Small Thoughts About The Internet

Over the weekend, I saw that cartoon posted on Facebook. It wasn't the cartoon that really caught my attention. It was the comments.

Specifically, the ones who thought it sad that bookstores are now influenced by the internet.

And all I wanted to ask was, "Why?"

When e-publishing in Amazon started, I was cautious. I was concerned. To that point, I'd never been self-published - although I'd been constantly criticized and treated as though my first novel was. I'd had a contract and been paid, just not by a publisher that met MWA guidelines. And I'm not going to debate that right now. In the end, the publisher sunk, I got my rights back, and have moved on.

But I was nervous about e-publishing, and nervous about trying my hand at it, because I really wasn't interested in going through another round of the criticism I'd experienced before.

And then I watched as the people who'd condemned me for being self-published when I wasn't jumped on board with Smashwords and got in bed with Amazon.

Clearly the times, they were a-changin'.

I still didn't run and jump right on board, but eventually, I regained the rights to my first book and was able to take a novel that had never really been properly distributed and only available in hardcover and make it available as an e-book.

Within the first six months, sales had passed 5000 copies.

I'm not sharing this to suggest that because I can make money online, I champion Amazon over brick and mortar stores. I don't.

But I also don't champion the physical bookstore over the internet.

When I saw the cartoon, and saw the comments, I had one of those moments of clarity. I've really gone back and forth about my feelings about e-publishing. I mean, it's fantastic that I can sell books and earn money and gain readers. SC has proven to have the legs I always believed it could have, and it's proven that the internet allows for the best effect of the long-tail reader, and authors don't have to expect to do the bulk of their sales in the first month. Word of mouth can build and grow and build the audience.

On the other hand, nobody can deny that there's more self-published crap being churned out at an alarming rate because of the ease of producing e-books and self-publishing through options including CreateSpace.

We have to take the bad with the good. That's the way it is with most things.

I love bookstores. Few authors would say otherwise. I love going to browse, a large store, to get lost in the books. I love having a bookstore close by.

However, I don't have an outdated loyalty to them. I grew up in a small town. 9000 or so, with a population in the area that tripled in the summer with all the cottagers, and went even higher on weekends. We didn't have a bookstore. If I wanted to get to a bookstore, I had to get someone to drive me down the highway more than 50 kilometers to a different city that had a small WHSmith in the mall. No, if I wanted books, my best shot was at the library, because I could walk there, but my opportunities to get to a bookstore were limited.

The thing is, as a kid, that puts a limit on what's available to you. As a girl, I had an advantage. The secret readership of YA books is adults, and since more girls read than boys, there's more published that appeals to girls. Publishers aren't as inclined to take the big risks on boy books. That leaves boys slipping through the cracks, without nearly as many options. In a house with literally thousands of books, including hundreds of YA and chapter books, it's almost always the boy who has a harder time finding something that appeals to him.

You may recall the synopsis of the book he decided to write himself from Brian's post last week.

As an author, I've listened to booksellers explain how and why they order titles, and I know that publishers don't promote their whole catalog. They promote their big ticket items they want to push.

The number of books that actually make it into stores, compared to the number of books that are even traditionally published, is miniscule.

And unless you've got an exceptional independent store, like those we know well in our community, or a very exceptional chain with well-informed staff that you can go to, you won't have people making recommendations based on what you really like to read or are looking for. They'll make recommendations based on what they're pushing. I heard these conversations too many times in chain stores, with staff who clearly didn't know anything about the book they were being asked about, other than what was printed on the back cover. Man, I had someone I asked about a crime fiction author try to get me to read Atwood. Now, she's a great writer, but if I'm looking for Allan Guthrie, why would you send me to Margaret Atwood? Could you at least try your hand at someone in the same genre? It's a bit like telling someone looking for a Ken Bruen title to try JRR Tolkein instead.

All too often, particularly in chain stores, I've known more than the person working there.

Here's the good news for the boy, and for those who live in small towns and don't have easy access to bookstores. The internet gives you that access. You're no longer limited by geography. And with two Kindles in our house now, we can have a book downloaded in a matter of minutes and set someone up with a brand-new title.

