Jim Huang's blog

What we're not allowed to talk about

I’m in Kansas City for American Booksellers Association and the National Association of College Store events, which have been great so far.  Lots of great energy, and great ideas that I can bring back to my store.  Looking at today's session information, I’m pleased to see an opportunity for a Publisher/Bookseller focus group. But then there’s this sentence from the session description:

These Focus Group meetings are an opportunity to dialogue about ways in which booksellers and publishers can better communicate and work together in the mutual interest of selling more books -- they are not intended to talk about specifics regarding the publisher's terms of sale, operational practices, or backroom issues.

Leave aside using “dialogue” as a verb and look at what we’re “not intended” to talk about. The thing about “terms of sale” is that they’re more than just numbers – 25 copies earns a 46% discount. Terms are a statement of values, a manifestation of how publishers view the relationship between their companies and booksellers. Ultimately, it’s really about supporting the relationship that stores have with readers.

The fact is that we get the top-line stuff in this business right. Lot of great books are being published, more than enough to allow booksellers to fill their shelves and allow readers to find something that will suit their preference. In other words, there’s a more than adequate supply of great product to satisfy consumer demand. The passionate book lovers in the industry – and there are lots of us - might even argue that the best thing about the business is that we don’t usually think of what we’re peddling as “product.”

The problems we encounter as publishers, as booksellers and even as readers tend to flow from publisher’s terms of sale, operational practices and backroom issues. Usually, that's what stands in the way of getting the right book into the hands of the right reader and the right time. Minimum order requirements are too high. Publishers and wholesalers don’t work well together. Shipping times are too long. The flow of information overwhelms store buyers. Some firms (publishers and wholesalers) are clearly offering better terms to select retailers, making it hard for the rest of us to compete. Some publishing companies are seeking to bypass stores altogether, offering incentives for readers to buy direct.

I realize that there might be legal implications to discussing things like terms of sale in a group setting (especially after the federal government’s ridiculous action on ebooks). I also realize that it’s a lot less fun to talk about operational issues than good books. But as an industry, we need to find more ways to have these conversations, instead of suggesting that these questions are off limits.

People who set prices don't like me

Three lines in three different posts in this morning's Sisters in Crime listserv stuck me:

"So I suspect that the designers who charge orbit-high rates for work with InDesign may be trying to recoup the cost of the program."

"I think this shows that publishers don't like/appreciate libraries."

"I think the risk (and the reward of jacking up prices) is being miscalculated ... publishers that make it hard for people to try out books are the ones who are risking irrelevance."

I think we are all struggling with assessing value in a dynamic environment, and I think it's especially interesting to look not just at the ideas expressed here but also the words that we're using.

"Suspect" has at least a connotation of something inappropriate.  That connotation is reinforced by "orbit-high."  But is there anything wrong with a professional trying to recoup costs?

It's always difficult to ascribe motive, but do we really believe that publishers don't "like" libraries?

When we're talking about risk and reward, we're using terms that put us into the right realm -- commerce.  But are we imputing a duty -- trying out books -- that publisher should not have to bear?  Not that I don't agree with the trying-out goal.  I just don't know how we pay for it.

Perhaps because I've just completed another text rush season at my day job, I'm feeling bruised on price issues. It's easy for a consumer to decide that he or she is being overcharged, something that students seem to have little hesitation to say to us.  I actually prefer that our customers vocalize the thought, because at least it gives me an opportunity to have the conversation, to explain how we set prices, why our prices are different from what they see at Amazon, what our costs are, and that we're a nonprofit trying only to recoup our costs -- primarily wages, which in some cases are shockingly low at our store.  I don't tell students the last part; I don't think they need to know specific hourly wages.  But otherwise, we are willing to share all of our financials with students and everyone else in the community.

Of course I turn around at do it myself every time I fill up at the gas station.  I think I know what's wrong with gas prices -- that they're manipulated by speculators, and not driven by pure supply/demand considerations.  But who am I to say?

I don't like how much Adobe charges for InDesign, but I pay the price because I like the results I get out of it when I lay out pages.  I wish that the designers I work with cost less, but I know that they've studied hard to get to where they are, that they're proficient both technically and aesthetically, that they haven't skimped on the tools of the trade, and that their files will be trouble-free at all the vendors who'll be processing them.  It always seems that Lightning Source is charging a lot just to set up a title and accept files, but I also know that they've made a huge investment in their digital infrastructure and that the people who support those systems get paid well (as they should for their expertise and education).

There's lots wrong with the book business -- including the prices of various services, and the prices of our products.  But I think we could all be more careful about how we think about and talk about these questions.  I don't think we can suggest that it's wrong for a service provider to try to recoup the cost of the tools of the trade.  If the terms of an arrangement aren't favorable for users, it's probably not because the seller doesn't "like" them.

Except, of course, the gas companies.  They obviously don't like me.

Reintroducting P.M. Carlson

After our move to Ohio a couple of years ago, we faced the daunting task of dealing with all our books. We still don't have all the shelving we want in our house here.  It's a slow process getting that all figured out, especially with an old house where nothing is standard.  Those nice six foot tall bookcases that we brought from our previous homes, don't work as well in rooms with 11 and 13 foot ceilings!   So a lot of our books are still in boxes, slowly getting unpacked as we find time and shelf space.

It's been a lot of fun to rediscover books in our collection, and one of those rediscoveries was P.M. Carlson's AUDITION FOR MURDER. I had fond memories of this book, and of an entire series that I adored. As I pulled AUDITION out of the box, I opened the cover.  I didn't put it down until I was something like a hundred pages into it. Finished it the next day.

I like everything about AUDITION FOR MURDER. Carlson's characters are wonderful, real people with real emotions and real problems. They're joyful, passionate and committed -- just take a look at how Nick O'Connor describes his work as an actor in chapter four, for example. And without flinching from tough realities -- war, justice and the personal demons (the book is set in 1967) -- they're also positive, upbeat and capable, ready to face anything, from a supercilious French restaurant waiter to the challenge of staging one of Shakespeare's greatest works, HAMLET. The HAMLET stuff in this book is great; you'll learn a lot about the play from Carlson -- and you'll enjoy learning it.

Because these books were originally published as paperback originals, and because they were first published in the pre-internet dark ages, you won't find much about them online. But if you look back through mystery bookstore newsletters and mystery fanzines, you'll find folks raving about Carlson's books. Tom & Enid Schantz in The Rue Morgue newsletter: "terrific characters, funny incidents, genuine suspense, and an absolutely right sense of period and place." Kate's Mystery Books newsletter: "this is an inspiring book, a joy to read and, except for the murderer and murderee, it seems that just about everybody is set to live happily ever after, just as in the favorite fairy tales of my childhood." Phyllis Brown in the Grounds for Murder newsletter: "Carlson is one of those writers who demonstrate an amazing degree of wisdom and knowledge about human nature and an equal degree of compassion and sensitivity. The characters and their interactions alone would make this a deeply satisfying novel. In addition, the reader is treated to skillful, literate writing and an engrossing, suspenseful mystery story. This is one of my favorite mysteries of all time."

Pat's books are just too good to be out of print. It's a privilege and a pleasure to make them available again.

AUDITION FOR MURDER and MURDER IS ACADEMIC are out now. They're in print, and you can get them through bookstores everywhere (independent, chain, online, US, UK and EU). We're also doing digital editions, which you can find on Kindle, iTunes/iBooks and Smashwords (epub for Nook, Kobo, etc). MURDER IS PATHOLOGICAL will be out in December, and we'll have the rest of the series available in early 2013.

Find more info at www.crumcreekpress.com, where we've posted a note from the author about these reissues.

Bucket List

In an hour, I'll be part of a panel at Bouchercon 2012 entitled "Bucket List: Books to read before you kick the bucket." Not exactly sure how this session is going to go, but thought it might be useful and amusing (for folks here in Cleveland and elsewhere) for me to post my list. I'll try to come back to the blog here and talk about this a little more, but for the moment, here are the titles, a highly idiosyncratic list that would probably look a lot different if you ask me again about this next week.

CLASSICS
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

(Look at 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association for lots more classic choices.)

COMMUNITY
Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell
Concourse by S.J. Rozan
Briarpatch by Ross Thomas
Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger
Still Life by Louise Penny

TAKE ME AWAY
Cut to the Quick by Kate Ross
Death Comes As Epiphany by Sharan Newman
Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill
A Nail Through the Heart by Timothy Hallinan

BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS
(genre is conversation among texts)
Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Bloodhounds by Peter Lovesey
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Holmes on the Range by Steve Hockensmith
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard

YOU THINK YOU KNOW (PERCEPTION, INSIGHT, ETC.)
Hindsight by Peter Dickinson
Breakheart Hill by Thomas Cook
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
The Ax by Donald Westlake

Happy reading!

The death of print is not inevitable

An edited version of a response to another Sisters in Crime discussion list conversation.  This is a little redundant -- you've heard me say much of this before -- but it's not like others aren't also saying the same things too, about the inevitable death of the print book and how young people are all about ebooks.  So this is just today's contribution to to the continuing conversation.  (At least I hope it's a conversation!)

Print will survive.  Obviously, it won't be the same, but I have no doubt that committed and creative readers, publishers and booksellers will find ways to sustain a market for books.  The mass market may move away from paper -- that's what the Bookscan figures are hinting and what folks at Apple said to the SinC summit team during our visit with them two years ago (members only at http://www.sistersincrime.org/login.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=21).  But that's not the same thing as saying that print is dead.

