As We Go, So Goes the Nation?

Hold off on buying that ticket to Tulsa--

Book club met last night, valiantly gathered around a fire pit because, dang it, thermometer notwithstanding, it's summer. While the rest of America fried like the proverbial egg on a sidewalk, we counted ourselves lucky not to be wearing fleece. And I'll bet any other book club in America which tackled Edith Wharton's Summer spent way more time on all her descriptions of heat. Hot weather, hot emotions, hot times on a Mexican blanket...

But while we may not be in step with our compatriots weather-wise, we were utterly representative of publishing trends. Of the nine of us gathered, five of us had e-readers: two iPads (with Kindle for iPad), two Kindles, and one Nook. Two more had library copies, and the other two might have owned the book from high school. Now, we usually try to pick books available in paperback or at the library, but it's unusual to have a month where no one had to buy a copy.

Publishers Weekly summed up the latest AAP report this way:

All major adult print segments—hardcover, paperback and mass market—showed a decline in sales in May...While e-books showed a steep uptick of 146.9% for the month, bringing in $73.4 million in sales, adult hardcovers dropped 38.2%, adult paperbacks dropped 14.3%, and adult mass market fell 39.4%. For the calendar year, e-books brought in $389.7 million in sales, a 160.1% climb over the same period 2010.

Not only that, but Borders has finally cried uncle, which had our book club spending two minutes mourning the fact and five minutes thinking we had gift cards we needed to use up, and do you think we could pick up the Hunger Games boxed-set at the sale..?

People love bookstores (I count myself in this crowd) and bemoan their death, but how many of our reading purchases are still made in them? And I'm not talking about Amazon killing the bookstore, either. So many people I know buy all their physical books at Costco! Amazon at least offers millions of books--Costco a few hundred. Traditional publishers don't have a prayer if they're jockeying for a few spaces on the Costco table.

I don't buy many books, but I make an effort to get them at my local, independent bookseller now, if I can't get them free from the library or for less than $5 on my Kindle. I've never bought a book at Costco, just like I've never bought one at the grocery store. The thought that "everyone else is reading it" makes me less likely to pick it up. But that's just me, I've been told.

I'd love to hear from you in the Comments. How many non-gift book purchases have you made recently, and where did you get them?

Say What?

In the FB and Twitter inboxes this morning I found competing advice. The first article declared that, if you're an unagented author, you have a better chance of being kidnapped by aliens and forced to do embarrassing things (my words, not hers, but that was the gist), than of getting an editor at a publishing house to consider your manuscript. The second article talked about how nearly-impossible it was to get an agent these days (unless you've been kidnapped by aliens and forced to do embarrassing things and thus gotten on Oprah) because you need to be mediagenic with a built-in platform to buy your books (cf. Sarah Palin and Steve Martin, among others). It isn't that the time-honored technique of sleeping with the right people no longer works--it's just you can't even get--without much perseverance--to the people you're supposed to sleep with, and nowadays there seem to be stables of people that must be slept with, to make anything happen. Can a boob job be written off on your taxes?

I'm just mulling this over hypothetically, of course. There are plenty of would-be published authors who will become published authors in a matter of time (my cousin, included) because they have the talent and the do-or-die stick-to-it-ness to get there, but I'm beginning to think I'm not among them. For one, I ran out of gas approaching agents after, what, five tries? I'm cutting my conference attendance in 2010 by 50% (one conference, instead of two), and I've grown a little weary of pimping my book. I just want to write and get copies in the hands of friends!

Of course, right after I decided I was going into semi-retirement as a book pimper, I heard back from Third Place Books in Ravenna (Seattle)--see ya there on Tuesday, February 9, at 7:00 p.m. But after that, and the Seattle U Book Festival, I'm outie. At least for now.

Here Go Ten Minutes

Okay, I vowed I would do some writing today because I haven't for a couple weeks. So after revising Chapter 4 of my unnamed sequel for twenty minutes, I'm ducking out again. Really, I'm approaching halfway done, if I'm not already there (on the whole dinged book), but there are so many distractions!

1. Goodreads.com. I know this site has been around forever (in cyberspace terms), but I finally got on because I was reading the publishing industry's eulogies for Kirkus Reviews--which now claims it's got a few more gasps left in it--and one commenter said she didn't read the professional reviews anymore. She just checked it out on Goodreads. Hmmm...Wondering if you readers tend to go with the professional blurbs, Amazon, Goodreads, or friends' recommendations. It's always a bonus to find like-minded readers, so you know whether or not you'll agree with their reviews. I just joined a group on Goodreads called "Madam, Want to Talk about Author Mary Stewart?" because I figure they have potential.
2. The avalanche of e-readers threatening to bury us. The publishing industry is also abuzz with the many, many e-readers launching in 2010 to challenge the Kindle. The Kindle, which already had some wringing their hands because the pricing didn't allow everyone to get a big enough piece of the pie. I haven't spent much time weeping over the publishing industry because I opted out, but I remain very interested in the whole electronic thing. MOURNING BECOMES CASSANDRA is already available on Kindle, and I'm in process with the Google Books version and queued up with Barnes & Noble. For the forseeable future I'll always want a printed, physical copy of my book(s), and I'll print some up for others without e-readers, but it certainly is terribly expensive. Had I sold every copy of MBC as a Kindle version, I would have been able to take that dream cruise to Antarctica now, even with the cut Amazon takes. As it is, I'm in the black but will have to dig into the savings to bring out the next one.
3. My cholesterol. For the first time it's approaching the Highway to the Danger Zone, and I really ought to take more walks.
4. Rock Band. Got it for Christmas and played plenty down in California, so it's irritating to come back up here and find that we have hardly any songs and have to start over. My avatar couldn't even afford the hoodie I wanted her to have, so I had to play a whole bunch after I sent the kids to bed to get money for the hoodie. Plus, the microphone was defective, and I had to sort that out. Plus plus, I now have a blister from drumming.

Okay, the ten minutes are up (and then some). Back to writing.