I've certainly heard people suggest those from small towns have small minds and I've heard critical comments of small-town thinking. Now, the mind of a person is only as small as the world they let themselves have access to, and through the internet we can find the books that interest us and get the titles the local store won't carry. Hell, I lived in a town where the boycott of The Last Temptation of Christ was successful. Now, my options are uncensored.

The internet isn't just a good thing for authors. It's a good thing for readers, and for people in general. I know that there's a cost, I know it gives birth to different crimes and I know that it can be a vicious forum for debate and discussion, and that trying to find intelligent discussion online can be, at times, nearly impossible.

But I can't look at a bookstore and feel sad about the internet. I just can't. I want both, and what the internet can offer me, as a reader, is something I greatly appreciate, especially because of the number of years I spent without easy access to books. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, I can actually get the title I want, in my hands.

Personally, I think that's pretty freakin' amazing as a reader.


And as an author, I've earned more in the past year than I could have imagined when I decided to try my hand at e-publishing. Suspicious Circumstances is now a few days away from being available via Amazon in trade paperback for the first time, and Harvest of Ruins will also be available in print by the end of this week, for the first time ever.

Those of you who know me know that I can be a champion and enthusiast for the works of others that I love, and am more reluctant to sing my own praises, but Harvest of Ruins is the best book I've written to date, and will be a hard book to top. It's a story that deserves to be told, and deserves to be read, and I hope that with the release of the paperback version it will begin to reach a wider audience.

Thanks to the internet.

And for your amusement, writers and serious readers should enjoy this.

The Superbowl Buzz

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Today is the big day. Even if someone isn’t a football fan, the Superbowl tends to be on everyone’s radar. Okay – that might not be true for those beyond the US, but here in the good ol’ USA Superbowl Sunday is akin to a holiday. Everyone has their favorite foods to eat. There are parties to go to. And any restaurant with a television (and even a few that bring in TVs for the day) are running Superbowl specials.

I know more than a few people who profess to hate football, but every year watch the Superbowl. Why?

The commercials, of course.

Every year people watch the commercials so they can talk about them at work, on Facebook or via Twitter the next day. Which ones were funny? Which pissed you off? Which ones were cute, but you have no flippin’ idea what product the commercial was hocking. The unveiling of new, expensive and often provocative commercials during the Superbowl has kept non-sports fans interested in the game for decades. No one wants to miss those brand new commercials.

Smart, right? I always thought so. Except this year I am noticed a huge number of tweets and Facebook posts talking about Superbowl commercials….not the ones they are looking forward to, but the ones they have already seen. For some strange reason that I don’t understand, advertising geniuses that get paid way more than I do have decided to release their “brand-new, never seen before” commercials before the big day. Which baffles me. I me, why pay millions of dollars to get buzz the day after the Superbowl unless you actually WANT buzz after the Superbowl?

I’m really asking. Why? If the public has already chatted about your commercial and deemed it interesting or uninteresting, they aren’t going to care when it officially launches during the game.

For books, sending out hundreds of ARCs before the book officially hits shelves is a way of building buzz. Booksellers read the book. Librarians and reviewers read the book. Then when the book hits shelves, those early readers can tell everyone they meet to read the book. That advanced buzz I get. This Superbowl commercial thing has me baffled.

So tell me 1) Do you watch the Superbowl for the game or the commercials and 2) Why the heck would you pay that much money for big impact only to lessen the impact with an early release. I really want to know!

Reading and Re-Reading: An Enquiry

by
Scott D. Parker

As he is wont to do frequently during my reading life, Neil Gaiman has performed a magic trick. He has conjured, in my mind a question: do we, as adults, re-read books?

Recently, he posted the text of a speech he once gave at an event called Mythcon. (Don't you just love how we can put the word "con" at the end of just about anything and it rings with a certain truthfulness?) His speech was some of his thoughts on C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and J. R. R. Tolkien and how he loves authors who have a certain number of initials in their published names rather than actual names. No, not really, but it struck me as funny just now.

In his speech, he talked about how he discovered those three authors in his childhood. He commented on reading and re-reading certain books--all seven Narnia books, the first two volumes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy--and how, when he came to write his own material, the language of these authors were already ingrained into his subconscious.