At my day job, I work among the young folks who've been mentioned here in various messages and who are always citied in a discussion like this.  You can argue that the kids who find their way to Kenyon aren't typical.  As a group, they are more devoted to words than most.  But if you have any doubt about their devotion to books on paper, you need only observe how they browse the shelves of the Kenyon College Bookstore, dip into and out of books that catch their eye, and then take books to the register and spend their money on their new treasures.  It's not just our regular college students, it's also the high school kids who are on campus for summer programs.  You'd be impressed with what they're reading, too.  We sell a lot of Penguin Classics and Dover Thrift Editions, for example.  We also sell Jennifer Weiner and that new Doctor Who book you're seeing everywhere.

That's not to say there aren't challenges.  We can say that there will be a sustainable market for print books, but somebody has to actually do all that sustaining.  Of course it's not just a singular "somebody," it's all of us who care for books -- readers, authors, publishers and booksellers.  Publishers have to be smarter and more equitable.  Booksellers have to work harder.  Authors have to inspire us.

And readers?  Readers have to decide what they want the marketplace to look like.  At the end of the day, this business is driven by your dollars.  Whether we're talking about the dollars you spend on books or tax dollars that go to your local library, you have all the power there is to support the market for books.

Books are not so big an industry that a change in the behavior of a relatively small number of customers will go unnoticed.  I guarantee you that for most community booksellers, the decision of even just two or three individuals to buy their books elsewhere (be it the grocery store or online, or as e-books from a site not allied with a local store -- whatever) on any given day makes a difference.

This isn't about electronic books versus print books.  This isn't about being a luddite versus embracing technology.  I'm not talking here about the merits of one thing over another thing.  What I'm getting at is the fatalism.  The discussion here (and elsewhere) is largely framed as one inevitability.  The reality is likely to be more complicated and more interesting, with print and electronic text continuing to exist side by side.  So it's really the nature of that co-existence that's at issue, something that I believe is entirely within the power of readers to shape in the context of their communities.

Shaping our worlds

At the end of an intense week of discussing bookselling, marketing and sales on the Sisters in Crime discussion list -- a great resource and a great community that you should consider joining if you haven't already -- this is a slighted edited version of what I'm posting there this morning:

It may be that a writer can find success online with Amazon.  Or perhaps success can still be found in person in communities and their brick and mortar bookstores, local independents or national independents like Murder by the Book -- stores that if you're publishing nationally, I would consider part of your community too.  More likely, success will be found in some combination of virtual and real world marketing and sales efforts.

For writers who've concluded that brick and mortar stores are no longer capable of being a part of their success, all I can say at this point is that I'm disappointed that we won't be working together and that I wish you well.  Your vision, relying as it does on a single mighty online bookseller to sell all books, isn't my vision.  But that doesn't mean I hope you fail.  (For some reason, "one store to rule them all, one store to find them, one store to bring them, and in the darkness guide them" is running through my head right now.  That punchiness is a sure sign that my participation in this discussion has run its course.)

Wherever you are in the discussion, at least you're passionate.  This business, such as it is, has always been driven more by passion than by dollars.  Not to reopen that argument; I'm just saying that we're all here -- writers, readers, booksellers, librarians, publishers, all of us -- we're here in the first place because we love books, the world of books, and the people we get to hang out with because they love books too.  If dollars were all that motivated us, well, there are more dollars to be found elsewhere -- virtually or in the real world.

What we're talking about here isn't anything new.  Take a look at Daniel Pool's DICKENS' FUR COAT AND CHARLOTTE'S UNANSWERED LETTERS for an illuminating examination of these issues more than a century ago.  It's one of those books that leave you with a "the more things change, the more they stay the same" feeling.

That's not to say that this discussion is uninteresting.  I believe that every day we have opportunities to help create the world we want.  As consumers, we have an enormous amount of power to use our dollars to shape our communities, to understand how spending money locally sustains the businesses that make our communities good places to be.  And that's true of businesses as well.  Businesses -- including writers as businesses -- need to use their resources wisely; a writer's decision to promote Amazon isn't just about the access to books at a discount price, it's about the writer validating Amazon too.  (Mostly, that's why I find Ann Patchett's new venture -- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/us/ann-patchett-bucks-bookstore-tide-opening-her-own.html?_r=1&ref=books -- so exciting, that it's such a strong, tangible statement in the opposite direction.)

The more we discuss, examine and understand what we're all doing, the better off we are -- wherever is it we each decide we want to be. I hope that writers and publishers will continue to want to be a part of what independent bookstores are trying to do.  But if not, I have to respect your decision as I hope you'll respect those of us who continue to do this work.

Measuring the success of an author event

On the Sisters in Crime discussion list, we've been having a conversation about -- among other things -- how one should measure the success of a book signing. I suggested that a signing is about more than just the number of books sold during the couple of hours a writer is at the venue, while some writers argue the opposite, that this situation is all about selling books. One writer offered an anecdote about a library event where the library engaged a bookseller to handle sales. The bookseller was reluctant to order in books for itself, and instead tried to get the author to bring books to the venue, where the bookseller would sell them for a 40% cut of the transaction. On her blog http://libbyhellmann.com/wp (scroll down to 11/6 - "Bookselling Today: A Cautionary Tale), she expressed her unhappiness.

What follows below is a slightly edited version of the response I posted to the SinC list, a description of how I as a bookseller look at sales at an offsite venue.

I'll repeat something that I quoted on this list earlier: the plural of anecdote is not data. (This quote is from a great article you'll find here: http://tiny.cc/deathofbooks.) I'm sure you know that I could offer counter examples, tales of Heroic Booksellers Who Nobly Went Beyond The Call of Duty -- and I know you know I could. But if you're already soured on bookstores, well that probably won't help, and the plural of anecdote is not data so dueling anecdotes aren't the answer here anyway.

So, let's talk about this library situation, and how I look at offsite events.

As a general matter, I've used 40% for consignment situations. At the same time, I would normally not expect to need to go the consignment route for an author whose books are available on standard terms through the usual channels. My feeling is that the bookseller behaved badly in asking you to bring books when they're normally available, so I'll give you that point.

But 40%? I know that sounds like a lot, but 40% of what? If we're going to create a profit and loss statement for the event, we need more information. How many books were sold? What's the dollar value of those sales? Expenses? Did the bookseller take credit cards? Electronically or by hand? Who bore the risk of bounced checks or card transactions that could not be processed? (The risk of either bad checks or bad manual card transactions is not big, but it's not zero.)

How much time did the bookseller put into the event? Mileage or gas money?

Did the library ask the bookseller for a commission on sales? (Or for one of those "suggested" donations to the friends group?)

Libraries often pay authors honorariums for an appearance. They don't pay honorariums to booksellers who support author appearances by selling books. I'm not quarreling with the money that a library pays to an author for the event. But I would hope that others would join me in not quarreling with the money that a bookseller gets out of sales at an event. If that comes at a cost of a 40% margin on book sales, I'm okay with it.

In my experience, even at a 40% margin, offsite events are rarely profitable -- the few at which you can sell lots of books are more than offset by the ones where sales are minimal. I'll give you a detailed example. I sold books at a poetry reading 11 days ago. For about two hours in the room, I grossed $118 in sales. (I'm home now, so I'm doing these numbers off the top of my head -- forgive me if I'm off a little.) I think that the title I sold most came in at a 35% margin, and the other came in at 40%. Call it a 37% margin overall -- probably close enough. That's a gross profit of $43.66. I know that we paid freight on one of the shipments -- probably about $6 or so. We're at $37.66. No credit cards at this event -- which is unusual, but good because we don't have to figure a percentage for that, and no risk of messing up the transaction. No checks, so no risk of bouncing and no fee for depositing a check. (Hard to believe, but commercial accounts are often charged for depositing a check.)

What else? The trade book buyer and I put in about two hours' time between us to locate books from this poet's small presses, evaluate available titles and make decisions about appeal and quantities, discuss terms, place those orders and receive them. Working out logistics for this offsite event (arrangements, needs on site, packing books and putting together a cash bag to make change, finding and packing the receipt book, bookstands, etc) was relatively simple in this case -- call it 45 minutes. Event was in another building on campus, so travel time there and back was only 15 minutes. Post-event, I had to input the sales into the system, return the books to the display, return the leftover cash to the safe -- all easy in this case, call it 15 minutes. We've already returned some unsold stock to one vendor -- probably 15 minutes of processing and packing plus $6 or so for shipping. That $6 gets us to $31.66 or so. If you've been adding up all the time, the pre- and post-event time was about 3.25 hours. I was at the event for 2 hours, for a total of 5.25 hours. $31.66 divided by 5.25 nets out to $6.03 per hour. I'm salaried so the extra time -- I worked a full day came home then went back to campus to do this event -- is just extra time. But the store pays for the trade books buyer's time, and shouldn't have to count on extra time from salaried personnel to cover events. I just remembered that I haven't put in anything for mailing checks to three companies from which we purchased books -- another $1.52 in expenses for postage, not counting time for our accounting dept. to issue checks.

I type that all out not because I'm intending to offer an anecdote -- I said I wouldn't do that. I'm typing this out in full detail so that you can see that there are a lot of details involved in being a bookseller at an offsite event. In this particular case, I haven't yet even touched on the issue of in-store display that supports the event, and how much that front of store space ought to be worth. (We sold I think 6 more copies of the poet's books from the in-store display, but if the measure of an event's success is what happens in the room, then these sales don't count.)  I also haven't touched on any other aspect of publicity, something Libby's bookseller promised and failed to deliver -- but something that booksellers do indeed deliver on occasion.

