Self Publish or Traditional Publish? Which is the right way?

Yesterday, my cousin, who is also an author, posted this on my Facebook wall and asked my feelings about it.

Self-publishing has become a cult@Salon.com

The writer has encountered something I've heard a million times: If you go with a big publisher, you're selling out. If you go indie it's because you're not good enough to catch a bigger fish. If you're at a small press, you're almost cool enough to sit at the table with the hip kids, but you have to wear a scarlet P and sit at the far end.

Every day at every writing conference, this plays out.

And it's all BS.

Trust me, I grew up in cow country and I know bull poo when I see it.

I think the idea that there is one path to print is behind us. In some ways, the self-publishing movement and small presses that have grown out of it are the AAA ball of publishing. Some resent being referred to as minor leagues because it hurts their feelings. I don't care about your feelings. If you wear your heart on your sleeve, keep your book in the drawer where it belongs.

Publishers are inevitable. If the Big Six fell tomorrow, a thousand small presses would fill the vacuum because most of us have no interest in doing everything ourselves. And when we do it all ourselves, for the most part, we turn out some pretty crappy, un-or-unevenly edited crap.

There are exceptions, but not many. Publishers play those roles. The middle man is not a freeloader, they provide a valuable service for reader and writer alike. There will be some who can only find a readership on their own. For others, they will never find an audience, certainly not a broad audience, without an army shouting their name until it is heard above the din.

Want to do it alone and hire professionals to edit your book and design a cover and typeset your pages? Congrats, you're a publisher. I know what I charge for covers and it means you're better financed than most and applying that level of hurdle for writers to leap before they can reach an audience leaves out a huge portion of the voices telling stories that need to be heard.

For every one truly indie author that rises from the unwashed ranks of free self-published, unedited e-books, there are tens of thousands lost in the tumult. This is the primary role of publishers. Is it always fair? No. Is it easy to get over the wall? No. Is it always good? Of course not. But it is a system that has curated our literary culture for a few centuries now and they've done more good than bad. Because while we lambast them for their Davinci Codes and their encouragement of the "Me Too" market that has turned the YA section into the "Hot Vampire" section, the dollars spent on that pap gives cover to books like The Bookthief and The Adventures of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. And Davinci Code allows books like The Corrections and The Yiddish Policeman's Union a bit of breathing room to flourish and find their audience.

And while the midlist is frequently eulogized, it lives on in the smaller imprints that have risen up to take the slack and live leaner on smaller profit margins than the Big Six can sell to their stockholders.

Publishers are not evil. We just like to make them seem remote and uncaring and evil because it suits our personal narrative for it to be so. They're not the bad guys and we're not the heroes. We're all just trying to do the best we can to get our art made and in front of the people who want to read it.

The path for most will fall somewhere between. If you get your books in the hands of the people you want to read them and are able to write the next one, you did it the right way. If that doesn't suit someone else's vision of "The Right Way" to hell with them.

Extreme views in either direction make me stop listening. I don't have time for zealots.

tl:dr?
Watch John Green's acceptance speech for the ABA's 2013 Indie Champion Award. He's pretty darned close to what I wanted to say here.

Judged By Its Cover: An Introduction to Book Design

Fact: 31% of book purchases are impulse purchases[1].

I haven't talked much recently about the business of publishing because I've been focusing on writing.  Recently, I put on my graphic designer hat to design the cover of an upcoming novel, and before I take it off, I wanted to talk about that a bit.

While I was researching the design, I trawled through the dusty remainder bins of the internet and what I found indicates a disconnect between the burgeoning independent book industry... and its cover.

I spent years working in bookstores, watching patrons peruse the shelves, picking up book after book and putting it back without so much as glancing at the jacket copy.  What were they looking at?  Title? Cover art? What was it about the books they put back that didn't appeal to them?

I posit that in many of those cases it was the cover. Something about the cover got in the way of them opening the book and reading the words.

I admit the possibility of bias, but I've watched it happen too often to discount it. Publishers agree with me.

