarding OMICS Publishing Group which is suing Jeffrey Beall who runs Scholarly Open Access (SOA) for $1 billion. SOA helps writers stay aware of predatory open-access journal publishers who prey on new academics who need to publish early, often, and in peer-review to make progress in their careers. And there are publishers who know this and offer up all sorts of blandishments.

Read more about what Beall finds reprehensible about OMICS Publishing Group.

Print-on-Demand

Sparks, the New Print-On-Demand

The IngramSpark platform (Ingram’s version of POD) will launch in July and is aimed at small, independent publishers, NOT self-published.

Publishers Weekly also reports that Ingram is expanding from simply (!) POD to what they’re calling Life Print which will “allow publishers to use Ingram to manage the complete life cycle of a book, manufacturing books in any quantity. The program also gives publishers the flexibility to manage all frontlist, backlist and long tail titles from one source, using one file and one order process, Ingram said.”

Shifting Sands of Distribution

Kristine Kathryn Rusch at The Business Rusch has an informative post on how distribution* is shifting today. One thing that it does confirm for me is that if you are self-publishing, you want to buy your own ISBN and be independent of the CreateSpaces, the Lulus, the B&Ns, etc. Do read through the comments as I found some very useful information in those as well!

* Distribution is how books get from the publisher to the buyer; in this case, the post primarily discusses the printed book.

Click the infographic to download a PDF for your own use.

Infographic of Publishing Paths

Jane Friedman has put together an infographic of five different paths of least-to-most-risk for an author deciding how much risk to assume in publishing their work with some “agent-assisted models in ‘special cases’ below the chart”.

Red Flag Wavers…

There is some disagreement about Friedman’s infographic, particularly with regards to her inclusion of all the self-publishing being heaped under a single self-pub category. However, the objections primarily center around how involved an author chooses to become in the self-publishing process, including the marketing aspects.

Kindle World

Amazon Launches Kindle World

Amazon.com will launch Kindle World, “the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so,” on June 1. Royalties will be paid to both the original copyright hold—the original author—and the fanfic author. “The standard author’s royalty rate (for works of at least 10,000 words) will be 35% of net revenue. As with all titles from Amazon Publishing, Kindle Worlds will base net revenue off of sales price—rather than the lower, industry standard of wholesale price—and royalties will be paid monthly.”

“Amazon Publishing will pilot an experimental new program for particularly short works—between 5,000 and 10,000 words. For these short stories—typically priced under one dollar—Amazon will pay the royalties for the World’s rights holder and pay authors a digital royalty of 20%.”

Check out the guidelines for using Kindle Worlds for “novels, novellas, and short stories inspired by the Worlds [Amazon has] licensed”.

The Red Flag Wavers Say…

John Scalzi points out areas—he does include a disclaimer that these are simply initial thoughts—in which fanfic authors can lose out if they publish through Kindle Worlds including “use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you”, loss of world rights; “Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright”.

Suw Charman-Anderson at Forbes notes in her post, “Amazon Legitimises Fanfic, Publishers Are Left Behind Again“, that “Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment division for its New York Times best-selling book series Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar; Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard; and, Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith”. They have “plans to announce more licenses soon. Through these licenses, Kindle Worlds will allow any writer to publish authorized stories inspired by these popular Worlds and make them available for readers to purchase in the Kindle Store.”

Ingram Adds Four Publishing Partnerships

Ingram has announced partnerships with Smoke Alarm Media, a firefighter-owned media company that publishes a series of cookbooks; Little Pickle Press, which focuses on the environment; Mouse Prints Press focuses on adventure books that tell the stories of world voyages drawn from historical moral teachings; and, Jumping Jack Press, which publishes keepsake pop-up books for children.

Barefoot Books Dumps Amazon

Christopher Zara at International Business Times reports that “Barefoot Books, an independent children’s book publisher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced on Monday that it is severing ties with the online retail behemoth Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN) in North America and the U.K.” partially due to Amazon’s strong-arm tactics.

“The quirky company, which aims to provide an alternative to the commercialization of childhood through books that stimulate kids’ imaginations, said it will continue to sell books to the education market, as well as independent bookstores and its own website. It will also maintain its existing relationships with distributors Baker & Taylor and Ingram.”

