The $5 book club

Russell Roberts has an idea for getting his newest book into the hands of people who "are either highly skeptical or influential (teachers)." He wants private donors to subsidize sales to that demographic. You join the book club, somebody you probably don't know gets to buy the book for $5. Such a deal.

We've had problems from teachers who think the rest of us for some vague reason owe them discounts. I've even had teachers threaten to tell their students not to shop at our bookstore if I didn't cut them a special deal. The school administrators, luckily for us, could see why we thought that was dirty pool, and with their help we've pretty much stopped getting extortion demands. So, anyway, I wish Roberts success in influencing teachers, but I hope he doesn't feed their entitlement mentality, if they have one...

Publishers and conservatives

Harry Stein muses on The Future of Conservative Books (City Journal, Summer 2008). That would be nonfiction books.

Side note: what the publishing industry (at the mammoth levels) and I call "conservative" aren't always the same thing. If I were in charge, verbal assaults would have to be called something else.

Stein has a nice overview of how big publishing houses are generally at odds with conservatives, even to the point of failing to promote books they might agree to publish, or somehow not getting around to printing enough books to meet demand should demand pop up despite their neglect. And it's not just the publishers. He also looks at the press, and trade publications, which tend to ignore those non-PC titles they don't savage. Conservatives have to work around these obstacles, which can be substantial.

hat tip: Phil at Brandywine Books

Rumor control

Sigh.

Our bricks and mortar bookstore is inside a gas station, which we lease. Until a few days ago, the gas station had a very tall sign upon which the prices were displayed. It was an old sign. It didn't look good. And it was horribly difficult to keep up to date. To change the prices, someone had to use an insanely long rod with a suction cup at one end, and, one by one by one etc., remove and replace numbers. It took rather a lot of strength and coordination to get the job done. I couldn't do it. My husband couldn't do it. Most of our employees couldn't do it, either. The ones that could do it sometimes hated to do it, and I can't blame them. In good weather it was hard. In bad weather, particularly very cold weather, it was the sort of job that could reduce a grown man to tears and/or animosity toward the universe. In all weather conditions, it was hard to not lose grip on the numbers at the wrong time - i.e. before they got delicately maneuvered into place. The numbers were prone to breaking even without falling horrendous distances to the ground. It was not a happiness-promoting system.

So, the other day, the parent company had the sign taken down. I don't have proof to show you that some of us danced jigs of joy to have it gone, but I assure you, we were happy. Very happy. We don't know what they're going to do eventually about replacing it, but we have petitioned, wholeheartedly, for them to save their money and let us just use the reader boards or put up a short sign, or something like that. Anything, you understand, that doesn't require us to go back to the insanely long rods with suction cups, which only a few people can master, and nobody likes.

So, today my husband told me that of the responses he's gotten so far to the sign being gone, about half are people saying how much better it looks around there now, and the other half are asking if we're going out of business.

No, folks. We got rid of an eyesore that cost us grief and money to keep up. That's it.

If you hear any rumor to the contrary, will you please squash it? Thank you.

In the meantime, I think I'll go and polish the windows and otherwise do whatever I can think of to make it clear that we're a going concern. We are even considering getting fresh, colorful banners. We've never had banners, but the sort that you see at car lots are pretty cheap. And they'd look new. Which might take people's minds off the old sign. Maybe.

If you can successfully anticipate the wild leaps of logic to which people are prone, you are way ahead of me. It never occurred to me, not once, that people might think we were going out of business because we're taking steps to improve and update the appearance of the place.

Silly me.

'Postbarbarian' culture

In Barbarians Such as the World Has Never Known?, Anthony Esolen serves up some food for thought. Here's the beginning:

I hesitate to use the word "barbarian" to describe our current state of amnesia -- or, worse, our current pleasure in deriding our civic, intellectual, and spiritual forefathers. That's because barbarians did not do that. The change from nomadic tribesman to citizen does not mark the beginning of chronicles and memorials and feasts to honor the legendary heroes of one's people. What changes is the form of the memorial -- in stone, perhaps, rather than merely in orally bequeathed poetry -- and the reasons for celebrating the virtue; no longer mere courage in the battlefield, but courage shown for the sake of one's country. In other words, there is a fine continuity between celebrating the strength of Achilles and celebrating the bravery of Horatius at the bridge.