Some events go better. Some go worse. But this one is in most respects utterly typical, esp. in the steps that we had to go through. Rarely is an event easier to arrange than this one -- it's not unusual to spend more time having to figure out details, esp. for the first time in a venue (which this was, but we had good support from the event's host). Rarely is an event closer than this one -- 15 minutes of travel time is hard to beat. Sometimes, it doesn't take 2 hours to locate, order and receive books. But it's always a noticeable amount of time for these steps.

Anyway ... more than you want to know. Or is it? From a bookseller's standpoint, this is the process, and all this is what we have to think about when we're measuring the success of an off-site event. Does this make 40% any more understandable?

It happens that I enjoy author events -- talks, readings, Q&As -- even when it's poetry. I enjoyed the reading that I described above; I was happy to be in the room for it. But as a business proposition? Well, you tell me. Did I make a good decision to commit my store to supporting the event by selling books there? Is there a business reason beyond dollars that justifies this effort? I'll be interested in your answers.

That’s what I posted to the list. Let me add two final notes. First, I love libraries – I was on the Friends board in my previous community, I’m speaking today at my current library (no honorarium or book sales) – and I’m delighted that libraries are hosting events, and that they’re trying to find a way to do book sales at their events. But if the current compensation system for bookstore is somehow objectionable, we're going to need to find an alternative. Secondly, if you shop at an online bookseller, I would ask you to think about whether that online bookseller would ever support an event at your local library.  This is another example of the way in which you spend your money having an effect on your community.

Mysteries and Thrillers

On the Sisters in Crime discussion list, a writer is asking for a simple way to distinguish mysteries and thrillers, and also asks whether mysteries "always have less suspense than thrillers."  Here's my reply:

A young Dane dons an antic disposition to investigate his father's murder.  That retrospective look at something that's already happened makes Hamlet a mystery, though at the time, of course, Shakespeare didn't know he was writing a mystery.  (Which accounts for the play's many frustrating failures to observe genre conventions!)

Driven by his ambitious wife, a Scotsman plots to kill the king and steal the throne, and then has to live with the consequences, as others plot to stop him.  That contemporaneous narrative focused on events as they happen or as they are about to happen makes Macbeth a thriller.

The question about the suspensefulness of mysteries versus thrillers is an interesting one.  My feeling is that the answer depends less on the elements of the narrative and more on the preferences of the reader, i.e. where you get your kicks.  If you prefer the ticking time bomb, chases and explosions, then thrillers are for you.  If you dig the intellectual challenge of puzzling out whodunit, howdunit and whydunit, then you probably prefer mysteries.

The main thing to remember, though, is that the two forms borrow shamelessly from each other.  Many great mysteries employ thriller tropes.  So, for example, the cat and mouse games that protagonists and antagonists play are present in both thrillers and mysteries.  Great thriller characters employ ratiocination to investigate and figure out what's going on.

The elements of mysteries and thrillers work well together and are intimately interwoven in our greatest stories and iconic figures.  That's why it makes sense to view both as sides of a single genre rather than two distinct forms of literature.  Sherlock Holmes is as likely to be involved in stopping a train wreck as he is to investigate why two trains collided.  As long as the game's afoot, we happily follow, regardless of which game we're playing.

"Minor" characters

On DorothyL yesterday, a writer posted this comment:

The woman who came across as "flat, stale" is a side character.  Yes, one of the more important side characters, but still only that.  How much time should an author spend developing the minor characters in a story?

Here's my reply:

At the beginning, what struck me about Crais' work was his ability to make the clients real.  Sure, Elvis and Joe were good, engaging characters.  But what I remember most about THE MONKEY'S RAINCOAT is Ellen Lang, and Crais' portrait of a woman who's so dependent on her husband that she doesn't even know how to write a check.  This was the focus of my short essay on this book that's in 100 FAVORITE MYSTERIES OF THE CENTURY, but you could also say the same about Karen Shipley in LULLABY TOWN or the kids in INDIGO SLAM.

When Elvis is focused on his clients and their problems, I'd rank him among the great fictional private eyes of all time -- right at the apex of the "private eye as social worker" movement.  (I'm often asked which among the mystery booksellers associations 100 favorites are my personal favorites.  My answer is look at the book; I was assigning the essays, so there's a clue in which titles I wrote up myself.)

When Elvis is dealing with his own issues (girlfriend, etc.), he's a bore.

Minor characters?  No such thing!  Great fiction only works when every single character is a vividly portrayed individual.  One other example: take a look at S.J. Rozan, if you haven't already.  She's an extraordinarily talented writer who does everything right -- intricate plots, great wisecracks, pitch-perfect portrayal of the uneasy relationship between her two principle characters.  But what single things do I remember most about CONCOURSE?  It's Ida Goldstein at the piano and, late in the book, the girl and the kitten.  Small moments with characters most would describe as incidental, but these small moments make big impacts.  CONCOURSE is another one of my 100 favorites essays.

Not familiar with IMBA's 100 favorites list?  Visit your local IMBA store (find one at http://www.mysterybooksellers.com/), or you can order the book online at http://crumcreekpress.com/titles/100-favorite-mysteries-century.htm.

Taxing online purchases

There's a conversation on the Sisters in Crime discussion list about Amazon and sales taxes.  One poster wrote:

the great question is why some, many think the state is entitled to these 'extra' revenues.  The company who ships the product to you is not taking advantage of any of the services of your state.

I've just posted this reply:

Lawyers on this list should answer this question, because they'd do a better job than I will.  But the word here is "nexus" -- an outpost, a facility, a brick & mortar element within a state.  That's what entitles the state to ask a merchant to collect sales tax.

So the issue here is not a matter of "extra" revenue or "new" taxes.  It's whether existing, well-established law applies to Amazon and other online merchants.  If Amazon has warehouses in your state, that seems like a pretty obvious nexus.  If Amazon has affiliates in your state, is that a nexus?  It's a debatable question, but Amazon seems to be taking the position that affiliates count as nexus because it withdraws its affiliate program from states that ask for taxes.  More interestingly in this internet era, does the hosting a website or a blog within a state count as nexus?  (How many of us could say for sure where our websites are housed?)

The California settlement isn't a capitulation -- by either side.  It's going to be interesting in this anti-federal moment to see whether the federal government will step up the way that Amazon is asking it to.  At the debate last week, a GOP candidate proposed a national sales tax system.  Anyone think that either Amazon or Herman Cain will get what they want?

I will add just one thing: the notion that an out of state merchant is not taking advantage of "any of the services of your state" seems to me to be to be an extreme position.  For example, state and local government pay for most of the cost of the roads that those products travel on.  State and local government respond if the vehicles that transport your purchases are involved in accidents.  (And there sure are more delivery vehicles out on the roads these days!)  If you shop over a cable modem, your local government was involved in the provision of that service (through regulation of the lines).  In some areas -- not where I am now, but in other places I have lived -- local government might take care of all the trash and/or recycling that results from all the extra packing used in shipping a product to you.  (No bringing your own tote when you're shopping online!)  If you have problems with your purchase, your state government offers consumer protections that the merchant probably hopes you don't take advantage of.

You can argue that state and local governments that are supported by sales taxes should not do any of these things.  But taking the position that Amazon does not benefit in any way from the existence of state and local governments seems a little over the top, no matter how fashionable that position is today.

Panel discussion this weekend

This Saturday, April 23 at noon, I'll be back in Indiana to moderate a panel discussion on The Future of the Mystery Novel.

 

In a sea of change, there isn't anything that we knew about books yesterday that we can be confident will remain true tomorrow.  We'll tackle a wide range of questions about how readers, writers, publishers and booksellers are adapting. We'll look at technology, of course, but especially at how technology might change the nature of the fiction itself.  We'll talk about the preferences of today's readers -- including young readers -- and we'll look at the ways in which change is serving or failing book lovers.

 

Our panel features:

 

Kate Stine, editor of Mystery Scene magazine, the premier guide to the genre.  www.mysteryscenemag.com 

 

Jeff Stone, author of the very successful Five Ancestors series of historical suspense novels for younger readers -- over 500,000 copies sold. readjeffstone.com 

 

Larry D. Sweazy, a 2010 Best Books of Indiana nominee whose third Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger novel, The Badger's Revenge, was published earlier this month. www.larrydsweazy.com

 

The conversation will begin at noon on Saturday at Barnes & Noble at 3748 E. 82nd St, Indianapolis.  (Store map page.)

 

The program is sponsored jointly by The Midwest Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and the Indiana Chapter of Sisters in Crime.  The program is free and open to the public. 

 

Hope you'll join us!

True believers

This week, SJ Rozan reported from Digital Book World on the Sisters in Crime blog (http://tiny.cc/SJatDBW and two other parts).  Her posts are fabulous, important and thought-provoking reading for all.

I was especially struck by one of SJ's editorial notes, on session eight, the future of independent bookstores.  She writes: "this session had a true-believer quality that made it hard to judge the realistic nature, or lack thereof, of what the speakers were saying."

I would turn this around.  It's only because readers, writers, publishers and store owners all together shared that "true-believer quality" that we ever had a strong independent bookselling community in the first place.  The book business has always been a challenging one, and independent stores survived only because all involved -- customers, shopkeepers and suppliers alike -- had an unwavering faith in the importance of what these stores were doing.