Jack W. Perry at Digital Book World looks at nine reasons why Barefoot Books has a good chance of surviving without Amazon. Independent bookstores may want to check their strategies out.

Self-Publishing Support

Self-Publishing: Alexandra Sokoloff’s View

Alexandra Sokoloff does a guest post at J.A. Konrath’s blog on her entry into the book publishing field (look for the post titled “Blood Moon and Having Control” dated May 6), and I liked her comment about authors sharing their numbers. The less authors know about the kind of numbers other authors are achieving, the less publishers may have to pay to an author.

Should You Self-Publish?

Jane Friedman has a list of 15 questions as to whether you should even consider self-publishing.

Self-Publishing Support at Indies Unlimited

Stephen Hise is one of the people behind Indies Unlimited, a platform for independent writers which encourages you to “engage, inform, discuss, and build quality relationships”; “promote your books or yourself by participating in discussions and providing valuable content…informative, educational, or opinion minded comments, guest posts and other contributions”; get “advice from industry veterans; access to writing contests and magazines which accept submissions; and, opportunities for authors to showcase their own works to the public”.

Indies Unlimited promotes adventure, romance, mystery, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and biography along with some children’s books and “stays away from sex, religion, and politics. We rarely feature poetry or business writing (except as it relates to the business of writing)”.

Bowker Adds SelfPublishedAuthor.com

This press release seems to indicate that adding SelfPublishedAuthor.com is the final leg in Bowker entering the self-publishing market with features such as “blog posts with advice for authors as well as a self-publishing checklist, which includes links to Bowker-owned services, like ISBN purchasing, as well as Bowker-affiliated services, like ebook distribution from Vook” as “an information, advice and resources portal with information on self-publishing books and ebooks.”

“In February, Bowker partnered with DCL and Vook to offer its customers who purchased ISBN numbers ebook production and distribution options. In May, Bowker teamed up with book publicity firm Smith Publicity to offer public relations services.

A Union for the Self-Published?

The indiePENdents sound like a union for self-published or independent writers…pssst, it’s free to join! They do make some good points, but on some of the points, well, the times they are a’changing, and it’s becoming easier for self-published authors to get their books into independent bookstores.

Self-Published eBooks on the Rise!

Five titles out of the top-25 on the eBook best-seller list are self-published. Go team! Read what Greenfield has to say about the average eBook price as well.

When Should We Add the (Book) Marketing?

Joel Friedlander of The Book Designer takes off on Seth Godin’s original post and includes insight from Robert Bruce and Brian Clark from Copyblogger on when an author needs to start planning his or her marketing…You’re not gonna wanna read this. And I can so sympathize, HOWEVER, look at the blogging/marketing/media thing as a way to keep you on track, to keep writing. After all, you’ll get excited in your blogging/tweeting…and you’ll have to stay honest…

MetaComet Releases Royalty Tracking System

MetaComet, the creator of royalty tracking systems, will release AuthorPortal.com to publishers at BookExpo America, giving authors access to all sorts of publishing information including “royalty statements and centralizes their contracts, manuscripts, and other documents in one easy-to-navigate interface”. Check it out, authors, and see if your publisher intends to incorporate this.

Starting Up in Publishing

An interesting post over at Medium on “Starting Up in Publishing” by Liz Daly, founder of a digital publishing startup called Threepress, in which she points out what she felt was done right, wrong, and what the current issues are facing digital publishers. It’s a not-so-subtle challenge on one side and excellent advice in general for anyone starting up a business with useful tips for publishers in particular.

Marketing Ideas

Social Media

Social Media – Essential for Your Business Plan

You thought it was bad with all the marketing people pushing at you to be on social media… Paige Crutcher at Publishers Weekly reports in her post, “BEA 2013: Being Social Matters“, that social media has now become essential to one’s business plan…dang it…

The Social Media Deluge Pushing for Sales

Mary Cummings at Digital Book World has an excellent point in her post, “Book Publicity: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t“: ” Think again of how you’d walk into a room, business card in hand. You would greet and get to know the person with whom you’re networking, then offer your resume. You would do no more but let that person read about and consider you.”