So how should we describe this new thing in the world, a people without roots, tumbleweeds that flit and float from fad to fad, attracted by bright toys and flashy sleaze? Postcultural, certainly, but also postbarbarian. The barbarian has not been civilized yet; but what we have now are people who used to be civilized, and that seems to me to be a different thing entirely. Right now I'm poking around in old schoolbooks, readers from the 1800's, for instance. The literary quality of the pieces included in Holmes' Fifth Reader is impressive (selections by Shakespeare, Dickens, Macaulay, Browning, Henry Clay, John Marshall, for example). Even the dated pieces by writers we no longer recognize are not all that bad. What strikes me most powerfully, though, is the assumption by the anthologist that the young reader will be edified, literally "built up," by his encounter with the great writers of England and America. The reader is expected to know, or to want to know, who General Anthony Wayne was, or what John Marshall was like in his personal habits, or how Henry Clay rose from penury and ignorance to his long career of service in the Senate. More than one kind of memory is exercised by these pieces; and it is not true that the students were encouraged never to question the complete wisdom of all those who came before them. That surely was not possible, two decades after the Civil War. Honor is not the same thing as supine submission.

I suggest reading the whole piece.

I also read old books and textbooks, and am continually amazed at the depth and substance of the older books compared to what is generally aimed at youth - or, for that matter, adults - today.

On the other hand, I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again, the classics section and the history section at our bookstore get regularly depleted, mostly by teens and twenty-somethings who have become convinced (probably correctly) that they're intellectually malnourished and need a dose of something not handed to them in school. Rootlessness might be epidemic, but some of the victims are actively seeking a cure, in other words.

Ours is a store stocked mostly with used books. Try going into a store like that someday, and watching people grab onto books written before they were born, and then clutching them like treasure. Many of today's young folks get every bit as much pleasure in seeking and studying voices from the past as some of the rest of us, believe me. They, too, want to know where they came from, and what's better and what's worse about their cultural environment compared to what's been in place before.

I think C.S. Lewis hit it dead on when he said that every age has its blind spots. What makes us luckier than most folks in history is that we can learn from age upon age, culture upon culture - assuming, of course, that the locally operative 'powers that be' don't erase the past, or skew it out of all recognition and therefore rob it of all benefit as an example of real life, or smash people who go in search of alternatives to the party line, or...

Amish-themed fiction is booming

According to Hitching a Ride on the Amish Buggy - 6/2/2008 - Publishers Weekly, Amish-related adult fiction by Beverly Lewis has reached 4.5 million copies sold, Wanda Brunstetter's Amish novels have topped 2.2 million copies sold - and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Several publishers and authors have gained readers with Amish fiction, and more titles are scheduled for release later this year and into 2009.

Writing for your target audience

When I saw this cartoon I wasn't sure whether to laugh or weep. Ah, yes, the crazy world of publishing and promotion!

hat tip: The Point: Hope, love, ponies, and Oprah

Book note: Mysterious Incidents at Lone Rock, by Rajendra Pillai

Believe it or not, I just read a Christian murder mystery starring a Hindu policeman. And liked it, overall.

The first part of Mysterious Incidents at Lone Rock (Heartsong Presents, 2008), I didn't think I was going to like it, but it picked up as it went, and turned into a pretty good little cozy, all in all, plus I found myself rather liking the central sleuth, Chintamoni Roy, better known as Chinni.

So, I went in search of information on whether this was perhaps the launch of a new series, all the more so because the prologue has the narrator (a Professor Richard Harrison) claiming that this case happened over thirty years ago, and that Chinni was 'a new friend at the time'.

So far, so good.

