I’ve been looking at financial results for Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon from years past. (Here’s some similar information and a pretty thorough breakdown: http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm)

Amazon’s sales keep going up, while BN and Borders sales are fluctuating a bit but generally trending downward. Most privately held companies (Auntie’s Books, Powell’s, etc.) don’t make their financial results so easily accessible, but it seems they are surviving a little better than the chains. (Note Auntie’s satellite store that just opened in downtown Spokane’s mall.) Interestingly, it’s BN’s and Borders’ smaller stores (the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks stores, respectively) that are really suffering. These are the ones in the mall that aren’t the cornerstone stores; they sit alongside Cinnabon and Lidz, and how they make any money at all is beyond me.

In light of this, I’m going to ask that annoying question again: Does the bookstore matter anymore?
Read more »

Check out The Great Typo Hunt.

Haven’t you always wanted to do that?

Two guys spent three months driving around the USA, spotting errors in signage and educating the sign owners about proper grammar. And the best part: they weren’t trying to be holier-than-thou assholes about it.

(Second-best part: after a Grand Canyon mishap, a federal judge ordered them not to speak publicly about grammatical errors for a year. That’s got to be one of the most bizarre sentences ever handed down.)

I’ve been reading a lot lately. That’s always good. But every once in a while I’ll come across a book or manuscript that does one thing so well, so often, or so poorly that it makes me go a little nuts. Read more »

Oh, yikes. Read this press release from Bowker.

Then take a look at the website, especially the part that follows “for only” in the little blurb next to the twenty-something, Caucasian, goateed writer guy’s head.

Discuss.

Just in case you’d forgotten, physical books are dead. And this just after Amazon sold out of the new Kindle in five days. Those new Kindles are cheaper and leaner and more efficient, which you knew had to happen because of the popularity of the iPad as an e-reader. And the technology is evolving fast enough that some companies, like Plastic Logic, are canceling upcoming products and moving forward with newer feature sets. Perhaps these newer devices will be helpful to fans of romance novels printed by places like Dorchester Publishing, which is going all-digital.

Sigh.

He said, she said, they said, we said….. Does the word said, drive you crazy? Are you forever searching for other words for said. Do you think your favourite characters need other ways of speaking? Other words for said seems to give most writers a problem.

It’s perhaps your dream or fantasy to write a story. Maybe you have a book in your head, but ‘said’ gets in the way.

Stories are what drive authors forward, words drive them wild, but said drives them mad.

That’s from this website, which lists 500 and some alternatives for “said.” And this reminds me of a project two of my classmates did in fourth grade at Sunnyside Elementary School. Emily and Sarah compiled a list of alternatives and asked the class for contributions. I must’ve written forty or fifty, partly because I was a bit ahead of the game at that age, but mostly because I’d had a crush on Sarah for two years already at that point, and it would be another five before I gave up on it. The point is that lots of people think it’s necessary to use something (anything!) other than said, even teachers, who describe lesson plans for coming up with “creative alternatives” for that dull, dreary word. Read more »

I’m back from vacation. Please hold your applause until the end of the blog entry.

Some things I learned on my 5,893-mile, 14-day road trip through British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and Alaska:

In Dawson City, Yukon, they take their Robert Service very seriously. Their are daily recitations/performances of his work, and the Robert Service House in Dawson City has folks dressed in period garb who will recite his work and give you little mini-info-tours as you walk past. (They’re a little scary.) If you don’t know “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by the time you leave town, you must’ve had earplugs in. Shooting of Dan McGrew
Read more »

There’s a new sci-fi mag: Lightspeed Magazine, which encourages its submitters to “take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.”

So, there’s that.

Their model is interesting: a new story each week, alongside essays on the themes in said story. Also available in ebook format each month. And podcasts. To me, this seems wise: give away a story or two via the podcast, package your constantly-updated content in larger, less frequent clumps, and reach audiences in multiple ways.

They seem strong-willed; from the editorial: “The number of fantasy and horror stories far surpass the number of science fiction stories. We’ve set out to rectify that.”

Noble effort to do things the right way? Doomed effort because of genre concentration?

Bigger question: does a genre short story automatically have more merit than a genre novel? The idea being that you’re not going to make cash with short stories, so you must not be selling out. Or is this just an excuse to write parables with aliens more quickly?

I hate titles. With a passion, a fury, etc. When I was told that a workshop story needed to have a title, I wanted to poke the professor in the eye. Yeah, sure, maybe that was the wrong thing to want to do, but I don’t claim to be perfect. (Unlike, you know, this guy.) I don’t know when I started hating titles, but I suspect it was around the time I had to start titling my own works and realizing I was really, incredibly inept at choosing a title.

I think most young writers go through a phase of selecting alliterative or punny titles for things, and that (hopefully) goes away. Maybe it morphs into plainly descriptive titles or titles based on the name of a character (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman comes to mind, a book which someone I respect very much once described as “The most perfect book the world has ever known; if only the world knew about it.”)

But what makes for a good title? First, I think we have to step back further and define what we mean by “good.” Read more »

But still. It’s thesis time for many grad students, which means countless hours in front of a computer screen, often staring at Microsoft Word documents. Oh, the horror of spell check and grammar check.

Jump for joy: Read more »