Interlopers have tested that faith, seducing both customers and suppliers with economies (real, sometimes, but more often false).  But the future clearly depends on the true-believers who will continue to count on independents' knowledge, erudition, curation and passion, and on independent booksellers' connections to their communities.  As the book business escapes its chains and, indeed, the entire industry becomes unbound (or is it unglued?), it's good to see the tide turning back towards independents, be it out of fear or necessity among those who have wavered or out of hope among those who've kept the faith.

Either way, it looks right now as though the future will be bright.  Independents certainly face challenges and it's going to be a bumpy ride.  But I do not doubt either the power or the number of true believers who sustained this industry in the past and will see it into the future.

Inside ball and corporate cultures

On the Sisters in Crime discussion list, there's been some chatter about a spreadsheet that Publishers Weekly made available on its website.  This spreadsheet appears to describe details of Amazon's levels of service for publishers.  You can find this spreadsheet on the PW website using this link http://tiny.cc/AMZcharges -- then look for "Click here to download a spreadsheet detailing Amazon.com's new levels of service."  What follows are slightly edited versions of two messages that I posted on this subject to the SinC list, messages that I wrote while I was on the West Coast on SinC's 2010 summit visits to Amazon, Google, Apple and Smashwords.

I started by recalling something I learned during SinC's 2009 summit: writers write, publishers publish, distributors distribute, booksellers sell -- you have to let folks do their jobs.  One writer replied:

"Ah, Jim, you make me think of an old-fashioned husband, patting little wifey's hand and say, 'Now, dear, you don't need to understand all these complicated money matters. Be a good girl and go cook dinner.' Writers want -- need -- to understand these things because we're affected by them."

In another context on the list, the same writer wrote:

"Selling screen rights to your book is like selling a car. When the new owner drives off in the car, all you can do is wave; you have no control over what happens to it after that. When you sell screen rights to your book, the movie is
out of your control. Take the check, wave, and let it go."

There are part of the business that writer must take charge of, where you need to roll up your sleeves and get involved.  There are other parts of the business that writers just don't participate in, that are a lot more like waving and letting it go.  I think it's really important to make some distinctions, and focus energies where authors can make a difference, otherwise you'll go crazy.

What we see on the Amazon spreadsheet that so many are finding so objectionable and mysterious is all about the agreements between a publisher and a retailer, agreements that cover the publisher's body of work.  Is it a surprise that some publishers are going to be treated differently from others? In broad strokes, a writer should certainly understand a few things about her or his publisher's arrangement with retailers -- esp. whether a publisher conforms generally to standard retail marketplace practices -- and know what kind of clout a publisher has with retailers.   But beyond these broad strokes, I think writers need to let publishers and retailers do their jobs.

I don't disagree that knowledge is self-defense, but it's a matter of knowing what you need to know, understanding exactly how you can be helpful to your publisher and to retailers, and knowing when to back off.  I don't need to understand the chemistry of gasoline and oxygen and combustion to drive my car, but I know that I need to maintain proper tire pressure.

Yes, there are some inner workings of the business that every writer should understand.  (Right now, belatedly, I've become more interested in the issue of copyright, and the meaning of Google's scanning project.)  But "author pages foil banner"?  As an author, I'm not worried.  I'm not even worried as a publisher.

One aside: Amazon takes money from publishers for this stuff.  Apple does not take money for this stuff.  We'll report more on this in the 2010 Summit Report.  But I will mention this now, because the era that we're living in right now is, most of all, an opportunity to think about what you'd like this business to look like.  Co-op or no co-op?  Both models have merits, but I know which I prefer.  And I'll tip my hand by saying again that Amazon is not a monopoly -- they only have power because you all are enabling them.  There are alternatives, and not just my beloved brick and mortar independent bookstores (that many seem so eager to abandon), but online alternatives too.

What we're learning out here on these summit visits is, truly, eye-opening, and will offer writers lots of actionable ideas, ways that writers at all stages of careers can get involved.  Almost all of these ideas are free, even on Amazon.  Stay tuned for our report.

On Jul 17, 2010, at 7:13 AM, sistersincrime@yahoogroups.com wrote:

Are Amazon's practices significantly different from those of other retailers?

The short answer is no, Amazon's practices are no different than those of any other big retailer dealing with any other big publisher.  Small independent stores and small independent publishers generally work differently.  Normally, none of this stuff is made public by either side, big or small.

The summit team asked Amazon about the spreadsheet.  The folks we met with said they were not familiar with this document -- which you may or may not choose to believe.  But they did say immediately that Amazon accepts co-op, just like others do.

As I mentioned on this list a couple of days ago, we learned that Apple does not take co-op for placement in iBookstore.  And I'll repeat this point too: the era that we're living in right now is, most of all, an opportunity to think about what you'd like this business to look like.

On my way back home, I stopped on Friday in the Chicago area, where I had a meeting with a vendor who supplies technology (among other things) to the bookstore that I manage.  The guy I met with was obviously earnest, smart, committed to his work and to his customers.  He's the kind of trading partner whom I'd be inclined to trust.  The problem is that he's working for a company that was founded in 1873, and the company is acting its age.  At Google, we were told, time is measured in milliseconds.  At this company,  the problems that I was there to talk with him about have plagued this system for 10 years, and the solution is not likely to be ready until next year.

During our travels, the four of us representing SinC talked a lot among ourselves about corporate cultures, the differences among the companies we visited, and the differences between these firms and all of the New York publishing industry.  We're going to be reporting to the Sisters in Crime membership on lots of specific details, details that matter and that you as authors will be able to act on right away.

But to me the larger questions are about corporate culture, and about who's steering the word business and their methods and motivations.  New York publishers aren't so incompetent because the individuals involved are stupid -- most everyone you meet from the NY companies is smart and serious about the work.  But there's no question that they're hamstrung by legacy practices -- a point that was made to us over and over by the new economy firms we visited.

To me, the most interesting thing about Amazon is that it's a new economy firm, but it's still trying to use old economy business practices -- such as co-op.  What does that mean?  Are they right?  It's not just the 64 billion dollar question.  It's the question about the future of words themselves.

p.s.  If you're not already a member of Sisters in Crime, I hope you'll consider joining, not just so you can see our report but for all the benefits of SinC membership. Visit www.sistersincrime.org for details.

... another door opens

A couple of weeks ago, I found my copy of Booked to Die. Both copies, actually, pulled out of two different boxes. One Booked to Die is a paperback full of post-it flags from when I used this book in a discussion group a five or six years ago. The other is a nice, later-printing hardcover that I brought home last year, a surrogate for the fine first edition I sold 12 or 14 or so years ago at a time when we needed money.

Since closing my bookstore in Carmel, Indiana in February, and moving on to Kenyon College in Ohio, I’ve mostly been living out of boxes. The logistics of this move have been especially complicated, and I haven’t found time to unpack a whole lot. This move hasn’t gone the way my wife and I originally expected. As a result we’ve been apart for most of the last five months – she still working in Indiana while I’ve been trying to find my bearings in Ohio. Folks at Kenyon have been great, friendly and welcoming, but this still feels like a huge leap into a vast unknown. Without my wife around and with all the back and forth that we’ve been doing, it’s been a weird and difficult transition.

Pretty much from the moment I landed in Ohio, I found myself thinking about Booked to Die, John Dunning’s wonderful novel about books. Protagonist Cliff Janeway talks about his apartment, and about the “wall-to-wall books in every room.” He says “once I killed two men in the same day, and this room had an almost immediate healing effect.”

I’ve unpacked a few books in our new house, but many more of our books are still in boxes. Rooms and shelves need to be made ready, especially when the configuration of the house the books came from is so different from the house they’re going into. Books take time.

In the meantime, I’ve found that the healing effect of books just doesn’t work when they’re all boxed up. As Dunning writes later in Booked to Die, it’s “a comfort to see a book you loved on the shelf.” Seeing them seems to be key.

Each morning as I arrive at my new workplace, the vast and wonderful Kenyon College Bookstore, I walk past the mystery section. When I arrived on February 15, I found a few familiar books already there. Armand Gamache’s latest case stood out, but it seemed lonely without the rest of Louise Penny’s wonderful books to keep it company. I see Harry Bosch in 9 Dragons, and over and over again I relive that heartbreaking shooting in Hong Kong. But most of what surrounded me in my own store in Indiana was absent when I arrived in Ohio. The many real friends I made in my store might not follow me, but surely my fictional friends should be here!

Over the past few weeks and months, when I’ve had a few minutes, I’ve worked on the mystery section. Lydia Chin & Bill Smith are here now, along with Nero Wolfe & Archie Goodwin, Kiki Lowenstein, Sweeney St. George, Peter Diamond, Kate Fansler, Lincoln Perry and Lew Archer. Kiki’s creator, Joanna Campbell Slan, even stopped by for a conversation/demonstration a few weeks ago, and I can’t tell you how lovely it was to see her here. Marcus Didius Falco, Siri Paiboun and Joe Sandilands have arrived, bringing along their entire lush worlds; I feel like I’m in India every time I see The Last Kashmiri Rose. I wouldn’t call Lou Ford a friend, but he’s found a place on our shelves too – perhaps a matter of keeping enemies closer? I’ve brought in the rest of Louise Penny’s books; I’m even happier to see that they’ve been going out too. The section has a ways to go before it’s a really good one, but it has come a long way and, yes, it’s a comfort to see these books every day.

It’s been really interesting to reread Booked to Die this week, and to think about it in the context of where the book business is right now. Booked to Die is a great novel, as elegant as mysteries come, with a stunner of a last line. So you we can read it with all the pleasure and rewards that we get from the very best mysteries out there.