Then I find that the Heartsong mysteries are only available through their book club, which only sends out new releases (as far as I can tell), which means (as far as I know) that to get your hands on a copy of this title you're going to have to find a used book. (Like I did.)

Yargh. I dislike flash in the pan publishing. :(

Anyway, this is a cozy in the true sense. The language is clean, there isn't gore, there are some nice red herrings, there are mysteries within the mystery, and, tah dah, we even have our hero having everyone assemble on the premises for the dramatic unveiling of the solution.

Chinni is a decent and considerate man. If he unearths something that would probably cause 'disharmony,' he doesn't use it if he doesn't need to. At the same time, he doesn't flinch from asking anything he thinks needs asking. And, just to make it more fun, he thinks crime solving is much like algebra, and should be approached as such (to the occasional distress of his more conventional colleagues).

Here's hoping Chinni Roy gets another case. And a publisher that will keep the book in print for people to discover in due time.

(And - is this too much to ask? - a publisher that would make the books available sooner or later to bookstores, because, you know, bookstores have trouble finding good, clean mysteries to stock these days.)

Speaking of authentic cozies, feel free to recommend some in the comments, particularly if you know of any that have been recently published. I am so tired of bad language and worse attitudes in contemporary fiction, and I love to encourage the nice guys, both secular and Christian.

Book market watch: Lady on the Beach, by Norah Berg

Going through a stack of used books I'm getting ready for sale, I stumbled across one called Lady on the Beach by Norah Berg, with Charles Samuels, published by Prentice-Hall, c. 1952. It turns out to be another of those "new life of contentment and adventure far from the civilization they eagerly left behind" books (quote from inside jacket copy). In this case, the author and her husband became beachcombers and clam diggers along the coast of Washington state.

Anyway, to my surprise, when I checked market prices, I found a couple for sale for around $13, but most copies were in the $45 and up range, with a few riding above the $100 mark.

Sigh. The copy that has fallen into my hands is in good, but not very good, condition, and sports a taped and torn dust jacket, and therefore will go out at the lower end of the range.

Anyway, you might want to keep your eyes open for a copy at yard sales, etc. As always, remember that prices might crash at any time (especially if enough of you find copies at yard sales, etc., and put them out for sale at once...).

Amazon buying Audible

Amazon is paying $300 million to buy Audible, the largest online seller of audiobooks. Brad Stone reports on the deal and what changes it might bring to the audiobook market, at Amazon agrees to buy online audiobook seller (International Herald Tribune, Feb. 1, 2008).

hat tip: wikio

Creating demand in the book market

From Why Does It Still Take So Long to Publish a Book? - New York Times, by Rachel Donadio:

Technology may be speeding up the news cycle, but in publishing, things actually seem to be slowing down. Although publishers can turn an electronic file into a printed book in a matter of weeks — as they often do for hot political titles, name-brand authors or embargoed celebrity biographies likely to be leaked to the press — they usually take a year before releasing a book. Why so long? In a word, marketing.

[...snip...]

As soon as a literary agent has sold a publisher a book, and even before it’s edited, copy-edited, proofread and indexed, the publicity wheels start turning. While writers bite their nails, the book editor tries to persuade the in-house sales representatives to get excited about the book, the sales representatives try to persuade retail buyers to get excited, and the retail buyers decide how many copies to buy and whether to feature the book in a prominent front-of-the-store display, for which publishers pay dearly. In the meantime, the publisher’s publicity department tries to persuade magazine editors and television producers to feature the book or its author around the publication date, often giving elaborate lunches and parties months in advance to drum up interest.

Read the whole article

Now, as far as I can see, that article applies primarily to certain big name publishers and big name retailers, playing their long-established games. Bully for them, especially if they're publishing something I can sell in my little bookstore. (We have standards they sometimes don't meet, even though we're not as picky as perhaps we ought to be.)

But they're only a segment of the publishing world. They're a significant factor, sure. But if selling books has taught us anything, it's that the big publishers' obsession with creating fads, and replacing them quickly with new fads, isn't what a lot of consumers want.