In fact, in "ye olde days" (which was actually about six years ago) the best thing a publisher could do to get a book in a customer's hands was to make a deal with a bookstore to put it on a table, an endcap, or on the shelf with the cover facing out. This is called a "Co-op" and it's been the way of things for decades in both the book and music businesses. Heck, they do it in grocery stores too.

Why does it work? Because publishers know that a decent cover can get you to pick up a book. And if you pick it up, you're significantly more likely to form a bond with it, and ultimately buy it. [2]

Here in the future (cue beepy futuristic Star Trek noises) where we buy most of our books online, all book covers get the full-face treatment (which is awesome) but they're shown the size of your thumb print (which is not).

On the screen of the laptop I'm using to type this, Amazon displays thumbnails at about 100 pixels by 140 pixels, or approximately 1/3 inch wide by about a half inch tall.

That's about this big:

Consumers do indeed judge a book by its cover. Is it logical or fair? No. Does it happen? Constantly. Do I judge a book by its cover? No, but I do judge publishers by them. . . or rather I take it as a measure of their faith and how devoted they are to marketing the book.

As both a reader and as a designer, the cover art tells me how seriously the publisher takes the book. It tells me that they invested the time, energy, and money in getting a designer and a book packager in a room together to give the book a visual identity and that ineffable thing we used to call "shelf presence" but I suppose we should start calling "thumbnail presence"  that gets people to pick it up and give the words a chance to seal the deal.

At best, a book cover will make the buyer click on it (or pick it up) but really the best you can hope for in the thumbnail age is for it not to get in the way.

The fake cover shown above is frankly a bit pedestrian, but it works.  It's imperfect to say the least, but it's still perfectly adequate cover for a science fiction book about melty buildings. I cobbled it together from a picture my wife took of the Experience Music Project which, frankly, looks a bit like Tupperware that melted in the dishwasher.  (I felt bad doing this to a perfectly good photo. Behold the majesty of my lens flares!)

If nothing else, it proves that you don't have to be Saul Bass to make a workable book cover or poster. This isn't great, but it wouldn't hurt your book sales. Even with all the stops pulled, it still works as a cover.

Why?  Because it adheres to some basics of proportion and composition (more on that in a minute). It uses a clean font that has been optimized for contrast with its background. There is nothing about this image that would make you skip clicking on it.

Let's look at a different picture that gathers together many of the most frequent cover design errors that I see as I trawl through Amazon's lists:

This is illegible. I see it all the time and it doesn't work on any level. A loopy handwriting font is bad enough, but it's in a color that isn't a sufficient contrast to the underlying image -- even in white against a black background as with the author's name you can't read it.

Note that this one barely works at a larger image size or higher resolution.  Even blown-up, the red subtitle is gone.

Graphic designers are so touchy about handwriting fonts that it's nearly legendary. (Type "Comic Sans" into a search engine sometime.)  In fact, I'm just shy of saying that all handwriting fonts should be banned from book covers entirely.  Except that I've seen them work, but only in very select circumstances and in the hands of a trained professional.

Sometimes it's easy to see why one things works and the other doesn't. Even with all the silly Photoshoppery, When the Buildings Melt "works" not because it's brilliantly executed -- it isn't -- but on simplicity alone. Just being legibile will get you a long way. The curly font murders Swear Not by the Moon in its bed before we ever get to the contrast and composition problems.

This isn't my best work, but it is a bit better.  At least you can read it.

The tapes and off-kilter type is very much a trend right now and it does look funky and youthful (I'm imagining this is a YA book). The font could be even clearer but I don't want to spend a lot of time on an example piece.

Note that I de-emphasized the author on this version just to make a point. Despite what our egos tell us, the least important part of a cover is the author's name. If you're not James Patterson or Steven King, your name isn't the prime selling point. It's a choice that not many are willing to take.

These aren't even extreme examples. Go through the lists of e-books uploaded by hopeful authors at any book site you care to name. You'll see every one of these problems and more that I haven't thought of.

The aesthetics of design are the work of a college degree and several library's worth of books.  Which is to say that they cannot be adequately encapsulated in a single blog post. So why bring it up at all? Because it's the place where so many small publishers and self-publishers fall short.