More importantly, though, Booked to Die is about books themselves, and how we relate to books more as objects than as texts. Cliff Janeway appreciates great literature, and he’s dismissive of bad books and bad authors – by name. Throughout Booked to Die, he tells us about books he loves and uses characters and situations to talk about himself – “I was like Fred Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: I had started out a sane and decent man and slowly the obsession had turned me crazy.”

Still, it’s impossible to read Booked to Die without seeing that Janeway’s love of books is mostly about the objects themselves. He tells us that the right way to build a collection is to keep the books you like – always good advice – but Janeway’s own words and deeds make clear that the worthiness of the text is merely a threshold. That love of the words might get you in the door, but what really excites him is the book itself – its features, points, signatures, associations, etc. – and the thrill of the chase. This novel is filled with Janeway’s loving descriptions of books. More than once, characters talk about how handling books is like having sex.

Booked to Die was published in 1992, and it’s a perfect description of a particular moment in antiquarian bookselling, a pre-internet era when books were found in real bookstores, or purchased and sold through notices in AB Bookman’s Weekly. Back in those days, we didn’t usually think about the book and its text as distinct things (even though we pursed first editions and dismissed book club editions). The text, the paper it was printed on, the binding and the covers that held it all together – all this we thought of as one thing.

Things are different today. The internet forces us to consider text apart from the means by which that text is delivered. You have to wonder what the ultimate bookman Cliff Janeway would make of this. I’m no Cliff Janeway, but I too love the look and feel of a book, and not just because I find the book to be a great way to access text. I’m reassured by the books that I own, and take pleasure in seeing books not just on their shelves, but on nightstands, dining room tables, the floor by the couch and everywhere else my books can be found. No one who owns two copies of Booked to Die can pretend to be anything other than a lover of books as objects.

Still, at the end of the day, much as I enjoy the feel of book in my hand and the presence of books around me, I know that it’s the words that matter. So why do I find the separation of text from the means that text is delivered so troubling? Some of it is simply a matter of being forced out of the comfort zone of books. Some of it is crass: will there continue to a place for independent bookstores in the new digital age? (Given that I draw a salary from an independent bookstore, this is no idle concern.)

But more generally, what I really wonder about is what the transition of text from print to digital means, and how our relationship to words will change. It’s one thing to say that digital is “just another format,” just like the difference between a paperback and a hardcover. But do we really mean it? We already know, for example, that folks relate to audiobooks differently from print books. Of course they do: there’s a reader involved, and that reader is bound to bring a new element to the table.

Even when we’re talking about hardcovers and paperbacks, there’s a difference. Think about what the rise of the mass market paperback meant to the mystery genre, the kinds of writers who found an audience in mass market. Think The Killer Inside Me would have seen print were it not for a paperback mill like Lion Books? Even today, the mystery genre perpetuates a distinction between work published in hardcover and work published in paperback. Isn’t that why we have different awards for paperback originals?

We don’t any of us know how the digitization of text will change our relationship to text, but we already know that it’s going to be different. What kind of pride of ownership will a digital library engender? What does ownership mean when the provider of your e-book reader can snatch back a text without warning?

It’s already obvious that many value words differently when they arrive via download. There’s enormous consternation over the pricing of digital books. I was startled by this statement, posted on a mystery discussion list that I follow: “I recently decided to try a new author who has been around for a while, has several books out. Each of them was $11.99/$12.99 on Kindle. Really hard to understand since only one of them was a recent pub. But, since I draw the line at the $9.99 that Amazon promised, I ordered none of them.” As I bookseller, I’ve always believed that the hard work was in persuading a customer to try a new writer. Here’s someone who’s been persuaded, and yet he was dissuaded by a hard line on price that he believes a retailer “promised” him.

I don’t know what the price of an electronic text should be. Much of the conversation focuses on the fact that without ink, paper and binding, electronic texts must inevitably cost much less than paper texts. Still, writers need to be paid. Editors need to be paid. A book needs to be marketed, in order to find its audience. Paper and binding are small slices of the cost of a book. Who’s to say that the digital infrastructure that makes electronic texts available is any less costly?

I took the job at Kenyon College for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is my own confusion about how we deal with words in this digital age. Last year, I confronted the fact that most leaders in the independent mystery bookselling community were unwilling to engage Amazon in a conversation about electronic texts. I began to see that I needed to look in different directions, that as the owner of a small, genre specialty bookstore, I didn’t have all the resources I might need to think through and to implement a way forward.

Right now, technology is driving the way we approach, relate to and own words. I like Apple and I like Google, and I use their products and services many times every day. But I’m not at all sure that I want decisions about the future of text to be made by the technologists. We know that leadership isn’t going to come from the big New York publishers and, frankly, we probably don’t want them involved. We don’t want to give the same people who’ve made so much of a mess of the business over the past few decades any opportunities to mess up our future.

Readers encounter words in any number of contexts, and we are fortunate that there are so many different ways in which writers and readers intersect and in which readers share words with each other. But in the business of words, bookstores are where the rubber meets the road. It’s in bookstores that readers exchange dollars for words. At least bookstores are where this interaction has taken place for the last few hundred years.

With the proliferation of electronic texts, the exchange of money for words moves out of stores and onto websites. Even chain bookstores are looking for ways to drive customers out of their stores and onto websites. The last time I walked into a Barnes & Noble store, I was greeted not by the traditional display of alluring new titles, but by a large kiosk promoting the company’s electronic text reader. This, too, is all very interesting, but are book lovers well served by this display?

My new position at the Kenyon College Bookstore offers a different vantage point from which to consider these issues and different resources to draw on. Kenyon is many things, but most of all it’s a community that values words. Where else but Gambier, Ohio would a village Fourth of July celebration include the naming of a 2010 Poet Laureate? Words matter here.

More to the point, it’s my hope that Kenyon and other communities that love words will find ways to take charge of the environment we’re in. The lack of vision and leadership among big publishing companies is allowing the New Economy to dictate how readers access texts. Is that what’s best for book lovers? Folks at Kenyon have the right tools – the passion and the intellect – to think about where we are and where we ought to be going. Wouldn’t you rather see decisions about the future of text made by people for whom words come first?

I don’t have any answers, but I hope I’m now where I need to be to ask the right questions.

* * *

This coming week, I’ll traveling as part of Sisters in Crime’s summit team. Each year, SinC’s board sends a delegation to visit industry leaders to learn more about what they’re working on and to report back to the membership. This year, we decided to talk with Amazon, Google, Apple’s iBookstore and Smashwords. We plan to begin reporting at the conclusion of this trip. If you’re not already a member of Sisters in Crime, I urge you to join, not just to see our report but for all the benefits of SinC membership. Visit www.sistersincrime.org for details.

One door closes ...

The Mystery Company is closing its doors.  The store that my wife, my staff, and all our customers and friends built here in Carmel, Indiana, and have struggled to sustain for nearly seven years will shut down in the next week or so.

We've just hosted our last two author events; we have discussion groups this week; we'll celebrate our time together here at a party on Saturday, January 30, 1:00 - 3:00 pm; and then we'll be wrapping up operations in the first few days of February.  We'll be at the Carmel Clay Public Library to support the launch of Jeff Stone's DRAGON on February 9 -- that will be our last event.

There will be some kind of clearance sale, or perhaps someone will come along ready and able to buy out our inventory/business in whole or in large part, and be able to carry on in some way -- we're open to all possibilities -- but I'll be moving on to new challenges in a new job out of state.  I start on February 15 at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, where I'll be general manager of the college's bookstore.

It's hard to express how disappointed we are that things didn't work out at The Mystery Company, and how much we'll miss the many friends we've made here in Indiana.  We've given this everything we could and we've had a great run.  In the end, though, it just wasn't enough.

Business here has been rough for a while, especially since gas prices spiked in the summer of 2008. Up 'til then, sales weren't great, but at least they were slowly growing. Almost overnight, though, that incremental growth evaporated and we started seeing our numbers turn negative.   We'd hoped to see a boost from our involvement in Bouchercon 2009; the convention was a great success and we did sell a lot of books at the convention.  But the costs of our participation -- in terms of both time and money -- were overwhelming, and we've seen no residual effects on our sales -- no additional walk-in business, no additional internet/telephone orders, nothing.  (That's been kind of a shock to us.)  Finally, we hoped for a good holiday season, but our sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year were once again disappointing -- our second straight poor holiday season.

I haven't had a paycheck from the store for two years, and we weren't feeling as though that would turn around anytime soon.  The only reason I've been able to stick with this so long is that Jennie has been well-employed, paid reasonably well by a company that offers important stuff like health insurance.  For some time, though, she has felt that she's been on shakier and shakier ground.  Her employer has been engulfed in its own problems and is in the midst of eliminating 5500 positions.  In particular, it has been actively working to outsource the kind of work that she's been doing.  Jennie still has a job today, but it's become increasingly difficult to believe that she'd continue to be employed there for much longer.  And even while she is there, the company's management has worked hard to make life difficult for its employees.  Instead of responding to the many pressures on it with grace and respect for the staff, it's engaging in the kinds of tactics that are designed to get people to quit so that the company doesn't have to offer buyouts.

(As I've been talking about our situation over the past few weeks, I've found that folks completely understand the difficulties that the store is facing and are completely understanding of our decision to close.  On the other hand, everyone is finding it difficult to believe that things at my wife's employer are so bad, and that the company has treated our family so poorly in these last few weeks.  It used to be a wonderful place to work, the kind of firm that truly valued its employees.  It's not like that anymore, and I think that the difficulty folks have believing that stems from real fear about what this company's new and horrible pattern of behavior might mean for this community.)