Digital and Social Discoverability

Deanna Utroske at Storify had an interesting video on “Finding Books Without Borders: Discoverability in a Digital and Social” –I had a preference for Jellybooks’ presentation by Andrews. He left me itching to get to work on my own publications. Which I’ve been neglecting shamefully…

Twitter

Use Twitter to Launch Your Book

Oh yeah! Caitlin Muir at Author Media has some practical suggestions for using Twitter to launch your book. And she has a post on “44 Essential Twitter Hashtags“. Check out #tagdef to run a search on an unknown hashtag.

6 Easy Ways To Use Twitter For Your Business

Jon Rognerud has a quick post on “6 Easy Ways To Use Twitter For Your Business (And Get Some Love Too)“. I liked his reminder about using Twitter’s lists and the last tip on using Twitter power tools.

NEW: Twitter Lead Generation

For those of who have or are considering paying for an ad on Twitter, you may want to look into Ginny Soskey’s post on “ Twitter Introduces Lead Generation ‘Cards’ to Collect Leads From Tweets. It certainly sounds like it could save time and ensure accuracy!

Facebook

Another Look at the Facebook Cover Photo

Andrea Vahl takes a different approach to the changes in Facebook’s cover photo guidelines.

How to Find Value in Facebook

Lisa Hall-Wilson has written a guest post at Kristen Lamb’s blog on “6 Reasons Writers See No Value In Facebook“, which actually discusses why you probably don’t see any value in it. Hey, I’m with the anti-Face crowd. I cannot figure out how to use the dang thing, so I mostly avoid it. So, yeah, it’s on my…gag…to-do list. Hall-Wilson does have some useful tips that helps reduce a tiny bit of the dread… And she makes a heckuva lotta sense about how to use Facebook!

Google+ Beats Facebook for Author Platform Building

Marcy Kennedy does a guest post at Jane Friedlander’s blog on “6 Reasons Google+ Beats Facebook for Author Platform Building“, and she makes some good points. I’m thinking of taking her Saturday, June 15, 90-minute webinar, “A Crash Course to Using Google+ to Build Your Author Platform” ($35), which covers how to effectively set up your profile, what to do about circles and communities, how to use hangouts, and more, if only because I’ve been trying to set my Google Authorship up and have been stymied by all sorts of issues.

Kennedy promises that “even if you can’t attend the live event, the webinar will be recorded and sent to all registrants”. Click here to register.

If you’re half as confused as I am, Demian Farnsworth at Copyblogger states that “Authorship markup might prove to one of the most confusing conversations in our Author Rank series. For one, many people think authorship is the same thing as Author Rank. Repeat after me: Authorship markup is not the same thing as Author Rank.

Pinterest and the Interactive Book

For authors stuck for ideas on how to use Pinterest to promote your books, you may get some inspiration from Marcello Vena at FutureBook with his post, “eBook streaming on Pinterest” about “a new service for book lovers just launched by RCS Libri [the second largest book publishing group in Italy and owner of - among other publishing houses - Rizzoli, Bompiani and Fabbri Editori] in Italy”. It’s an intriguing “value proposition to book readers”, and you may want to check out RCS Libri’s Pinterest account to see how they’re providing interactive samples!

Target Audiences

Data About Target Audiences

Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly has a fascinating post on data. Yes, it’s a dry topic. Don’t read it when you’re tired. However, I would suggest reading it if only for the positive note the Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay Conference had about the state of publishing today—it’s surviving, which is better than the music industry with eBooks driving that publishing success.

Hilary Mason notes that “the right audience [online] is better than a large audience.”

Reid relates who the eReaders are, how they’re nurtured, and who is it who buys how often—*snicker*, you’ll just have to work out what I’ve said! His post notes that the proprietary eReader is being surpassed by the iPad, what format the Wattpad readers are using, and more.

Target Audience: Young Adult Genre

Liz Cook with the Kansas City Star has a fascinating article on “Novels for young adults are reaching more (adult) readers“. Cook points out some excellent reasons why the Young Adult genre is doing so well—and it goes right along with my whining about authors who talk down to teens—paying particular attention to John Green’s success (The Fault in Our Stars is only his latest successful publication!).