Good backlist books, midlist books, small press books, niche books, regional-interest books, even self-published books, can do surprisingly well if they're kept in print, and are easily obtained. Novelty sells. But so does something that somebody stumbles across. Or backlist of an author a customer has recently discovered, perhaps years after the publisher has whipped up buzz and then abandoned the titles and the author. I won't be surprised if more big book houses learn to keep more books in their catalogs, long after the talk shows no longer care. We'll see.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but when I read the New York Times piece linked above, the thought that popped to mind was "Me thinks they do protest too much." (However that's supposed to go. Thinks? Thinketh? Protest? Protesteth? I never can remember...) If they want to keep giving elaborate parties, that's their business, of course. But I have to wonder if they're trying just a bit too hard to convince the rest of us that a high-flying style of promotion is necessary, in a day and age in which authors can self-publish, and self-promote, without ever even leaving their home, not to mention that this is a day and age when talk shows and magazines have more competition than ever, and perhaps can't quite drive the popular culture as much as they used to? It's not like the old days, when there were three networks, and no podcasts or bloggers, etc. Is it?

Am I calling big publishers and their marketing departments dinosaurs? Oh, my, no. Think Harry Potter. Think how people lined up to get into stores at midnight. Think how crazy some folks got waiting for the release date, book after book. Think how much people enjoyed the countdown.

Marketing can be powerful. No question. But word of mouth can spread a lot of different ways, and it can and does sell a lot of books ignored by the talk shows and magazines and newspapers. If I were one of those hotshots who is used to being wined and dined, I think I'd be keeping one eye out for signs that the gig was wearing thin. I wouldn't necessarily be sweating, because people who like to live high aren't likely go frugal without a fight. But I would be keeping one eye out.

Call me a true klutz, I guess...

... because I've done this. More than once. (But I help run a bookstore. It's an occupational hazard.)

I like her follow-up post, too. Funny stuff. :)

Book market watch: I am a Mouse, by Ole Risom

I don't know how many people have walked into the bookstore over the years and told us, while handing over some books they want to trade in, some variation on 'We threw the kid's books out. We didn't figure anyone would want old kids books, and we didn't want to waste your time.' Whereupon your humble booksellers try not to scream or whimper, especially when the barterer adds that the books were in reasonably good condition, but were simply "out of date."

Now, books that are trashed are one thing. I don't like handling torn and filthy books, and neither do most people. But those "out of date" books sometimes are in pretty fair demand in the market, even in just fair condition in some cases. Sometimes they aren't, it's true, but children's books from a generation or two ago that have gone out of print can sometimes go a bit bonkers price wise, at least now and then, because there are a whole lot of people who crave to hold in their hands a copy of a book they loved as a child. Or they crave to give it to a beloved grandchild or something.

Board books can be especially likely prospects because the supply tends to be short. They aren't always printed in big batches to begin with, and babies will chew them into ruin.

As a case in point, in today's stack of used books for which I'm checking market prices is a copy of a Golden Sturdy Book, sort of a board book supreme, almost ten inches tall and almost five and a half inches wide, with sturdy cardboard pages, and wonderful, colorful illustrations by John P. Miller. The copyright is 1964. The title is I am a Mouse, and it's by Ole Risom. Risom, upon checking, did several books along this line.

The I am a Mouse title is in scarce supply, and the prices today pretty much start at $22 and range up from there, with the majority being between $25 and $50, but with several above that. This could change tomorrow (or even later today), but even on the sites that specialize in cheap used books the prices are up in this range.

The prices for I am a Puppy are also pretty good today, but if you want solid gold, find yourself a copy of I am a Bear in good condition. As of post time, on my usual sites there is only one bookseller with a copy for sale, and they're asking ninety bucks for it, and that's while admitting that it's foxed (i.e., has got brown age spots), and the spine is almost worn away and it's being held together after a fashion with tape, "but all boards are intact and beautiful." That's a c. 1967 book, by the way. There's no telling if anybody will bite at that price, but I wouldn't be surprised. I've seen crazier things happen once someone has decided to get his hands on a treasure from his youth.