Since we no longer believed that Jennie was likely to stay in her job long enough to get us through paying for college for our daughters, we began to consider our next steps.

We thought hard about the book business, and what it might take for a small, independent store like ours to stay afloat.  The business is changing dramatically, pulled in many directions all at once.  Shoppers are shopping differently, big retailers are engaging in ruinous price wars and technology is completely rewriting the book on the book itself.

Our goal has always been to create an environment that offers opportunities for connection -- readers with books, readers with each other, readers and writers, readers with literary communities here in Indiana and across the globe.  While we still believe in the goal, we've found it difficult to achieve in this context.  The streetscapes of the Indianapolis metropolitan area aren't friendly to small, locally-owned independents -- far too much of the development around here is designed to exclude rather than include.  This is our second location, and while it's better than our original spot on Rangeline Road, it's still problematic.  The culture of discounting is at odds with a culture of customer service. We can't tell you how frustrated we are with the increasing number of people who are coming to us for advice, but are obviously doing most of their buying from others.  And, finally, the lousy economy is a drag on all of us, making it difficult for even our strongest supporters to spend much of their money here right now.

We can imagine strategies to deal with some of these issues, and the economy is cyclical, so some of the pressures would ease on their own were we able to wait things out without the pressure on our family that Jennie's job situation has created.  At the same time, though, there are larger challenges that won't go away without serious investments of time and money. We believe that even a locally-focused store that's built on the idea of getting to know our customers has to be built on strong technology.  Independent booksellers need to find ways to participate in print on demand, to offer electronic texts and the devices on which they're read, and to be available 24/7 with robust, full-featured virtual stores on the web in addition to keeping our real, brick-and-mortar stores open and lively.  Some of this is possible today, some of this is still beyond the reach of small independents.  But going forward, all of this is necessary and all of this will take resources beyond what we have at our disposal.

Making the decision to close hasn't been easy, but we knew that things had to change for both the business and for our family.  This position at Kenyon offers an opportunity to apply all my experience in a community that truly values books and words, and I'm especially looking forward to working through all of the book business' larger issues among so many smart people.  I love what I do, but I have been doing this for over 22 years now, working as a mystery bookseller in Boston, Kalamazoo and Carmel since 1987.  Kenyon will offer a fresh context and fresh perspectives, and I'm excited to be joining such an amazing community.

I'm not disappearing from the mystery genre.  Though I'm giving up our retail store, I'll still be doing the occasional mystery publishing project through my company The Crum Creek Press.  (We have some cool stuff in the works.)  I'm still expecting to be able to attend at least two mystery conventions this year.  And, of course, we do sell mysteries at The Kenyon Bookstore.

It's been a great ride here at The Mystery Company, and I'm grateful to all of you who've been along for part or all of it, all of you who've made it possible and made it so wonderful.  We've done so much here together!

Please keep an eye on our website and emails for details about our last days, and I hope to see many of you at the party on Saturday, January 30, 1:00 - 3:00 pm.  We are offering $10 off any purchase of $40 or more and $30 off any purchase of $100 or more, in store on on our website.  If you're ordering on the web, just ask for this discount in the special instructions box on the checkout form, and we'll apply the discount when we process your order.

Thank you!

Fish stories

It’s all about the metaphor.

We know what a “real” book is, how it looks and feels, which end is up, how the pages turn.  An electronic book is a different kettle of fish.

Indeed, an electronic book is just as much like a “real” book as is a kettle of fish.  Neither the electronic book nor the kettle of fish has a cover, leaves of paper that can be turned or flipped through, or page corners that can be folded down to mark your place. If we’re not reading a real book with real pages on real paper, then what we’re doing with either an electronic book or a kettle of fish is a metaphor for the process of reading a real book.

There are a fair number of folks who find the very concept of reading an electronic text as sensible and appealing as trying to read fish, but this number is getting smaller every day.  Here in my small, independent bookstore in Indiana, I have customers who are as far from early adapters as you can imagine asking “what’s a Kindle?”  More and more of my regulars have already taken the plunge.

Neither Amazon’s Kindle nor the current version of the competing Sony Reader is a bad piece of equipment.  They work, they have plusses and minuses.  Mostly, they’re good first drafts.  You can see where this is going, but they’re not there yet.

The biggest problem?  Neither has the metaphor just right.  As electronic reading devices, they are both closer to the “real” reading experience than kettles of fish.  But pushing a button isn’t the same as turning a page.  It’s not difficult, but it doesn’t look right and it doesn’t feel right.  It’s just not what we’re used to.

Then my colleague Austin Lugar showed me the Kindle reader on his iPod Touch.  Suddenly, I saw the metaphor done right.  You turn pages with a flick of the finger -- the same motion you’d use to page through a “real” book.  If you want, you can even dogear a page.

The Kindle app lacks some important features and the iPod’s small screen size limits the experience. But it masters the hard part: it gets the metaphor right.  Turning these electronic pages is as natural as turning paper pages.  It’s not something you have to get used to; it’s what you already do. You can feel how the e-book reading experience can be as familiar, comfortable and comforting as reading a real book.

Because it’s all about the metaphor.

As an independent bookseller who’s also an independent publisher, I can’t tell you how torn I feel about what’s going on.  I’m in this because I like to connect people and books -- that’s my mission and that’s my passion.  It’s cool to imagine how electronic books and electronic book systems (be they dedicated pieces of hardware or smartphone apps) will expand readership and put books in front of folks who just aren’t picking up old-fashioned paperbacks and hardcovers.  Like every other person in the book business, I want to see more people reading more of the time.

At the same time, the bookseller in me sees the writing on the wall.  Increased market share for e-books is likely to mean a decreased market share for the small independent bookshop.  The pie will expand, but a lot of the pie will move out of brick and mortar stores.  Once we move from selling the tangible good to providing digital downloads, it’s a whole new ball game, one that we’re not equipped to win.

Recently, the independent booksellers’ trade association, the American Booksellers Association, announced a program that will allow store-branded ABA-operated websites to sell e-book downloads for the Sony.  While this isn’t a bad program, one can already see the problem: e-book downloads aren’t a part of the “real” store. They are instead connected to websites that rely on the association’s virtual infrastructure.  No longer are small independent stores quite so independent.  No longer are we putting books in people’s hands.  We are, instead, web mavens, trying to understand and manage a metaphor for putting books in people’s hands.

On the other hand, the publisher in me is truly excited about the possibilities of the new frontier.  My publishing company has achieved a modest level of success.  Our books are well and widely reviewed. We’ve been nominated for and won more than our share of significant awards in our genre. Given the constraints of our resources, we can’t be unhappy with our sales.

Electronic books are a whole new market, offering even my tiny little publishing house the opportunity to reach a lot of new readers. There is considerable chatter about the fact that Kindle is a proprietary file format and, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s a closed system. There’s also much gnashing of teeth over about Amazon’s pricing practices for Kindle downloads.

On the other hand, Amazon offers small publishers the opportunity to walk onto their site and make Kindle versions of our titles available with little fuss and no expense.  In terms of access to this market, my tiny little publishing company now offers four titles in Kindle format, side-by-side with titles from Random House. Sony does not yet offer this functionality to us. Others provide access, but for a fee.

I’d like to be able to publish -- if that’s the still right term -- in all e-formats, and I’m sure that at some point, my tiny little publishing company will find a way to do so.  But in the meantime, we’ll take what’s being given.  You can now get Kate Flora’s Chosen for Death and Stalking Death and Terence Faherty’s Kill Me Again and In A Teapot on your Kindle, your iPod or your iPhone. You can discover these fabulous books by these fabulous writers.  And that’s what this is all about, it’s it?  The opportunity as a publisher to help put books in front of readers who are going to love them. (Go! Use these links to download them now!  You will love them!)

No longer are we talking about fish confined to a kettle.  As a publisher, I can leave the kettle to seek greener pastures.  Ok, there may be a limit to the usefulness of this metaphor.  But there are fewer limits to what we might now be able to accomplish.

Some guy named Dan Brown has a new book

I sent this offer to my store's email list earlier today.  Four hours into the offer, we still have few copies left...

Some guy named Dan Brown seems to have a new book that goes on sale today.  It's called The Lost Symbol, and boy is there a lot of desperation out there surrounding this new release.  In over twenty years of bookselling, I don't think I've ever seen like this!  Folks are falling all over themselves to give the thing away.

It all started with the publisher.  Our very nice Random House sales rep contacted us over and over again to get us to take a few copies. I bet we heard more from her about this one title than we did about every other new Fall title combined.  (Random House publishes many very fine writers whose work must just sell itself, since we hear so little about those books from them.)  If they were spending so much time and energy on The Lost Symbol, they must have been really worried that no one would want it!

I think that stores might have picked up on the publisher's concern because they're doing so very much to get you to buy it from them.  Have you been getting all those emails too?  The ones from the chain stores and online outlets offering huge discounts on this one title?  It just seems weird, doesn't it?  These big, big chain stores and even bigger online stores offer thousands of titles yet use so much of their email bandwith to sell you this one title at a price so low that they can't possibly make any money on it.  Truly they must be worried that they'll end up stuck with lots and lots of unsold copies.

We did oblige the publisher and take a dozen copies of The Lost Symbol, which will go on sale when we open in a couple of hours at 10:30 a.m.  I guess we've caught the bug, and are just as worried as everyone else is that no one will want it.  So we'll make this offer, limited to just the 12 copies we have on hand: buy $35 of other books from us in store, your choice, new or used, and we'll give you The Lost Symbol free.  If you can't make it in to the store, buy $50 of books from us online or over the phone, and we'll throw The Lost Symbol into the box for no additional charge.  As always, we will not add a  charge for standard shipping to any address in the US.