Young Adult, however, is an audience and any genre may be written for that audience. Check out Cook’s article for a lot more information, including the increasing number of buyers for YA.

Digital Strategy of the Year Award to Pottermore

Phillip Jones at Future Book notes that “Pottermore picked up the Digital Strategy of the Year award at The Bookseller Industry Awards” in his post, “Pottermore’s winning digital strategy” against seven other contenders.

Digital Book Signings

Beth Bacon at Digital Book World explains how to have a digital book signing. Who’d'a thunk…? In part 2, Beth Bacon discusses “Digital Book Signings: A Range Of Technologies And Services” and lists four e-signature options.

eBook Publicity Success

Deanna Utroske at Digital Book World has a checklist for eBook Publicity success, and it’s short, sweet, and to the point.

7 Secrets to Writing Persuasive Back Cover Sales Copy

Casey Demchak has a guest post on Joel Friedlander’s blog, The Book Designer, that covers “7 Secrets to Writing Persuasive Back Cover Sales Copy“, and Demchak lays it out well.

Pomegranate Books Uses Clever Promotion

Authors of eBooks and bookstore owners may pick up some ideas from Kathleen Jewel of Pomegranate Books, a general bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina. She keeps the shop “consistently filled with author readings, children’s events, lectures and workshops, community gatherings, and more. …and keeps finding ways to promote the store’s ability to sell e-books.”

Audio for Your Book Trailer

James Revels III offers up what he refers to as eargasms, and they are available for free or a donation (I think). You might find something you like for the audio in your next book trailer.

Another Distributor: Sellbox

Another distribution possibility for your book is Sellbox.com an eBook consulting and publishing organization offering their services to businesses, publishers, and authors, converting manuscripts to eBooks to POD or books to eBooks. It appears as though they cover eBooks and eBook distribution from soup to nuts in any flavor you like. I haven’t looked into what they charge, but it’s an interesting site.

eBook Bestseller List Online Only Now

Digital Book World‘s bestseller list for the week ending May 12, 2013. And, as of Sunday, May 19, “the New York Times ebook best-sellers list will be online only. … And as prices change frequently, the Times will no longer include cover prices on its list (DBW).”

Marketing Calendar

Jack Media has a 2013 Affiliate Email Marketing Calendar that points out the big holidays a marketing person should pay attention to with suggestions and tips on how to play up to it.

Marketing Lessons from Jane Friedman

Laura Hazard Owen at Paid Content has a mixed post on “Six book publishing lessons from Open Road Media’s first three years” which looks at Open Road’s reasons for becoming and its marketing plans ahead.

Go Kobo for International!

Digital Book World notes that “Barbara Freethy sells ten times more Kobo ebooks internationally than she does in the U.S.”, selling “in over 190 countries and devices in over a dozen; it has significantly higher market share in countries like Canada and Japan where the market is much smaller but growing quickly”.

“According to CEO Mike Serbinis, Kobo is planning on doubling the number of countries where it sells its devices by the end of next year.”

Building Your Own Website

10 Useful WordPress.ORG Plug-ins

Please do note the .ORG. These will not work with a WordPress.COM website because .COMmers don’t have access to the php files.

1st WebDesigner has ten useful plug-ins intended to help your blog’s performance including adding post meta descriptions, split your content into multiple columns, Google Maps, redirecting those nasty ol’ 404 pages, create a custom way to display posts in your home page, a dropdown menu for page categories, display similar posts WITHOUT a plug-in all the way to creating custom widgets—woohoo!

Billboard-Styled Websites

Jane Friedman has an excellent post with a different perspective on designing websites—billboards! “Three Ways to Improve Your Website Design” spouts some home truths you’d be well advised to plan around. Think about how you approach a website and how the masses and masses of text with no space between or around sends you screaming outta there!

6 Google Sins

Jon at Boost Blog Traffic posts about “6 SEO Sins That’ll Put You on Google’s Naughty List“. And you DO want to pay attention to this as ignoring it can get you cut off from search engines!