This got me to thinking about re-reading in general. In my own boyhood, I re-read a few things, but only major things are sticking to my adult memory. I re-read the Star Wars novelization, the Star Trek log books by Alan Dean Foster, and numerous adventures of the Three Investigators, a group I favored over the more popular Hardy Boys. Even though the animated film of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was released during my childhood, I never got around to reading the entire seven-book series until midway through this past decade. More than likely, I missed something I would have probably found useful had I been twelve when I read them versus mid thirties.

Why do we re-read books? One obvious answer is that we like the characters. I'm an only child and I lived a lot of time in my own head. I was the Fourth Investigator. I wrote myself into the Star Wars saga (Han Solo's nephew, I think it was). We may like the created universe and prefer to spend lazy weekend days there rather than the mundaneness of real life.

Now that I'm a "grown up"--and I use the term very lightly, usually referring to the number of years living as opposed to mindset--I don't re-read much, if at all. I've had the mindset to consider life too short to re-read anything, even things that I love. With so many good books out there, why bother spending any amount of extra time in one book when there are millions more to discover. It's almost as if reading is a race and, knowing I'll never get to all the books I want to read before I pass on, I've contented myself to skimming through my reading life like a thrown stone on a glassy lake. Sure I might touch the surface a few times, rippling here and there, but, ultimately, I'm going to stop moving and sink.

Honestly, the more I think about returning to shared universes, the more I realize that we moderns, if we don't re-read books, instead return to movies and TV shows. I'm starting to think that DVD ownerships and the ability to watch any TV series or movie over and over again is the modern equivalent to re-reading a book. I own a few specials DVDs--The Dark Knight, all seasons, to date, of Castle, Brisco County, Jr., The X-Files--that I'll return to, periodically, to watch. I get to watch the screen and enter again that warm embrace of nostalgia and familiarity bestowed by the stories, characters, and created universes.

There is, of course, a certain wistfulness about childhood re-reading when looked back at it from the point of view of an adult. Lazy days, which, at the time, probably seemed boring--remember how long a Saturday afternoon could be when you had nothing to do? Now, contrast that to a typical Saturday nowadays.--could be spent reading and re-reading any book you wanted to, immersed in the joy of a favorite, dog-eared book. Perhaps, what I'm feeling is that lost sense of wonder that can best be experienced as a child and during first discovery.

When was the last time a book truly opened your mind? Or made you have a physical, visceral reaction? I'll admit that when I read a book nowadays, I read with two minds. One mind merely wants to be entertained while the other is keeping a mental list of Things You Can Learn as a writer. While the former always manages to subvert the latter, the presence of the latter means I'm not truly consumed by the book. As a kid, I didn't care what writing tips I could learn from an author. I just wanted to be entertained.

When was the last time a book truly opened *my* mind? Well, being all analytical and compartmentalized in my thinking, I sub-divide my answer into two components. There are the mind-expanding books and there are the books from which I've had a physical reaction to, one in which I've simultaneously enjoyed the story but also took note of things as a writer. In the latter category, I present the following: Mystic River, The Dawn Patrol, The Shadow of the Wind, and Naked Heat. (Yes, that last is based on the Castle TV show and is the reigning book in the I've Re-Read It list. Why did I re-read it? To learn how "Richard Castle" structured his story.)

The former category consists of only two books: Perdido Street Station by China Mieville and Hyperion by Dan Simmons. That they are SF/F books lends some credence to my own personal belief that the genres of science fiction and fantasy are the best mediums to open one's mind. And here's where my skipping-stone analogy/too many books to bother re-reading mentality ruin me. Both of these books are part of a larger series. As wowed as I was by them, I felt compelled to stop living in their respective universes and charge forward. In some ways, I cheated myself, an idea I've only recently considered and lamented.

So, I pose the questions to you. Do you re-read books? If so, do you only re-read books you first read as a child, or do you re-read books you discovered as an adult? If you've returned to a book first read during childhood, did it stand up or did your adult sense ruin, in a way, the memory of the book? When was the last time a book truly opened your mind? What was it, and why?