Book selling used to be all about getting booksellers to lay your book flat on a table or turned face out on a shelf. Give the book prominence of placement and the chance for the cover to work its wiles and you're halfway to a sale.  These days, it's all about clickable thumbnails.

A very basic understanding of graphic design is mandatory in that marketplace, but independent authors and small publishers the world over fail to fully appreciate the power of a thumbnail. If you don't believe me, go through the lists at your favorite online bookstore and pay attention to how many thumbnails are completely indiscernible.

Scott's First Rule of Design: "Possessing a copy of Photoshop does not make you a graphic designer any more than owning a stove makes me a chef."

I may be a foodie, I may even be an excellent cook, but it takes years of training, tasting, and all around hard work to become a chef. The best I can hope for is to be an enthusiastic amateur. And that's fine, but it doesn't mean I should open a restaurant. Technique is the product of training, taste is the product of training combined with experience. You cannot claim the funny hat without liberal helpings of both.

What you're going to turn out will be amateur work. That's okay. Make it the best amateur work you can. Honestly, you're ahead of the pack if your cover just doesn't actually deter sales.

Here are some very basic rules and/or guidelines:

1. Don't use Microsoft Word or Paint: MS Word & Paint are not adequate to the task. Your image will bust into pixels as you re-size it and you will be sad. Happily, you don't need the full Adobe Creative Suite. Photoshop "Elements" contains all the tools you're likely to need and only costs about $80.00. This is a business you're engaged in. Invest in your business.
2. Pixelation is bad. Work large and shrink it, don't work small and try to blow it up. While you're working, constantly apraise your image at every size it's likely to be viewed at. At art school, we were taught to think of every image as a postage stamp.
   
   
3. Use clear, strong, fonts in colors that contrast with their background. Keep it simple. Ornate fonts are your enemy and have to be applied very carefully if at all. If I can't read your title, the odds of me reading your book are diminished.
4. Learn the "Rule of Thirds" and stick to it. The Rule of Thirds is a quick way to attaining a decent level of composition and after awhile it becomes second nature -- without meaning to, I adhered to it even in the Swear Not By the Moon cover I posted above. The Wikipedia article on this topic really is pretty good. Click the link. Even professional designers and photographers only break the rule of thirds on purpose.
5. You do not have to use a photo. I see so may photos on book covers that I feel like someone, somewhere thinks it's a rule. It's not. Also, as we've seen, photos can complicate the legibility of your text. If you do want to use a photo, use your own if you can. Take the picture in the best possible lighting and at the largest format your camera allows.  Do not use a flash. Most bad digital photos can be made better simply by turning off the flash.
   
   If you feel you need to use someone else's photo, you need to familiarize yourself with licensing a fair use.  CreativeCommons.org is an excellent resource.  I urge you to use a photo that is in the Public Domain (the Library of Congress or Wikimedia Commons are excellent sources) or a Creative Commons image that the photographer licensed for commercial use.  If you don't, the image owner has every right to sue you.
6. Fonts belong to their designers. The same rules of photo and image licensing apply to fonts. When you choose a font, you must be sure you have permission to use it commercially. There are a lot of free fonts available. Shop around.  (Once again, the Creative Commons folks can help you out there. See above.)
   
   
7. The Three C's" Contrast, Clarity, and Composition. These are the three concerns you must always keep in mind as you're choosing every element of your design. As in storytelling, the parts are in service to the whole, not the other way around. I don't care how much you love the photo of the kids playing in the mud puddle, if it doesn't work, chuck it.
8. Go to a book store or a website that sells books and LOOK at the covers. Take note of what makes you want to click to see more and what doesn't. Go thou and do likewise.

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[1] Source: Bowker: Making Information Pay 2009 -- GALLAGHER, KELLY (Bowker)

[2] “Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping” by Paco Underhill

Amazon's Latest News Cycle: Grinches or Goofs?

Does Amazon have any Public Relations people on staff? I mean... at all? Maybe some advisors of some sort that play the Jeff Goldblum role and say "Sure you can do that, but should you?"