If you enjoyed this newsletter, do me a favor and tweet it. ]]> http://lisamontanino.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/quote-of-the-day-from-one-of-my-favorite-books/ Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:10:39 +0000 lilmountain http://lisamontanino.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/quote-of-the-day-from-one-of-my-favorite-books/ “But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I’m going to blame John Cusack.” 

 ― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Cheers to the week ahead!

Lis

Broad Street Book Centre, 6 Broad Street, Hay-on-Wye, Wales, HR3 5DB

Now this, my friends, is a proper bookshop.  Housed inside a beautiful Tudor building (or maybe Tudor revival, but I’m not fussy), The Broad Street Book Centre is at the centre of Hay and its dimly-lit windows, wooden floorboards and display of books in the front window draw in many aimless wanderers off the street.  Each inch of wall space and lots of the floor space too is covered with beautiful rare and secondhand books, just waiting for you to come and pick them up.  Many of them are so old and frail, with thin pages, crumbling spines and delicate gold-leaf, that it almost feels unfair to disturb their rest on the walls by picking them up.  But fortunately, the overwhelming message that the shop sends is that this is a place where adventure is allowed, so explore on!

The shop basically consists of what feels like a never-ending string of rooms, which are labelled in the most mystifying system I have ever seen.  I’m sure it makes sense for the owner of the bookshop to say ‘Ah yes, this book needs to go to section A in Room 8b’, but to the average browser, it’s not very helpful.  It is however, charming, so I’ll allow it. And it makes the shop feel a bit like a labyrinth, one where an alternatively benevolent and sadistic overlord gives you hints on how to leave which you never know if you should trust or not.  But the joke’s on him because I’m not trying to leave.  I had to be dragged out in the end, with the gentle admonition that if I spent as much time in every bookshop in Hay as I did in this one, I’d never get through all of them.  Which, in the end, I didn’t.

But if you find yourself scratching your head as  you try to get your head around the somewhat chaotic collection of rooms and books as you make your way through the labyrinth, try to enjoy being lost.  Wandering, in shops like this one, invites a certain wonderful phenomenon: serendipity.  Secondhand bookshops are one of the best places in  the world for serendipitous moments to happen; indeed, I don’t think any other kind of place is better suited to creating that ‘Well would you look at that!’ feeling.  And that feeling is one of the best feelings we can ever have; it reminds us that despite our efforts to micromanage and control every moment of our days, the world and all its magical possibilities still have the power to surprise us.  It’s a feeling that sadly is becoming less and less common as we not just lose, but freely give up, our ability to accept the random, the unplanned and the unexpected.  Fortunately it is still allowed and even fostered in secondhand bookshops like this one.

One of my favourite rooms in the shop to rummage around in held the children’s section, Folio Society Editions and modern novels. The children’s selection had lots of the contemporary favourites – Harry Potter, Narnia and other secondhand copies of our favourites – but also had many beautiful hardcover children’s books from the 30s and 40s that have been forgotten, including some titles by Enid Blyton that I had never heard of (although I also heard lately that the wrote over 600 children’s books – can you imagine?!) and some very dated storybooks for girls and boys.  The section was colourful and the light from the window just above it made for a bright and pleasant reading area, with a little wooden chair perfect for storytime gatherings, should some ambitious parent decide to try.  On the opposite wall was a brilliant collection of modern first editions, featuring books by writers like Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro and all the other darlings of contemporary fiction.  A small selection of these first editions were actually signed by the authors, so they will have been much more expensive, but the rest of the books were affordable.  I would say that for the average paperback novel, you could expect to pay about £5, though many were cheaper than that and a great many of the beautiful rare books were much more expensive.  The final wall of this room was covered in Folio Society Editions of everything from Shakespeare to Chaucer to Arthur Conan Doyle to Emily Bronte.  Some were more expensive than others, again, but most were around £20, making them the perfect gift even if buying one for yourself feels a bit extravagant.  As regular readers know, I love the Folio Society and should probably not go on about them as much as I do, but I will say once again, that they are perfect as presents, particularly if you want to give someone a special copy of a book they love to be kept in a place of honour on their bookshelf.

