Walking to Gatlinburg: A Recap

What a great way to start off our 2010 Reading Series! Howard Frank Mosher launched his nationwide book tour (which will include stops in somewhere between 60 and 100 cities across the country) at The Galaxy Bookshop last night. While we had some of the typical pre-event jitters (Will the books show up? They did--at 2:00 yesterday afternoon. Will anyone come? Most certainly--a standing-room-only crowd!) any fears we had were laid to rest as we welcomed Howard and his audience to the store.

Our friend Will--who, among other things is a Civil War reenactor--loaned Linda and I the fabulous period coats we're wearing in the photo above. We received a huge round of applause and laughter when we made our entrance. I think Howard got a huge kick out of this, too, since we decided to surprise him and not put on our costumes till the last minute.

Howard used to be known as a fairly quiet author, and one who never read from his books, but last night he spent an hour entertaining us with stories about his writing career and the work that went into writing Walking to Gatlinburg and read not one but two sections from the novel. One of our customers, hugging her new book to her chest, told me that she thought that no one would get much sleep that night, because they'd all be up, racing through their books!

After he'd signed several dozen books (including extra stock, which is available now), Howard, his lovely wife, the booksellers, and a few guests including contest winner Charlie, went to Claire's Restaurant to celebrate a very successful and enjoyable evening.

Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for this memorable event!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Local and national praise for Walking to Gatlinburg.

Why I Always Launch My Book Tours at The Galaxy Bookshop

Special thanks to this week's guest blogger, Howard Frank Mosher!

On Tuesday, March 2, at 7:00, the Galaxy Bookshop will be hosting the WORLD PREMIER of my new Civil War novel. Walking to Gatlinburg tells the story of 17-year-old Morgan Kinneson, who walks from Kingdom County, Vermont, to Gatlinburg, in the Great Smoky Mountains, in search of his brother Pilgrim, a non-combatant Union surgeon missing in action.

For years, I’ve started my book tours at the Galaxy. Independent bookstores are the best booksellers, and the Galaxy represents everything that’s wonderful about them. Chain bookstores tend to all look alike, but indies are all different. The Galaxy, for instance, was once a bank. It still has a vault, not to mention the only drive-by window of any bookshop in the – well, galaxy.

When I walk into a great independent bookstore like the Galaxy, I immediately sense that I’m surrounded by all my best old (and new) friends: Robert Frost, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Richard Russo, the Northeast Kingdom’s Leland Kinsey and David Budbill.

At my Galaxy events, most of the people are my friends. They’re from the Kingdom. When I show my signature slide of myself shooting a bad review with my shotgun, they nod gravely as if to say, “What else would you do with an unfriendly review in the Times?”

Most important of all, I launch my books at the Galaxy for the same reason I buy all my books there. Like independent booksellers from coast to coast, Linda and Sandy and their staff know and love books the way this clueless storyteller knows and loves the outlaws, living and deceased, of the Northeast Kingdom. Why would I ever buy a book any place else?

Please come to the Galaxy and meet Morgan Kinneson and some of his fellow outlaws from Walking to Gatlinburg on March 2 at 7:00 when I’ll be talking about the new novel and my psychopathic, murderous great, great grandpa, who, I’m sorry to report, inspired the mad villain Ludi Too in my latest! Sad but true. See you at the World Premier.

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day gets a bad rap. It's overhyped by card companies and can feel like a kick it the teeth when you're single. Even when you're in a happy relationship, it can feel like there's a lot of pressure to make the perfect romantic gesture for your loved one (see "overhyped by card companies" above).
I say, let's celebrate all kinds of love on Valentine's Day. Let's celebrate our  love of our community; our wonderful pets, best friends, and dear family members; our favorite books and authors.

Happy Valentine's Day, with love from all of us at The Galaxy Bookshop!

Macmillan: Hero or Villain?

The title of this post is, for me, a rhetorical question. Despite Amazon and many of its customers crying foul over Macmillan's refusal to meet Amazon's terms on lowering the prices of its e-books, as both a bookseller and a member of a democratic and capitalist society, I am thrilled that Macmillan has stood firm on its pricing policy. Macmillan's stand paves the way for other publishers to do the same, and to assert control over their products and services--something Amazon has been trying to take for themselves in subtle and overt ways.

