bookselling | bookselling
Jul.20.2011
I was writing a brief article for my local Patch about the demise of Borders Books & Music when a decades-old memory surfaced. Once again, for a fleeting moment, I was thirteen years old, browsing the stacks at my beloved public library. We didn't have a lot of money in those days. My mother...
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Jun.02.2011
Publishing in the U.S. has been, for a very, very long time, New York-centric. When my own career began, the common wisdom was that if you really wanted to make it as a writer, you needed both an agent and a publisher in New York. For a lot of us, that meant a trip to New York at least once a...
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May.19.2010
I would rather sell 1000 copies a year for 100 years than 100,000 copies in 1 year.
100,000 copies a year for 100 years also works for me.
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Dec.22.2009
I recently read distubing news: The Toronto Women's Bookstore is on the verge of closing, and is begging for help from its supporters. Just across the street (on the edge of the University of Toronto's downtown campus) a long-running scholarly used bookstore has closed its doors. This summer, our...
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Dec.02.2009
Pyr's energetic editor, Lou Anders, has a unique way of demonstrating how a reader decides to buy--or not to buy--a book. Lou is a dashing, colorful sort of man with a big personality. He tends to jump up from his chair and dramatize his points. My own new book happened to be the one he used...
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Nov.13.2009
This article by William Petrocelli is a must-read for all lovers (and producers) of books: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-petrocelli/not-a-simple-price-war_...
He says, in part: "Predatory pricing is a means of driving other booksellers out of business. When this happens, the choice...
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Mar.30.2009
In a recent interview, Newsweek tried to deconstruct what made David Baldacci's books so damned buoyant despite the weight of negative opinions from the likes of the Newsweek and the New York Times.
"The suggestion that reading a thriller is a kind of civic obligation is questionable, to say...
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Mar.20.2009
Am TOTALLY bummed when I hear about supposedly smart companies doing something that hurts those that help make their bottom lines. The parable of the scorpion and the frog comes to mind. You know it by heart:
Those two critters make a deal to cross the river together–despite the fear on the frog's...
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Jan.06.2009
A real bookseller made me very happy this morning. Piper and I dropped by our local (and only) bookstore, Borders. A smart and savvy woman named Andrea works there, and she had seen to it that when Airs of Night and Sea came out last week, it was accompanied on the shelves by Airs Beneath the...
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Dec.05.2008
From Locus Magazine, December 2008:
Borders, already in a weak financial state before the current economy crisis, warned publishers that it will cut book orders across the board and sent out notice to at least one major distributor that it will not be making payment for two months, due to "...
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