If they do have such people, are they ever allowed to attend meetings? And if so, why don't they ever say "You know this is going to make us look like the Grinch that stole Christmas, right?"

Sometimes it seems like Amazon is a machine purpose-built for creating internet rage. They remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, they delisted LGBT titles or recategorized them or... something, they got in a very public spat with MacMillan that made all of us wish they'd fight in private like civilised people, and now... now they're paying you not to shop with mom & pop.

Well... sort of.

A Country Without Borders :: The Blame Game

Last night, my wife and I walked past a great barn of a building, an abandoned space lurking on the edge of a mall in our little seaside town. As I glanced inside at the vast and empty sales floor that used to be crowded with bookshelves, it sank in... my town had lost its bookstore and there was no longer a bookstore of appreciable size anywhere nearby.  A toll bridge and thirty-odd miles of interstate now stand between me and the nearest purveyor of new books.

The store closed back in February, but this new wave of melancholy was underlined by the fact that earlier that day, America had lost the rest of the chain, 300+ stores and over 11,000 employees, all in one go. And the sight of this massive ruin felt very much like a glimpse of a lost civilization.

The Buggywhip Defense League

I'm a big fan of buggy whips, and you just can't find anywhere to buy them anymore.  Sad, really.

In recent weeks I've been accused of being a Luddite, a snob, a hipster, and a Luddite hipster snob.  Just because I prefer printed books to the digital ones.  Or was it for whining too much about Daylight Saving Time?

Might have been both.

Earlier today, someone sent me a link which implies I'm a "Book Fetishist", which has implications I don't care to delve into here.  Though here's a hint to the guys who wrote that: you're not going to win a booklover's heart by handing them a gutted book unless it was used to smuggle another book into the former Soviet Union or something.

Preferably with the smuggled book still inside.

I do love books.  I love the sensory experience of them and feel that I retain more of the text reading paper rather than the screen, but contrary to what is apparently a popular belief, I'm not anti e-book. Being anti e-book would be like being anti paperback. In point of fact, I'm fully in favor of someone making this digital marginalia idea from the New York Times a reality with all due haste.

If they do that, I will be first in line for my ticket.  Please make it available for the Kobo.


I am blessed with a personal library that runs into the thousands of books, some of which I inherited, some of which were gifts and some of which I bought when I was a bookseller and could get them at a steep discount.  I grew up surrounded by them and cannot imagine a house that feels homey without them.  Not everyone has that luxury and not everyone has the space to store them properly even if they can acquire such a collection.  Electronic formats allow someone to acquire such a collection at a significantly lower cost in terms of both money and space.

I don't think that any booklover in his right mind would begrudge someone that joy over a simple matter of silicon & pixels versus paper & ink.

Just mind those user's agreements.  Read it before you click "I agree".  Know what you're signing away in terms of rights and privileges, because you're not getting them back.

The part of the digital domain that does bother me is the part that eliminates bookstores.  And mayhap that does make me a Luddite or one of the other things I've been called.  Nevertheless, I posit that the ecosystem that grew up in support of the written word is not the Cult of the Buggywhip as it is often portrayed.  It was the support system that gave rise to our literary culture. A support system which at present, no one has presented a replacement for it that seems to have the chops to go the distance.

I'm not actually talking about publishing.  Publishing will evolve and the publishers will evolve or not as their survival instincts dictate.  Publishing will find a way to survive, they always do.  I'm talking about bookstores.  Indies, Barnes & Noble, Borders, the lot of them.

Only recently has the Googlebooks launch made it possible to buy e-books from my local bookstore (and this time I am talking about the indie bookstores such as our beloved local independant Elliot Bay)
There's nothing wrong with reading books on an e-reader any more than there's anything wrong with listening to music on an MP-3 player, but I'm not a fan of leasing any of my media.  And while the comparison between music and books is tenuous at times, I mention music specifically because of the death of the independent music store that used to be a part of the culture of every city.