The shop also has a brilliant collection of CDs, sheet music, history, politics and poetry books and a room that is full of books about the railways.  Because why not, I guess.  I very much doubt that there is anything you couldn’t find in this bookshop, that there is any booklover whose ideal birthday present isn’t lurking at the back of one of its shelves.  And if you’re looking for serendipity or book fate (something I had a great chat about with a bookseller at Richard Booth’s Bookshop – coming up!) this is the place to go.  You’re sure to find a new book, or author, or even genre that you’d never heard of before but won’t be able to get out of your head.

Which brings me to ‘the one that got away.’  In the fiction section near the front of the shop, I gasped out loud when I discovered a small early edition of Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book.  This is the first in the Scottish writer’s series of twelve books of fairy tales, which collect famous stories like Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty with more obscure ones from all over the world.  This book had a blue hard cover, gold  leaf pages, and a Happy Birthday inscription on the front cover.  And it only cost £6.  Unfortunately, knowing that I had already spent too much money on books on my little trip to Hay, I decided to leave it.  For now.  In a way, seeing it there was more precious to me than actually taking it home.  When I was a little girl I used to take Lang’s Fairy Books out of the library at school after our kind  school librarian suggested one to me and I became completely hooked.  I would borrow them week after week until I had read all of the ones we had in the library several times. And I hadn’t thought about that in about ten years.  Like so many other childhood memories, reading those books has probably formed my personality in many ways and I doubt I would be the person I am without them, but they had slipped into the dark recesses at the back of my mind.  Until, as if a bit of fate or serendipity had followed me all the way to Wales, I saw them sitting on a shelf in the Broad Street Book Centre, and precious memories from years ago came flooding back.

]]> http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/06/01/why-they-never-sleep-the-peculiar-anxieties-of-new-yorkers-afflict-us-all/ Sat, 01 Jun 2013 13:00:12 +0000 Jonathan Goldstein http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/06/01/why-they-never-sleep-the-peculiar-anxieties-of-new-yorkers-afflict-us-all/ I’m in New York and Starlee suggests we go for noodles. As we take our seats, she looks around with unease. It seems she’s accidentally brought us to the wrong place. In fact, we are not at the best noodle shop in Manhattan, but, God help us, at the second best.

“No wonder we were able to get a table,” she says. Accidentally dining at a runner-up noodle shop is only one of the many anxieties endemic to New York. My New Yorker friend Rob’s fear is that he’s constantly missing out on all of the city’s many cultural landmarks. On his walk to the laundromat alone, he might be unknowingly sailing right past where John Coltrane first played Blue Train, the diner where Andy Warhol ate a particular kind of soup for the first time, and the spot where Walt Whitman stepped on a rusty boardwalk nail and released his famously mighty yawp.

‘I might as well have stayed in Indiana and been paying half the rent for all I’m getting out of this city’

“I might as well have stayed in Indiana and been paying half the rent for all I’m getting out of this city,” Rob says. With his face buried in his iPhone while endlessly searching for a decent noodle place on Yelp, he’s pretty much blind to it all.

A New Yorker I recently met shared with me her anxiety — based on a rumour she’d heard­ — that one of the more popular bookstores in Manhattan had a bed bug problem. Bugs nestled in your favourite book turns the creepiness of a Poe collection into a real-life pop-up book that can destroy your life. (Can an iPad do that? Three cheers for a good old-fashioned book!) As we eat, I ask Starlee if she has other anxieties specific to New York.

“A big one is that the bodega clerk is laughing at my healthy choices,” she says. “I’m probably buying cereal that costs more than that poor man spends on groceries for himself, his wife and his seven children.” This is the price one must pay when one is as obsessed with fibre as Starlee is. She also fears her New York friends might secretly be pitying what they perceive as a lack of success. I tell her that that is not just a New York thing.

‘I once lived in an infested house where everyone got head lice except for me. You know how upsetting that is?’

“All I’ve ever wanted was to go out in a blaze of glory,” I say, “and at this point, I’d settle on having my hair catch fire, but I don’t even have enough hair for that. Not even enough hair for lice. I once lived in an infested house where everyone got head lice except for me. You know how upsetting that is?”