I've discussed the issue in the past, and during this week, with people outside the bookselling world, and their thinking is often along the lines of, "Well, publishers make plenty of money--they're just being greedy;" and on the subject of Amazon ceasing to sell all Macmillan titles since Friday, "That's Amazon's perogative." The second comment is certainly true--Amazon can choose to sell or not sell any products it wishes. Despite this particular move coming off as a bit of a temper tantrum to some, that fact remains. As for the first comment, the concrete numbers of publishing profits continue to elude me. I am not going to argue one way or the other on that issue--or on the issue of the value of good literature.

For what it's worth, here is my take on the matter.  This conflict with Macmillan (and any other publishers that come to their senses) is all about the online retailer trying to bully publishers into doing business Amazon's way. Amazon is a huge company that, for many publishers, is their biggest account, and this gives the company a huge amount of leverage in any negotiations. At least, that's how it's been up to this point. After all, this isn't the first time Amazon has tried strong-arming a publisher by ceasing to sell its books (perhaps one of Hachette's motivations in joining Macmillan's side in the e-book price war).

However, as The Amazon Kindle Team so misleadingly put it in their "poor us, trying to stick up for the little guy" * letter to customers, publishers do, indeed, have a "monopoly" over their books. That is, if you define "monopoly" as one company owning the rights to the products that it produces and sells. I think most of us would agree that, while the vocabulary might be correct in a literal sense, it in no way corresponds to the typical use of the word.

Macmillan and other publishers need to finally realize that, yes, they do own the books that they sell, and that means that they get to have the final say in how they price and distribute those books. I'm not suggesting that all of the publishers join together in setting prices for their books--that would be getting into monopoly territory, and very illegal--but they each need to determine the appropriate value of their books, in physical or digital format, that will sustain both the publishing house and the larger industry long into the future. If the publishers don't assert themselves now, it will only get harder down the road, and they may find themselves out of business after allowing Amazon to drive them down to unsustainable prices while driving the publisher's other customers (i.e. your friendly neighborhood booksellers) out of business.

More links:

Macmillan's jab at Amazon, in a New York Times ad

Macmillan's latest comment

It's important to remember the other injured party here: the authors whose works are being made unavailable by Amazon. Of course, this works to the advantage of other booksellers (Indiebound!) when authors choose to link to Amazon's competitors.

Author John Scalzi (a Macmillan author) has had a lot to say on the subject

• More here and here

A really wonderful post by a fellow New England bookseller

I'd love to hear from you on this--thoughts, questions, debate. What's your take? Do you feel this affects you one way or another...or not at all?

*Sorry, I don't buy it. It was Amazon's choice to take a loss on e-book sales by pricing them below wholesale. By demanding that publishers make $9.99 (or less) the standard retail price, Amazon is trying to save face with their customers and start making a profit on sales again.

Living up to the hype

I'm not usually a tech geek. Having the latest gadget, or the very newest version of some computer hardware or software isn't one of my priorities. Somehow, though, the build up to the release of what we now know is Apple's iPad wormed its way into my brain to the point where I was actually counting down the days to the announcement, and hopped onto the live blogs on cnet.com and nytimes.com during the big event. I even checked out the Twitter feed for #ipad to see how people were reacting to this brand new product.

A big part of my interest had to do with the buzz about the new tablet computer being a "Kindle Killer" and a huge step forward for e-readers. Here's what Steve Jobs' had to say about the e-reader feature of the iPad (from cnet's live blog):

10:53 a.m.: Jobs is back. He puts a picture of the Kindle on screen. "Amazon's done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. We're going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit further."

The new app is called iBooks.

10:54 a.m.: You can choose books from what looks like an actual bookshelf. On the upper left is a button that leads to the iBook Store. Can download books right to the iPad. [Five] major publishers (Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, MacMillan, and Hachette) are on the bookstore starting this afternoon.

Now we're getting a demo of the books app.

10:55 a.m.: The user interface is exactly like iTunes or the App Store.

10:56 a.m.: To read a book, you tap on it and it opens to be read via portrait or landscape. Tap anywhere on the right to flip forward in pages, tap on the left to go back. You can also pick up a page and lift it by dragging your finger right to left.

10:57 a.m.: A scroll bar on the bottom shows your progress through the book and what page you're on.

You can also change font and size if you want.

10:58 a.m.: It uses the ePub format. Not just popular books, but textbooks are coming as well.

But he moves on quickly without giving any detail about textbooks.