To throw that away in the name of convenience is a crying shame.  When you throw out the bathwater, don't be surprised if you look down and the baby's no longer there.

And if that makes me a Luddite, a hipster, or a snob, then so be it.

Beyond Borders -- The Borders Bankruptcy as Seen by this Former Bookseller

It may surprise you to note that I haven't yet said anything about the Borders bankruptcy.  In part this is because I've been focusing my writing on other things than chasing the latest business debacle down the rabbit hole.  Honestly it was mostly because it's just too painful to think about.

As most of you know, I've worked for both of the major bookstore chains at one time or another and spent the longest time with Borders.  I worked for them in various capacities for the better part of nine years, mostly as a manager in one of their larger stores.

It was unlike any other job I've ever had.  I loved and hated it.  I formed friendships there that have persisted well beyond the walls of the bookstore and I formed ideas about books, publishing and bookselling that I carry with me to this day.  I also acquired the bulk of the library that currently weighs-down my house.  I think every writer should serve such an internship.

It genuinely pains me to see what is happening now.

I was in my local Borders last night.  My friends and I meet there weekly in the cafe to decide where to take our wandering 'supper club'.  They're closing our local store, meaning there won't be a bookstore of decent size within easy driving distance anymore. It's sad to see a town lose its bookstore.  Chain or independent, bookstores are the repositories of our cultural aspiration to be well-read and literate.

My wife and I usually buy a book or at least a magazine while we're there -- sometimes with a coupon, sometimes not.  Last night I picked up a nice book about cheesemaking and another one about gardens and a baking book I'd been thinking about getting anyway, and for the first time in a very long time, I had to wait in line to pay.  A friend of mine works nearby and she stopped in on her lunch break and she said at that time, the line stretched out the door.

A line at a bookstore that stretches out the door.  Imagine such a thing.

And here's the thing: the discount was only 20%, which is less than the weekly 30% off coupon that Borders has sent out to subscribers to their email list every week in recent memory.  Obviously people still value books.  They were shoveling them off the shelves with an impressive zeal.  And they were paying more for them than they would have a week earlier if they were really paying attention...

I wish I could tell you what that means, but honestly I don't know. Probably that people don't value something until they lose it, which is both cliche and true.

The other day, the Writer Beware blog posted a link on their Facebook page to an article written by a former Borders CEO which listed several systemic failures to manage resources and people and then argued vehemently that this wasn't management's fault.  Oh, and the dog ate his homework too.

Follow the link.  Read his story and tell me what you think.

To summarize his argument: Borders made a series of disastrous decisions that positioned them poorly to compete in the changing market.  They built a business to compete in the 20th century and not the 21st.  But it's not management's fault?

It's the same song we've been hearing from collapsed banks and other failed corporations.  Apparently that "Not Me" ghost that used to haunt the kids in Family Circus cartoons went back to school and got his MBA.  I hate that.  Those were management decisions and management failures.  You screwed up, own it, learn from it, make corrections and keep fighting.

If I had a publicist, I'm sure they would point out to me that it is ill-advised for an aspiring author to take a swipe at what will still (theoretically once they come out of bankruptcy) be a significant distribution node for my books.  Maybe.  But I started this blog to give my unvarnished take on publishing, writing and writing culture and here we are.

I hope Borders emerges from bankruptcy as a stronger, leaner and more agile company that learned from past mistakes.  Looking forward, I don't know if there's an ongoing place for bookstores the size of barns stocking enormous stacks of whatever the next Harry Potter novel will be.  I think probably not. While I don't think that print bookstores are the equivalent of buggy whip emporiums as some commentators are depicting them, I think that the day of the massive book barns is over.  If the national chains have a future, I believe it means getting to a smaller, lighter, faster vision of bookstores that encourages the passion and expertise of their booksellers and makes that their mantra.  Which means upper management that knows the book trade, not the grocery trade as Borders did.  Books aren't just another product, they're a thing unto themselves and those who do not 'get' that are not destined to succeed in this peculiar business.

As a bookseller, I saw the first signs of the approaching wave in the droves of browsers who used the booksellers' knowledge and expertise to find the book they wanted and then put it back, saying "Cool, I'll go order it from Amazon."