We do have lots of other great books in stock right now.  It won't be hard for you to find either $35 or $50 worth of books that you really want.

It would be nutty to think that a store like ours could get into a discounting war with all the big guys who are trying to trying so hard to give The Lost Symbol away.  But we are just as concerned as they are about being stuck with these things that -- given the signals everyone is sending -- probably no one wants.  So we will literally just give it away to the first 12 people, one copy each.

You can shop online beginning now -- www.themysterycompany.com -- or come in to the store starting at 10:30 a.m. If you shop online, be sure to put at least $50 of books into your shopping cart, and just mention "Lost Symbol" in the special instructions box on the checkout form.

(OK, I may be a little sarcastic about the rationale, but I am serious about this offer.  Don't hesitate to take advantage of it! Once these 12 copies are gone, we're done.)

Answers from a convention organizer

There's been some chatter on the Sisters in Crime discussion list about conventions.  I posted a long answer to the list earlier this week, and I'm sharing it with you all here today.  I realize that this is coming in on middle of a conversation, but I think that this will still make sense out of context.  If you're not a member of SinC and/or you're not on this list, I'd urge you to join both -- these are interesting and useful resources. (SinC website)

"Is there any panel organizer on the list who is brave enough to tell us the criteria they use to assign authors? "

Is it just me, or does this question sound somewhat hostile to you too? As co-chair of Bouchercon 2009, I have of course been following the comments here about conferences with more than a little interest. It may just be the circumstances that I find myself in -- sacrificing far more than I can afford on a job that's turned out to be way more difficult and distressing than I expected. I went into this process believing that an all-volunteer fan conference such as Bouchercon is a "we're all in this together" experience. That belief is being tested over and over again, each and every day, not just in the messages here, but in many aspects of our planning.

I don't think that the author who asked this question means to be hostile, nor do I think that most folks who comment about conferences mean to be hostile. At the same time, it is sobering to see Rosemary write "believe me, there are still people who give me dirty looks because I didn't do enough to get them to Murder 203." I know what she means, though. A programming decision that I made earlier this year has already cost me several twenty-year friendships.

Your Bouchercon 2009 program committee is right now deeply engaged in trying to find a way to give over 400 writers some kind of opportunity to be a part of the formal schedule. The answer to the question is really pretty simple: we schedule the participants that we believe are most likely to be of interest to our audience. To be sure, we look at popularity -- of course the big names are big draws -- but we also look at author's books, recall what we've seen authors say on lists like this one, visit websites (our browser histories for the last few weeks are dominated by your web pages), and solicit and heed the suggestions of folks we trust. We've all read widely. We've been to conferences. As program chair for Magna Cum Murder, I've already worked with hundreds of writers over the years.

All of this research and all of these experiences go into assembling the program. If you're not on the schedule, ultimately, it means one of two things: 1) despite our best efforts, we just couldn't find a way to include you or 2) we didn't think you would be as big a draw as other folks. It's pretty much as simple as that, so simple that you probably didn't need me to tell you that.

To the extent that it's called for, bravery lies not in saying "we did our best but couldn't find a spot for you" or "in designing program, we're looking for ways to reward service to the genre" or even "we found someone else more interesting." That's all kind of obvious, isn't it? Bravery (or foolhardiness -- it's often hard to tell the difference) lies in being willing take up the challenge in the first place.

Will we make mistakes? Of course we will. We'll get the mix of people wrong. Someone will turn out to be a bore. We'll miss out on a topic of importance. We'll meet someone whom we didn't schedule and find him or her so charming that we'll wish we did. I've told my committee -- which is working harder right now than you can imagine -- that we must not be afraid of making mistakes. We'll do the best we can and hope that we got more right than we got wrong.

And then we'll just have to learn to live with the dirty looks.

If one approaches a convention with an entitlement mentality -- i.e. the convention owes me a spot on the program or owes me XX number of book sales -- one will inevitably be disappointed. Nothing we can do as convention organizers can ever live up to these kinds of specific demands. No program assignment will ever be good enough. No quantity of book sales will ever be sufficient. I've written before (perhaps even here?) that if your convention experience depends on the few minutes that you'll speak to an audience as one-fifth of a 55-minute panel discussion, then please don't even think about registering for Bouchercon 2009. That's a bad attitude, and while we welcome everyone, we don't welcome bad attitudes.

I fully agree with Pari, who writes "even if a writer gets a crappy panel (and I've had my share), there's still the hospitality room and the bar and the restaurants -- even the darn hallway or lobby -- all places to make connections for current and future sales." As a conference bookseller, I've often heard folks say that they made the decision to buy a book because they chatted with the author at lunch or at the bar.

And more generally, I strongly agree with Barbara who thinks "the key to a good convention experience is remembering it's about extravagant love of mysteries and the reading experience, a bonding of people who are quite honestly a little obsessed about a genre and like being among their peers."

I would add only that we need to remember who our peers are. At a conference like Bouchercon, every one of us is there first and foremost as a fan. We may identify ourselves as writers, librarians, booksellers, agents, publishers, etc. But we all come to Bouchercon because we share a passion for our genre, and for books themselves. Sandy asks "why not cater to writers and to fans?" My feeling is that fans are the ONLY constituency that matters because we are all fans.

A few comments on some other points:

ON THE MONEY, PART 1 - PAYING PEOPLE: This may not be the ideal way to run a railroad, but Bouchercon has grown up around an all-volunteer model. What that means is that no one is paid for their work on the event -- not the organizers, not the presenters, no one. In fact, like presenters, my co-chair and I are paying for the privilege of hosting Bouchercon 2009. We wrote the first and second registration checks that Bouchercon collected. We needed to. At the time we got the ball rolling, we had not yet received any pass-along funds. The first expenses that the committee incurred -- making up flyers, application fees for the corporate stuff (such as non-profit status), copying and mailing registration acknowledgements -- were literally paid for out of these first dollars kicked in by the core members of our committee in the form of registrations. This is the model we're working with. Would another model, one that allows Bouchercon to pay staffers and presenters, be better? My feeling is no, that having everyone (other than guests of honor) kick in their own registration and expenses preserves the fan nature of the event. It's an arguable proposition, but until we take the time to have that argument, we're doing the best we can with the model we have. Bouchercon 2009's ability to attract so many people, including some of the biggest names in the genre, suggests that the model still works.

ON THE MONEY, PART 2 - BUYING BOOKS: I wish that more people recognized that the booksellers who are willing to stock and staff tables in the dealer's room are providing a valuable service. Instead, booksellers often feel like punching bags, having to endure complaints from writers who haven't thought about just how hard it is to be a bookseller at a conference. Think for a moment about the 20-copy number from Murder 203. In terms of sales, Liz writes that this is "a lot or a little." However you may look at this as an author, it's not a little thing for the bookseller, who might be contemplating a list of 400 writers at 20 books each for a total of 8000 books -- even before scaling up from Murder 203 attendance to Bouchercon attendance. If booksellers are cautious, if booksellers expect returnability, if booksellers ask for a 40% discount, don't automatically assume that booksellers are lazy or incompetent or greedy. Think about the quantities, about the hours to order, to haul and to return, and about all the sunk dollars in inventory before you lodge a complaint.

ON THE MONEY, PART 3 - CONVENTIONS ARE EXPENSIVE: I'm glad to see folks try out low-cost approaches to running a convention. But most low-cost alternatives do come with other "costs," such as kid-sized desks in a school setting. I'm astonished by how much things cost at our host hotel and at the other venues we're working with. But if you want a nice setting, you have to pay the price. Our A/V costs alone will be over $40,000. While you’re sitting in our lovely hotel in the heart of Indianapolis’ lovely, convention-oriented downtown, think about that number. For the 1600 - 1700 or so people we'll have at Bouchercon, that means that about $25 of your registration dollars will go just to microphones, an occasional projector or two, etc.

ON FREE BOOKS AND WASTE: You will not receive a load of free books at registration at Bouchercon 2009. Instead, we are designing different opportunities for readers to get free books. We're doing this for a lot of reasons, but avoiding waste is a big part of our planning. We believe that the mass distribution of sacks full of books on arrival is a really poor use of resources. Especially in this brutal economy, we are all trying to be smarter and more efficient about everything -- including the ways we make free books available. As for extra books, Bouchercon 2009 will be working with Feeding Body and Mind to take care of leftovers -- and we will be soliciting donations for this group from all attendees. The bag, incidentally, costs about $4000. We are grateful to the Mystery Writers of America for sponsoring the Bouchercon 2009 bag.

ON ALTERNATIVE PROGRAMMING: Pari was kind enough to note that I've been experimenting with new ideas at Magna Cum Murder. I've been fortunate to work with an inventive and energetic group of authors, and to work with a conference chair who gave me complete freedom to innovate. We'll be bringing a lot of these ideas to Bouchercon: continuous conversation, resolutions, "one conference, one book," a first novelists' round robin, etc., and we'll be doing a few new things, such as a craft room and the Bazaar. You can read about some of this stuff on our website. The overall goal is to foster connections. I agree with Hope, who says of writers that she wants "to listen to them speak as normal people, not someone famous." I think that "one conference, one book" is especially effective for this as it gives everyone a common place to begin a conversation. One thing we won't do is just put a single writer in a room with no topic -- "15 minutes of fame" or whatever other events call this. Though these sessions can sometimes be effective -- and they're a great way to do a bookstore event -- this feels to me too much like an "it's all about me" approach to a convention. Really, no convention session should be all about an individual writer -- other than the few guest of honor feature sessions.