(Oh, you say you have a copy in a box somewhere? May I politely suggest you try to remember where you put that box?)

Book market watch: How to talk with practically anybody about practically anything, by Barbara Walters

Noted in passing. In today's stack of used books to go through for our bookstore is a copy of the c. 1970 book, How to talk with practically anybody about practically anything by Barbara Walters. Actually, it's a copy of the 1971 paperback edition by Dell. It is, frustratingly enough, in good minus condition, with watermarks in the green that lines the page edges, and a number written on the front. Even in this condition, though, the current market price is - to my surprise - about five bucks.

I wonder when it stopped being a one dollar book? And why?

That's not to say the prices might not crash again. You never know in this business. This afternoon's prices could be a fluke or some sort of publicity-related mini-boom. Or... it might be an early sign that supplies are getting scarce enough that prices could be headed up more or less for good. (Have I mentioned lately that you just never know in this business?)

Update: Over at Wikipedia (I know, I know, take it with a grain of salt, OK), from the Barbara Walters article:

Walters has been married three times. As she told The New York Times in 1996, "I'm convinced that you stay married when the days are bad only because you really want to be. But I always had an out. I had this job, and this life and enough money. I didn't have to fight the bad days."

I hope she was misquoted. If not, it would be nice to know the context and tone. Was she bragging, or mourning? Or what? It doesn't strike me as a healthy attitude, that's for sure, whatever spin goes with it.

And how do you write 'wedding vows' for a 'marriage' you're only going to honor if it's only full of good days? (As if that's possible?)

At any rate, it struck me funny, considering the title of her book. How to talk with practically anybody about practically anything apparently doesn't include talking to a husband or fiance about the things that really matter when it comes to going through life shoulder to shoulder come what may. Well, it struck me funny in a sad - very sad - way...

Book market watch: Books by D. E. Stevenson

Going through a stack of used books, getting them ready for sale, I came across one that looked like about a three dollar book, everything else being equal - used paperback, good condition, Ace Books, 1978 printing. It proclaims itself "A D.E. Stevenson Romance" at the top of the front cover, but the artwork is a family seated at dinner. (Oh good, not that sort of "romance," I say to myself. I can handle only so many of the dangerous-illicit-encounters-are-as-good-as-love-maybe-better books before I get exasperated. You know the ones I mean.)

Anyway, The Musgraves (the book I'm investigating) looks to be something a little bit different from the standard "romance," and Ace books in this line sometimes get collectible, so I go look it up on the Internet. The prices are not what I expected. As I look around, a copy listed for nine dollars and some cents sells. And most of the rest are $15, $20, $25 and up. Yikes. I do a bit of nosing about. The author wrote quite a few books, and a surprising number of the titles are $10, $15 and up books, even in standard mass market paperback editions. I'm finding hardbacks for $60. Fascinating. Another author that's hot but out of print? Maybe?

Has anybody read D. E. Stevenson? Glancing through this book, I didn't happen on anything objectionable. On the contrary, it seemed good, clean fun. Anybody? This is not an author I know. Is she a good one to recommend?

Hmmm. While waiting for reader input, let's see what we can find on the Internet. Here's a Moffat Town write-up on her. I guess she was Scottish...

Oh, bingo! In 2003, the North American Branch Angela Thirkell Society (ATS) sent a survey to its members asking about their favorite authors, and she's one of the top selections, according to this 2004 speech by Jerri Chase of the Richmond, Virginia branch of the society: Comparing the lives and works of Dorothy L. Sayers, D.E. Stevenson and Georgette Heyer with Angela Thirkell.

That puts her in illustrious company indeed. And being listed in the same breath with Sayers, Heyer or Thirkell, any one, would be a sort of recommendation in itself.

Now, if I can just remember who it is who was bemoaning that they'd read everything ever written by Angela Thirkell and wanted another author to try...

At any rate, don't put her books out willy-nilly for 50 cents at a yard sale, unless you like kicking yourself later. ;)