I'm still in contact with one of my former store managers and he said his partner had to talk him out of standing at the top of the escalator and shout "Where were all you people six months ago?!"   The answer, of course, is they were at their computers, pointing and clicking.

Last night, as I watched people shoveling books into baskets and hauling them up to the counter at Borders like they were stocking-up for the apocalypse, I wondered what it would take for a bookstore to inspire that kind of zeal all of the time...  but no answers came to me.

Bookselling :: Behind the Publishing Curtain

How a book with potential becomes something more than just another tree sandwich:

Thoughts from the Rose City

For our anniversary, The Engineer and I took off and disappeared into the wilds of Portland, Oregon this past weekend for a very bookish anniversary vacation.  While there, I had several thoughts I wanted to share...

• I have the coolest, most beautiful wife ever in the history of humankind.  Among the many reasons this is true is that she allowed... nay encouraged me to spend an inordinate amount of our anniversary trip in bookstores.
• I love Powell's City of Books and could live there quite happily.
• Portland is the most walkable city I've ever visited.  Bar none.  Next time I'm leaving the car here.
• I've now had coffee prepared by a robot and I rescind my previous yearning for a robot to make my morning Joe.  (That technology isn't perfected yet.  Trust me.)
• I'm curious about citizenship in Powell's City of Books and would happily emigrate given the opportunity.
• Portland has more hat shops per capita than any city anywhere.  I don;t have any data to prove that, but I've fairly certain it's an accurate statement.
• Everyone should wear more hats!
• People should stop worrying about "looking like a tourist" and look up more often.
• There aren't enough "flatiron" style triangular buildings in the world and we need to build more of them.  Portland has a pleasing number of them.
• Did I mention Powell's Books?  I did?  It's wonderful.
• My wife is the best and I am looking forward to the next ten years and the ten after that and the ten after that... ad infinitum.

Survival of the fittest...

The other day, I mentioned an interview with Amazon's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos in Newsweek. At the time, I was focusing on the battle between single-use devices (dedicated e-Readers) and so-called "convergence devices" (tablets, laptops, netbooks, smartphones, et al) that do everything even if they don't do any one thing particularly well. He said something else there that's been raising hackles in the parts of the book community that are wed to the tangible paste and paper artifact.

"...we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world. That's not going to go away; that's going to thrive. But the physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever." - Jeff Bezos Quoted in Newsweek, 21 December 2009

By far the most articulate argument for the permanence of the physical specimen comes from Seattle author Knute Berger. The op/ed is called "Will Books Survive?" and I encourage you to read it. It's an interesting take from someone in the heart of one of America's most literate cities and home of Amazon.com. Berger is mostly reacting to that part of the interview which would threaten or eliminate the creaky floorboards of the Elliot Bay Book Co or the glass and steel cathedral of the written word that is the Seattle Public Library (which Berger refers to as the "Rem Koolhas temple" in deference to its famous architect -- I have to admit I'm not a fan of the latter, the architect seems to have forgotten that libraries should be pleasant places to read as well as look at.) Knute Berger is a frequent contributor to my local NPR station, so I'm familiar with his views and I know that he and I don't necessarily see eye-to-eye on many issues. On this at least, I agree with him wholeheartedly. I have similarly eclectic buying habits despite my best intentions and my omnivorous tastes have led me from the digital docs to the dusty stacks of the Puget Sound's used bookworld. And my home too is a constant battle between finding space to build more bookshelves and the people who have to live there too. So too do I hope that the bookworld can find a kind of equilibrium that allows for the existance of all varieties of books from the terra cotta to the terabyte and beyond.

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and blogs on the interface between technology and literary culture. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

Voting in a hidden election...

Seattle's legendary independent bookstore Elliot Bay is moving from the location in Pioneer Square it has occupied for almost forty years.

This is perhaps not so momentous for those bookhounds who live beyond the Puget Sound, but for those of us close-by it's a bit like hearing that the Space Needle is going to be relocated. The legendarily creaky plank floors of the Elliot Bay book store really are that much of an icon to the literate denizens of Western Washington.