She tells me she can suggest some apartments in New York where I’d be almost guaranteed some cockroaches, if that might help. We finish eating, pay the bill, and since it’s such a beautiful day, we decide to walk to Central Park and as we make our way, we pass what might be superior noodle restaurants, and, I’m sure, landmarks galore; but for the most part we don’t really notice as engrossed as we are in the beauty of the day and the enjoyment of our conversation about our shared anxieties which, for the most part, cross national divides.

—Jonathan Goldstein is the host of WireTap on CBC Radio One, airing Saturday at 3:30 p.m. and Thursday at 11:30 p.m. Follow him on Twitter @J_Goldstein.

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But this isn’t just any bookstore, it is my bookstore, and that makes a world of difference. When I say it is my bookstore, I don’t mean I own it. Not in any literal sense, though I’ve probably spent a month’s rent inside. The store is owned by Half-Price Books, but for me and the regular customers, it was ours.

I know where to find everything, from the Clearance rack that is always my first stop and has been the location of assorted treasures, to the somewhat misplaced genre authors (Caitlin Kiernan and Richard Matheson can be found in Science Fiction and Fantasy, rather than horror). This place is the reason I could go six years without purchasing another book and probably not make it through my collection. They have fueled a sort of addiction, but have also given me the comfort that only a good bookstore can provide.

This story is nothing special. It happens all over the United States, probably every day. Amazon has proven to be the femme fatale mistress of the bookstore. While I love Amazon and my Kindle, it saddens me that physical bookstores are unable to compete.

Yesterday, all the regulars received a letter from Half-Price Bookstore thanking us for our patronage and reminding us of other locations: Olathe, Kansas City, and a new store in Independence, MO. The Lawrence location, they say, didn’t get enough traffic. Of course there are other bookstores. Others in town, others of the same chain in other cities. Unfortunately, 15% off coupons and other options can’t ease my melancholy mind. They aren’t my bookstore.

I’m sure I and the other customers will move on. It’s human nature. But in the meantime, I will miss the little treasures I have found, and the staff that was never anything but nice. Books are very personal things. I’ve found postcards from a trip to Yellowstone in a copy of Bird by Bird, an essay on Faulkner inside a copy of As I Lay Dying, and numerous inscriptions from anonymous loved ones within numerous books that were loved and then passed on.

Books are like people, in that they contain more than their outward appearance. Similarly, while the closing of a bookstore is sad on the surface, it is tragic for the staff who gave so much, but will now be looking for new jobs. I wish the best for all of them, and for all of the customers who will now go on a search for a new bookstore to call their own.

On the first floor of the building, they’d have a whole section for romance and sci-fi/fantasy. The back wall had shelves and shelves of history, biographies, and books that “exposed” the bad side of perfectly good people (i.e. President Obama). There was even a section for manga next to the magazines. Opposite the entrance were the traveling, language, cooking, and other books that helped you in your daily life and travels. There were two sections split into sex books and new age items (i.e. spirituality, Sabbats almanacs, etc.) and books about ghosts and things. Above that were all the movies and music. It was much like the Barnes & Noble at the Bolingbrook Promenade, but better and cozier.

Now that Borders is gone–ever since it went out of business so many years ago. It was all very disappointing and I didn’t get nearly enough books from them. That two-story building with the floor-to-ceiling windows is currently vacant, though I haven’t been to Downtown LaGrange in quite some time, so who knows who moved in there and bought it?

I miss Borders; I always preferred it to Barnes & Noble. I don’t believe they came out with an e-reader–they probably couldn’t because they were struggling. Now, I’m doomed to go to Barnes & Noble with my NOOK (which I’m not too upset about).

How about you? Do you miss Borders? Or have you always loved Barnes & Noble?

Whether you plan on hanging out at the beach or your own backyard this summer, it’s fun to have a tall cold drink in one hand and a book in the other. Our preference is cookbooks and we enjoy being an armchair chef browsing through new releases to give us some inspiration for our summer menus and barbecues. 

We found a few worth recommending for summer reading and year-round inspiration. Miss Vickie’s Real Food Real Fast by Vickie Smith (www.wiley.com) celebrates the rediscovered joys of using a pressure cooker to create your meals.  Lori Lange has authored “The Recipe Girl” cookbook (www.hmhbooks.com)  that is chock full of easy to prepare dishes in which the whole family can help prepare. And for the mothers-to-be among our readership, or those throwing baby showers this summer, “Eating Expectantly” by Bridget Swinney (www.healthyfoodzone.com) is a comprehensive go-to guide for healthy eating before, during and after pregnancy.

