Tag Archives: bookstores

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.)

 

Teaching Facebook a Lesson

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Our bookstore attracts free spirits, intellectuals, and weirdos–sometimes all in one person. So of course some bookstore friends and I have enjoyed inventing a new game; it’s what creative, bibliophilic, dangerously over-educated and slightly maladjusted people do.

It started after the latest hoopla about “the big F is ruining our privacy and we are being sold as products to marketers via those little pop-up ads” escalated into “Homeland Security is watching you.”

Yeah. The government’s clear-headed efficiency dealing with every project undertaken to date has me quaking in terror about the laser beam of intellectual resources targeted at ferreting out anarchists like me.

Actually, I’m not an anarchist; I voted Democrat in the last election (in case you were confused on that point). But since I live in the Bible Belt’s buckle, that makes me look like an anarchist to some of the neighbors. I don’t mind. They usually send over fresh-baked muffins or rolls with their religious flyers. And when I leave flyers for the Democratic party on their front porch, I anchor them with a jar of homemade chutney.

It’s easy for the five thousand or so of us living here in Big Stone to remember that politics is politics, family is family, and ain’t nobody out there beyond the mountains who loves us as much as we love each other. The same cannot be said of The Facebook Community. I suppose when you get a billion or so people together, there are bound to be disagreements that become hard to settle. But the idea that someone, somewhere is keeping an eye on who disagrees with whom, about what, and why, is not nearly so plausible as that a whole bunch of someones (or, more to the point, somethings) are keeping tabs on what we talk about and what we “like” so they can sell us more of the same.

So some friends and I have started the game of “therapy posting.” Once a week, we get on our timelines and write statuses (stati?) like “package tour to Uzbekistan, small animal husbandry, 1900s German cookie molds, cute memes of fuzzy kittens, sourcing fertilizer, the collected works of Karl Marx and Charles Schultz, and yoga for parrots.”

Go on, try it; it’s fun! And it confuses the heck out of those little pop-up ads. Mine went from “promote your new book in ten easy steps” and “Petsmart” to “10 household supplies you should hoard” and “Lowe’s.” (I guess the Apocalypse Soon crowd would need a lot of building supplies….)

My friend Rachel posted a mess of stream-of-consciousness random ideas, and her pop-ups went from “a message from the First Lady” to “buy Sarah Palin’s autobiography.” She said she wouldn’t play any more after that.

So maybe search engines and cookies are easier to confuse than real people. Here in Wise County we live side by side, screaming obscenities at each other in the political arena, then sitting down to casseroles. ‘Twas ever thus in small towns, where the mayor could be your mortal sworn enemy, your church organist, and in all likelihood married to someone with whom you play on a ball team. And you’re all gonna meet at the bookstore anyway.

Facebook could learn a lot from us, if they were REALLY listening.