Category Archives: publishing

Sarcastic Shelf Guides involving Sexual Innuendoes we Fantasize about putting up in the Bookshop

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I’ve spent the past few days moving large masses of books around the shop, reshelving sections that have shrunk or expanded, making certain like sits with like. This has included creating new overhead hanging signs, showing what’s on the shelves below.

As happens about hour three of scrutinizing books title by title, carrying armloads back and forth across the shop floor, Jack and I got the wee bit silly. We began to create “totally honest shelf guides.” Here are a few you will never see in a bookstore. Not if it wants to stay in business, anyway.

Celebrity biographies

Biographies of people who have actually done something

Memoirs

Interesting Memoirs

Classics because the school system says so

Real Classics

Science Fiction

Science Fiction involving Science

Bikini Bimbo Science Fiction

Science Fiction with an Apocalyptic Christian Twist

Science Fiction with an Apocalyptic Amish Christian Twist

Cozy Mysteries: candles, soap, needlecraft

Cozy Mysteries: medieval

Cozy Mysteries: cookery

Cozy Mysteries: cats, dogs and other animals with big brown eyes

Cozy Mysteries: someone actually cares when murder occurs

Non-Cozy Mysteries: Native American

Non-Cozy Mysteries: Everything Else

Historic Fiction

Historic Fiction with at least 30% accuracy

Poetry

Poetry that Rhymes

Christian Values

Christian Values that are in the Bible

Modern Values packaged as Christian to sell Better

Paranormal Romances: Fleas and Fangs

Paranormal Romances: three or more pages occurring before coupling (Literary)

Cookbooks by celebrities and diet fad gurus

Cookbooks by people who know what they’re doing

Guys with Big Guns, Fiction and Non

Estrogen Express (Self-help, Career and Relationships)

Hippies, Retro

Hippies, New Age

Hippies, Green

Stephen King (Horror, but we’ve stopped bothering)

Bestsellers (please stack latest Cornwall, Evanovich, Grisham or Patterson here)

War (aka American History; please note Middle East and WWII are located here)

Small Town Writer Tribes

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The bookstore, like every small town shop, rejoices in several networks and tribal affiliations. The tribe of writers is just one of these. Today I present three members who have recently published their own work–resulting in some very diverse stories, now available on-line.

Joann Lee

Joann’s mom is the lady my friend Elizabeth and I bought our goats from. (Welcome to the networking hotbed of rural living!) Joann lives where people tend to believe her lifestyle is not okay and theirs to comment on; she balances daily between being herself and flying below the radar. It comes out in her work, a romance about two women from very different backgrounds spending the summer at the beach.

Broken Star is available from jms-books.com.

Sheila Mayes

Sheila is from Pennington Gap and has written a novel based on real events, the story of a young girl from Afghanistan who struggles to get an education in America. In her words, the book “was important, but not a priority. As I was writing, Malala, a 15-year-old Pakistani girl, was shot in the head on the way home from school by the Taliban. My writing hit fast forward, the book became a priority and I completed it in March 2013. I am only one person, but I knew I had to do something to help end the violence against women all over the world.”

Sheila is donating a  portion of her e-book’s sales to the Malala Fund to help educate and end violence toward women. Sheila is on Facebook.

Michael Samerdyke

Michael is the writing group coordinator at our bookstore; if you’ve read Little Bookstore, he’s the one who started the group and has nurtured it these past five years. He writes lovely, strange short stories that range from hearts-ripped-out-of-bodies horror, to ripping through your heart with empathy at his nuanced portrayals of how people interact. His snowmen dance, his cat people long for more than blood. http://www.lulu or Barnes & Noble on-line carry Mike’s e-books, both collections of short stories linked by a framing story.

In Featured Creatures: a Phantasmagoria, space invaders, experiments run amok, rampaging dinosaurs and other horrors parade across the Star-Lite Drive-In’s screen for the greatest summer film fest ever. In The Dream Cabinet of Dr. Kino, the mysterious doc travels from town to town showing visions of mad scientists and monsters, vampires and werewolves, and other horrors in his cabinet.

Enjoy!