Good books for summertime reading – Gotta Love It!

During lunch breaks, I used to go over there, say hi to them and intermingle with the personnel, and get the latest on what was going on. It wasn’t long before I spotted the growing library of paperbacks, hardbacks and magazines volunteers had set up. In fact, we subsequently added a chunk of our own books and magazines to that library. One day, I spotted the word Titanic in a book title. That was all it took. My lifelong fascination with that ship was enough incentive to grab that book, regardless of genre and I spent every spare moment at home reading it. I’d vaguely heard of Clive Cussler but never tried any of his works. I finished the book in two days and returned it to the rack. Funny, it sat there the rest of the war (or conflict or operation) and nobody even moved it from that spot. I never saw another Cussler novel on the rack or probably would’ve grabbed it also. I was surprised nobody took an interest in it as it was a great story. Then again, most of the troops were not there long enough to read a full novel, and probably didn’t have room in their gear to take a paperback, let alone a hardback with them.

Since that was near the end of our final tour at Torrejon, I wasn’t buying new books at the Stars & Stripes bookstore though I noted a few Cussler novels on the shelves. Once we returned to the states, I devoured every one of his books I could get my hands on, usually from the local Hastings in Altus, Oklahoma or at the book section in the base exchange. They came along at an excruciatingly slow pace.

When I prepared to start my third novel, I’d already developed some writing chops, though looking back, they were still woefully inadequate. However, the basic ability to write a structured novel was there and that’s all I needed. I loved the Dirk Pitt (Cussler’s main hero at the time) adventures enough to start my own series which are to this day called the Gold series. Lusitania Gold started as a nugget of inspiration from Clive’s Raise The Titanic along with his action/adventure sensibility. However, at the time since I’d just finished my first icky bug, The Greenhouse, I wrote in a more adult vein like most of the other thrillers of the day. Clive wrote clean (and still does) and I didn’t hold anything back. Funny enough, when I was already halfway through it, it had eerie parallels (at least in my mind) to a Cussler book that came out called Sahara. I took off early from work and drove down to Fort Worth to meet him one day. I won’t divulge the parallel, but I’d already started writing the path with that thread and was well on the way there when I read Sahara and got to the point in the book where I discovered a vaguely similar twist!

Did it make me go back and change anything? Not at all! Though similar in concept, my story had completely different settings. There’s no doubt the series was inspired by Mr. Cussler, it’s my own, not his. These are my stories not Dirk Pitt adventures! One thing I eventually did, again, partially influenced by Cussler was to clean up the language. That came about for marketability. I wanted all ages and genders to be able to read my stories without parents banning the books because of language, at least in these action/adventure (now called adventure/thriller) novels.

I’m not the only writer inspired or influenced by Clive Cussler. There are plenty of other thriller writers out there with similar styles but with their own unique stories. I’m not afraid of being accused as a clone. There are plenty ahead of me to take the heat.

With so much background, I have to get into why I admire his writing so much. He writes solid third person. He writes easy and fast-moving prose that doesn’t get bogged down in mind-numbing narration. His plots involve the fantastic, bordering on science fiction and barely possible (if not impossible). In other words, you have to suspend your disbelief, but in a fun way. He has lots of likeable characters. His stories are just plain fun.

The downside is that he tends to get corny, he sometimes over-describes his characters and makes them too good to be true. His plots get to be samey. While he stretches boundaries in one way, he writes the same old stuff in another way. He’s like AC/DC in being accused of recording the same album over and over again. He writes the same book over and over again. To me, when I pick up a Clive Cussler novel, I know what I’m going to get. I’ve rarely been disappointed, except occasionally when he’s used one of his co-authors. It’s usually the co-author’s style leaking in that causes that disappointment.

To this day, I still hold him up there as one of my favorite authors of all time. Despite any flaws the man may have, he writes a fun read and I always look forward to his next book.

That’s the mark of a great author.

Next week, I’ll talk about another author that has helped and inspired me. What about you?