Thankfully, they're just moving up Capitol Hill (which puts them closer to my brother-in-law's place, come to think of it) rather than closing as previously feared. But the economic necessity that drove them to seek less-expensive digs is an eye-opener on the state of bookselling in America. If even the most iconic bookstore in a city that has been the most literate city in America for many years is endangered, what does that say about our buying habits?

I hope they install some creaks and squeaks in their new location.

I've been a manager for both of the major chains and my brother in law used to work for Amazon. I have a better appreciation than most for what large bookstores bring to the party, and for all the complaints people have about them, they have been largely responsible for the integration of reading into modern American culture. Many books and authors may never have found an audience without the big-box chains needing to fill shelf space and selecting them out of the dustbin of the backlist. Many publishers would not have survived into the new millenium without their broad avenue of distribution.

But the independent bookstores embody the culture of their cities, and to cavalierly throw that away is a travesty. This is a hard sell in tough economic times, believe me, I know there are genuine economic reasons to shop the chain stores or online for your books. Not every city or town has - or ever had - a thriving independent bookstore. But the price wars like the recent one between Amazon and WalMart are unsustainable.

The dollars you throw into the kitty of one or the other of those rivals won't be a vote to preserve those prices. Price wars are fleeting, but the damage they do to those who cannot participate (and to some who do) is permanent. And once closed, an independent bookstore in your area is gone, likely never to return.

Witness the towns across America who now lack a grocery store because they threw their business to WalMart until that was all they had left. Every dollar you spend on books this holiday season is a vote in a hidden election. And like any election, the consideration cannot be wholly economic. Because while money cannot buy culture, it can preserve it.

Bookselling is a peculiar world, a meeting place of art and culture and commerce. A place where the boundless thoughts and ideas and dreams of our culture are exchanged, and as consumers we get to vote on the venue we think best suits that exchange. I posit that this sort of activity thrives best in a marketplace with as many competing voices as possible given as much room to run as we have to offer. Don't know your local Indie bookseller? Find them online using this handy tool provided by IndieBound.

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Update:  The new Elliot Bay is in a beautiful new location, in the sort of permanently up & coming neighborhoods Seattle is famous for. Sadly, they didn't bring the creaky floors with them, but they did salvage their iconic stained glass...

An Incomplete Map

The dawn of this country spawned many pithy quotes and axioms, sayings that embody the spirit of this country, many of which cannot be reliably attributed to an individual. There were just too many erudite people wandering around at that time to be sure. Regardless, the one I quote most often is has to be "I hate what you say, but I will die for your right to say it."

I came on here last Sunday and gave my defense of challenging literature. (Literature is supposed to be challenging.) It is easy to defend something that exists in the nebulous realm of fiction because it is easy for reasonable people to divorce the actions of Holden Caulfield and Kilgore Trout from reality even as we acknowledge their satire and latent messages about our reality.

Yesterday someone reminded me that some of the most challenging books out there aren't sold in the literature section.

Recent years has underlined how truly divisive political speech can be and how quickly it can change the nature of the debate from issues to namecalling. The partisans stand behind barricades constucted of paper and ink with provocative titles like Stupid White Men and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and/or Liberal Fascism and Arguing with Idiots.

When the aforementioned Stupid White Men came out, I was manager of a large bookstore in the Seattle exurb of Bellevue, WA. At least three times a week, I was hauled downstairs to answer the complaints of someone complaining about the latest political screed. Because Bellevue tends to trend in the conservative direction, the complaints were generally of Michael Moore or Al Franken (though Anne Coulter racked up quite a few because this is still the west coast, after all).

At the end of the day, it was easy to want to just chuck the entire "Politics" section in the bin. It was even easier to convince yourself that removing the grit from the gears would actually improve things... and that's part of the dangerous slope that becomes slipperier the farther you travel along it. Far funnier to re-label the entire section as 'Fiction' and pretend you didn't know who did it. (Not that I would ever do such a thing... ahem.)