My initial reaction: This is bad for us. Apple (and the participating publishers) are bypassing traditional bookstores. By making it so very easy to purchase e-books from the iBookstore, Apple makes it incredibly inconvenient to go to an independent bookstore's website to purchase e-books.

On the other hand, there is good news here: the ePub format that the iPad will use is an open source format, meaning that it is not proprietary; you can download a book in the ePub format and access it on any compatible e-reader software, not just the iPad. [I hope this will be the case--I could be wrong.] And we've already got e-books in the ePub format available on our website. So, if people are willing to make the effort of going online to visit our website (which is possible, with the iPad's wireless capabilities), then they can easily purchase books to read on their new device.

Where people buy their books for their iPad might be irrelevant, however, depending on whether people actually buy the iPad, and if they then use it as an e-reader. Going against it is the fact that it uses a traditional computer screen, rather than the eInk technology (used by e-readers like the Kindle or the Sony Reader) that makes reading on a screen easier on the eyes. Going for it is the fact that it uses a traditional computer screen that allows publishers to use color and opens a world of possibilities to authors and publishers in the way of interactive content (videos, hyperlinked text, and so forth). The backlit screen, while it can be tiring to read from, allows you to read in the dark. Plus, there's the whole touch screen aspect, which is undeniably awesome, as anyone with an ounce of geek sense will tell you.

So, ultimately, I don't see the iPad being being the e-reader game changer that was predicted, but it is one of the more tantalizingly futuristic gadgets created for general use, and if someone (Hi, Steve Jobs!) wanted to just give me one to play with, well, I wouldn't turn it down.

For more on the iPad, good and bad:

LA Times has several articles discussing various aspects of the iPad (including its unfortunate name)

Spend days wading through the articles, OpEd pieces, and videos at cnet.

More at engadget

New York Times

TeleRead

Flavorwire

And...I'm done. Feel free to Google "iPad" for over 3 million results!

Link salad

I do not follow basketball, or any other sport for that matter, but I think it's pretty cool that the LA Lakers' coach has made it a tradition to give his players books to read during their time on the road.

Over at Powell's blog, first-time novelist D.C. Pierson talks about why he thinks we should live our lives (or at least narrate them) as if we're in an adventure story.

For Linda's fellow fans of Scandinavian literature, a video interview with Karl-Ludwig Wetzig, an Icelandic translator.

The Onion reports on a dispute about the accuracy of a children's book depicting the friendship between a horse and a caterpillar. It's an outrage!

Author Stephen Elliot writes about taking his book tour directly to the people. I love the flyer advertising FREE CUPCAKES! with the bit about the author reading in small print, near the bottom.

I caught a recent episode of Diggnation* in which hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht discussed the (hypothetical) pros and cons of the highly anticipated Apple tablet. I'm no tech geek and I've still yet to read an e-book, but I'm fascinated by Kevin's idea that the tablet could allow people to "follow" other readers, a la Twitter. How cool would it be to read the same books that Neil Gaiman (a personal favorite--go ahead and insert your idol of choice) has on his nightstand, and also get to read his comments on those books? If that doesn't do it for you, how about reading a book with a friend who lives far away? You could make comments to one another in the margins in a type of digital book discussion.

Who knows what features Apple's new product will include--or even what they're going to call it--or if it will be the "Kindle Killer" that some journalists are grandly predicting (much as I dislike Amazon's business practices, I can't imagine that a product that's likely to cost close to $1,000 could shut out a $259 competitor). Whatever Apple reveals next week, this is a company that is a proven trend-setter; their device is sure to set the tone for future e-readers, and it will be interesting to see in what direction this will send the book industry.

*Contains potentially offensive language.

[Update: Just a few more links to stories about the "Apple tablet" and its forseen rivalry with Amazon's Kindle.]

Help for Haiti

It's been hard to watch the news this week, with each day bringing the continued horror that the people of Haiti are facing in the aftermath of the earthquake. People are going without food, water, or medical attention as they wait for help to arrive. We may not be able to jump on a plane with a bag of food and medical supplies and start pitching in, but we can help by donating to the relief efforts that are in place. These groups need money to purchase supplies and send aid to the people in need. Here are links to a few of the organizations that are doing all they can to bring aid to Haiti. As they say, every little bit helps.

Red Cross

Pure Water for the World (a Rutland based company dedicated  to bringing clean water to developing countries)

Mercy Corps

Partners in Health  (Health care organization made famous in Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains)

The Clinton Foundation