Tag Archives: booksellers

Sailing on the ARC

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Well, my ARCs have landed. These are the advanced reader copies that publishers make to get your book into the hands of reviewers, other authors, and anyone else likely to like what you wrote–and in a position to say so to a few thousand people.

They are pretty. I LOVE the cover of The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap. I didn’t have a thing to do with designing it; the amazing Nichole and Laura at St. Martin’s Press sent a first draft of the drawing, and Jack and I were smitten (although we did ask David, the artist, to add a cat anyplace he fancied. His second draft became the cover.)

What’s fun is, that’s what our house-cum-bookstore looks like, right down to the chairs on the porch. And while we don’t normally dance in the front yard, we have been known to take a twirl around the front room now and again.

So these arcs with the beautiful covers have wended their way to bookshops across America, and notes are trickling in from the people reading. Just simple stuff: “enjoying it”; “love the part about the guerrilla bargainers”; “I laughed out loud over the policeman!”

Affirmation, I think that’s called. So far no one has written to say, “Who told you this was interesting, you moron?!” Which makes me happy.

But what makes me happiest is the booksellers who say “Oh, this happened to me, too!” Tribal siblings finding one another. Bookslinging is a hard way of life, but boy it’s a good one. One worth fighting (a lawsuit against the Department of Justice) for, one worth braving even the jungles of Amazon to preserve. Booksellers don’t just sell books; we know who wrote them, when, yet also why, and what happened because of their publication. We not only preserve the past, but predict the future.

We’re like nuns and monks, only not so much.

Of course it’s lovely to be told someone’s enjoying my work; everybody likes appreciation of what you’ve created, be it basket, baby, or book. And of course St. Martin’s Press sent the arcs to garner interest and comments; it’s all part of the ever-chugging marketing engine, and we need have no illusions or “playing the daft blue-eyed laddie” as they say in Scotland. But I do the happy dance when a fellow bookslinger messages on one of the myriad electronic pathways by which we can so easily find one another now, to affirm the human connections our work brings. It makes Jack and me feel like part of a big, hidden team.

We love our shop in and of itself, but knowing it’s got cousins and grandparents out there makes us sweep the steps with a little more vigor in the morning. We have a lot to live up to. Thanks, y’all!

(For anyone interested in winning a copy of The Little Bookstore, Caption Contest III closes July 20. Scroll down to July 8’s posting to see the photo and enter. It’s fun, and the existing entries are side-splittingly funny.)

 

We Happy Few, We Band of Booksellers

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Sometimes the little guy does win. Or at least holds her own.

I’m not quite sure what’s happening with bookstores these days – small, independently owned bookstores, I mean; we can all see what’s happening to the giants; Amazon is closing them. But what I begin to suspect (okay, hope for and daydream about) is that we’re gaining ground.

Bookstores are magic places, but I don’t have to tell you that. The watering holes of like-minded souls, the gathering spot for the tribe, they come pretty close to sacred. And it seems to me that, like farmers markets ten years ago, small bookstores are entering a period of rejuvenation and revitalization, even as people decry their loss.  Readers have begun noticing how much more fun it is to shop with real people than online. Realization is dawning that—like breaded, fried fast food versus a slow-cooked home supper—faster and cheaper is not always better (and that the price difference might not be as high as one might think, either).

That’s why I wrote The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: to celebrate this way of life that some proclaim dead or dying.  And that’s why I cried in the middle of Ann Patchett’s acceptance speech for “Most Engaging Author” at BookExpo America, when she recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V while all these pictures of people who run bookstores flashed on the screen. Sweet people. People standing behind messy counters, in front of orderly shelves, hippies in scarves and skirts standing next to well-coiffed people in tailored suits, people who dress and think completely different from one another, arms entwined and smiling.

God love us, we are the ones who keep the barbarians from the gates. We keep a stall in the marketplace for stuff that lets people think for themselves. We take the financial risks of hand-selling things we think are good, even if they’re not commercially viable. We take trade-ins; we make staff pick shelves; we listen, listen, listen to our customers, and offer suggestions based on what they said, rather than who paid us for  a pop-up ad.

We can’t be bought, but boy-o can we sell.

I cried the whole time those pictures flashed. We are the little guys, the reeds still standing in the wind because we’re flexible, smart, and fast. What we do is so important: we help people think; we help them express themselves. And when they express themselves in particularly charming, compelling ways, we give other people a chance to hear those words that never will get made into movies.

What Ann Patchett and William Shakespeare say is true; sometimes the little guys win. Here’s tae us!