To challenge a book -- to ban it or attempt to ban it -- is to try to craft a culture in which only one viewpoint gets to be aired. A one-sided debate is not a debate, and to silence the extreme elements is to stifle those who would speak more reasonably. To chuck Michael Moore in the bin is every bit as dangerous as pitching Glenn Beck, no matter which one you ultimately agree with. Every book is an historical document. From the thrillers of Tom Clancy to the best of Kurt Vonnegut, each book reflects the world in which it was generated. Political books are documentation of the width and breadth of American political and cultural thought. To remove any of them would be to have an incomplete map of our cultural landscape. To draw a map of the middle and scribble in the left and right margins "Here there be dragons."

Finger Food?

Someone asked me recently whether I was at all concerned that my comments on Amazon's Kindle and eBooks in general might someday come back to bite me. After all, I am trying to get a novel published and then I have to sell it to people. That necessitates making nice with retailers.... so, isn't that biting the hand that feeds me? Have I really said anything bad about any one bookseller on here? Because they all seem to get my money at some point in time or another. For the record, I'm a big fan of bookstores. All of them, really. When I was first dating the woman who is now my wife, we would often go on to the Tattered Cover instead of going to a movie. That sounds terribly romantic doesn't it? We've been married almost ten years and a nice day out still involves at least one bookstore. Isn't nerd love sweet? I want booksellers to thrive. I want all of them to survive. The Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Powells as well as Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I would miss them if they were gone. Without Amazon, I wouldn't have been able to find esoterica like Middleton's A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique. That title would still be scrawled on the index card in my wallet instead of up on the Amazon wish list where my friends found it and bought it for me. Powell's is the only place I can think of where that sort of book might pop up on the shelf and I don't get down to Portland nearly often enough... Incidentally, one of the things that inspires me to write about publishing and bookselling and allows me to go into detail comes as much from the decade I spent working for one or the other major book retailer as it does from my experience as a writer. This blend of perspectives is where I come from when I write this blog. There's a reason why I added "Technology" to the topic header. We are standing at the intersection of technology and our literary culture -- for better or worse, the industry is transforming in front of our eyes. You can't talk about that without discussing e-Books. And you can't discuss e-Books without discussing the industry leader in the e-Reader market. The Amazon Kindle sets the pace for e-Readers if only because of its name recognition (actual sales figures are a subject of great speculation). There's no ignoring that. Everyone who comes along -- whether it Barnes & Noble's new site or someone we've never heard of -- everyone will be casting themselves in the Amazon mold. Despite a Luddite streak a mile wide (it took a major illness in my family to get me to begin carrying a cell phone), I think e-Books are an excellent idea if we can get the kinks worked out. I recently read a biography of Gutenberg by John Man that mentioned as an aside that the printed output of western printing presses is roughly equivalent to the mass of the Alps. Not a mountain of books, a mountain range of books. In terms of ink and paper, that simply isn't a sustainable output. Much though I love the smell, feel and heft of a real book, the e-Reader seems inevitable. And it makes sense. But that means that our society as a whole needs to facilitate a frank and open discussion of what form the next evolution of books will take. It means hammering the dents out of our copyright laws and finally aligning them with the current level of technology. In my view, the music and movie industries failed to begin this discussion early enough. The creators of the music didn't get involved early enough. Now, if the writers' blogs I read are any indication, the authors seem to be more open to the discussion digital rights than their musical counterparts were. For all it's problems and ensuing legal entanglements, the Google Books settlement with the Author's Guild was evidence of this. The changes are happening now. The market is being created around us. In many ways it's being defined in the legal battles that swirl around Amazon and Google. Each decision creates the precedent upon which the next will be decided. Once there's a body of law, it will take something extrodinary to change it. The time to sort this out is now, while things are still in flux. Keeping the story in the realm of the reasonable mean, keeping the story from moving entirely to the fringes, and moving the debate forward toward a resolution is good for readers, it's good for the book industry (Amazon & Google included) and it's ultimately good for me. I don't bite the hands that feed me. But I do nibble the fingers once in awhile.