ON INVOLVING GROUPS: Reed notes that organizations such as SinC, MWA and ITW "have vast experience with conferences large and small" and that they "represent the interests of their members." I fully agree with his suggestion that conference planners engage these groups in the planning process, and we have in fact given these and other groups the opportunity to design and sponsor sessions on our program. I have reached out in many different ways to many different organizations and companies because I know that they're capable of bringing different experiences and expertise to the table. In most cases, folks have been eager to find ways to partner with us. Sisters and Crime is doing some extraordinary stuff, including the pre-conference SinC into Great Writing, an incredible value for writers, and a tea that honors librarians. Our vision is simple: Bouchercon doesn't belong to any one group or constituency or point of view, it belongs to the genre as a whole. In bringing in these groups -- and more -- we are trying to make that vision a reality.

GETTING INVOLVED: We've been watching some old episodes of The West Wing at home, and a line from a first season episode has been stuck in my head lately: "decisions are made by people who show up." Leslie urges folks to volunteer to help with conventions. I do too. Show up, participate in making decisions, and help keep these conventions vibrant. These events are important resources that help keep our genre great, and they need your help!

The power of the dodo

I'm responding this morning to posts on Murder Must Advertise, a list that discusses the marketing of mysteries (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MurderMustAdvertise/ -- you'll need a yahoo id). One poster wrote that "all books read just the same" while author Jeri Westerson (whose debut novel Veil of Lies is lots of fun) wrote:

"... the original model is outdated. I think hardcovers will go the way of the dodo as just too expensive to produce, ship, and sell."

Actually, Jeri, I think that hardcovers can and should be an increasingly large part of the mystery business, at least for the foreseeable future. (Which in this era of technological revolution means what ... maybe five, ten years?)

My feeling is that there are still a lot of readers who value the feel of a book in their hands, for whom reading is a visceral experience as much as it is an emotional/intellectual one.  Clutching a book is a little like holding a teddy bear: the object itself is comforting, apart from the words inside (which can also be comforting).

That's something that's rarely talked about in discussions of where the business is going, but I think we're foolish if we forget the power of the book itself and we're foolish if this industry fails to main high standards in book design and production.  I disagree with the statement that "all books read just the same." They certainly don't sell just the same.  That's why publishers spend so much time trying to get covers right.  It's absolutely vital that we craft a package that lives up to value of the text. The look and feel of the book can be a huge impetus in getting a buyer to take that text home -- or a deterrent.  Publishers who go cheap on production values -- and there are lots who are going this route -- are not just imperiling one title's chances of success but are undermining the appeal of the book itself.

One of the reasons my publishing company's edition of Terence Faherty's In a Teapot was successful (to the limited extent that it was) was that we were able to design a book that looks and feels right.  Faherty's words are wonderful -- and earned him a Shamus Award nomination for best novel. But we also got a lot of compliments for the book itself: an attractive cover, a trim size that's neither too big nor too small, nice interior illustrations (by Robin Agnew) at the head of each chapter, etc.  This book was also a Dilys Award nominee and it won a Benjamin Franklin Award from what was then the Publishers Marketing Association.  Teapot is a great story, but I think that even the author would agree that the package helped the story achieve all this attention and recognition.

Cost-wise, there's not a big difference in producing hardcovers vs. paperbacks (if you're running traditional offset).  The only real difference is the price of the jacket; the difference in the book itself isn't significant. (That's one reason you've seen some folks experiment with jacket-less hardcovers.) Hardcovers are more expensive to ship. But once in the store, they're no more expensive to sell.  In fact, if I take 15 minutes working with a customer to find books he or she will enjoy, I'd just as soon that person buy hardcovers. The unit price is higher, and as a result the gross dollar value of the sale is higher.

(Actually, many of our regulars buy enough paperbacks at a time so that their sales add up to significant sums.  And if we're really talking about profitability, the better gross margin is in used books anyway. Really, I'm grateful for every single sale, especially in this economic environment!)

I'm not knocking e-books. There's no question that e-books are a part of our future.  We're talking about how we'll talk about e-books at Bouchercon 2009, recognizing that readers and writers need to know about what this technological shift means for the stories they love, what kind of experience we're getting with e-books. Should we even be calling an "e-book" a book?  I'd like to see us think in terms of "book" for the physical object and "text" for the words the author has written.  But that may just be me, and this is a conversation that I'd like to see us all have.

Ultimately, of course, it's the words that matter.  But text isn't all there is to the reading experience, and the form of the text has huge impact on how those words reach readers -- or whether those words will reach readers at all.

Who bucks up whom?

This morning, I'm reacting to a question posed on the Sisters in Crime discussion list, and to a related discussion there about marketing bestsellers versus "long tail" marketing.

Here's the question from the SinC list, posed by Barbara Fister (whose latest book, In the Wind, is terrific):

Very few consumers realize the books they see most prominently featured are a function of money. Am I correct in thinking that, though indies get some coop dollars for promotion, they don't get big bucks for placement - so that in indies you generally are seeing the books the bookseller thinks are good, not just the ones the publisher wants promoted? Mind you, I wouldn't begrudge you the bucks... but to me that would be a meaningful distinction in choosing where to shop as a consumer.

I agree that this is a vitally important distinction.   Generally speaking, display space in chain stores is publisher-driven.  Display space in independents is largely driven by the preferences of real, local book-lovers who know books and know their customers. The distinction between chain stores and independents isn't completely black and white -- certainly not in the way that there's hard line between the inclusive practices of all bookstores versus the very restrictive (and I think destructive) methods of the discount stores (such as Walmart, Costco, etc.).  I'm not saying that the mystery buyer at B&N (whom I've talked with) doesn't know and love mysteries; what I am saying is that he works within one limited system, while as an independent I have the flexibility and freedom to promote and sell whatever books I like, regardless of system.

Independent stores like mine do get some co-op money -- usually for events and/or newsletter mentions. I'm grateful for every dollar that publishers approve for us.  But it's a drop in the bucket, and it takes real work to earn that kickback. (We spend many multiples of what we get in co-op on marketing and promotion.)  So it's not like the major subsidy that chain stores get for doing something that all booksellers ought to be doing anyway -- just putting books out for display in a way that should maximize sales.

Over and over again, I write that you all as consumers have a say in what the marketplace for books is going to look like in the future. Different stores offer readers different kinds of choices, different opportunities to discover new writers you'll cherish, different opportunities for writers and publishers to reach readers.  What the chain stores offer is a single publisher-driven, centrally-planned, top-down system. It's not an awful system and not all of the results of the system are bad, but this system has real limitations. What independent stores offer is careful, individual attention and consideration that can build into a groundswell, a foundation for multiple kinds of success -- local, regional, national.  This isn't a perfect process either, but it's a whole lot more open and it results in many more interesting choices.

A healthy book business would support both models of bookselling.  Even as an independent bookseller, I recognize that there are things that the chain stores do very well.  But there are other things that independents do well.  Publisher money supports what the chains are doing.  It's up to readers and writers individually to support what independents do.  That's where you all have to make a choice, and where I hope you'll realize that every dollar matters.  You keep stores like mine afloat so that we're here to champion the folks we like (here’s a current example). Or not. It's up to you.

On the issue of bestsellers versus the long tail, as raised in the Wall Street Journal, here are two quick notes:

1) I've said this before, so won't dwell on this.  There are basically two ways to make a bestseller.  One is to buy your way onto the lists. The other is to build a readership over time, and gradually find a way onto the list.  It's my belief that while either method can work, the latter is far more likely to result in durable, lasting success.  It's the difference between being Douglas Kennedy or Jilliane Hoffman versus Michael Connelly or Laura Lippman.  (Since I first cited Douglas Kennedy in this context, I've learned that he's actually had some success overseas ... so this example may be even more interesting than I thought.  For what I'm talking about here, I'm focused on his US publishing experience.  The verdict might still be out on Hoffman, though she and her original US publisher have already parted ways.)

2) In this morning’s New York Times, there's a comment from literary agent Amanda Urban that strikes me as shockingly naive. She's quoted as saying "Books can only support a certain retail price.... A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet."  Like hell it does.  James Patterson is undoubtedly the biggest beneficiary of a system that subsidies the sale of a handful of bestselling writers with huge discounts: 40% off is typical for a new James Patterson title.  That sure isn't typical of a new book by "some poet" or any midlist writer you can think of.

Take these points together and ask yourself this: if the discounts vanished, which writers would still be successful?  It's my belief that folks like Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman and P.D. James, who rose through the ranks based on strong response from independent booksellers and independent readers, will continue to sell strongly, whereas folks whose careers are built only on short-term gimmicks (huge advance, big discounts, costly promotion and inefficient mass distribution in chain and discount stores) will be dead in the water.

I said two points, but I'll add one more.  Remember that when a media outlet like the Wall Street Journal bashes the long tail, it's doing so out of economic self interest.  WSJ wants everyone to believe that the bestseller culture and the dollars that publishers use to support it are necessary components of success.  The reason they want everyone to believe this is that those publisher dollars get spent in places like WSJ.  WSJ does not want publishers to realize that there's a viable model that does not demand that publishers fork dollars over to them.  Actually, this is even more complicated by the cross-ownership of big media and big publishing.  Who owns WSJ?  The same guy who owns HarperCollins.  Is it surprising that these companies will work to buck each other up?