I'm published by St. Martin's, so my books are some of those that were unavailable on Amazon this past week. I also work at a bookstore and I've frequently recommended Amazon to customers when I couldn't get the book they wanted. Only this week, I didn't. It wasn't on purpose, but suddenly while talking to customers, I found myself recommending Alibris for used books, or Book Depository (free shipping!) for other needs. It's just that this whole thing has made me think differently about Amazon, I guess.

I went to a large party recently at which I didn't know very many people. I'm an introvert and not the most out-going of people on occasions like these, but I do my best, though I find I mostly have to take frequent breaks from "mingling." Anyway, what I wanted to say was that, on reflection, I realized that practically everyone I was introduced to talked to me about books or about the Kindle they'd gotten for Christmas. I'll talk about books forever, so I was perfectly happy, but looking back I wonder if they were merely being polite and a whole lot better at party small talk than I am (this would not be difficult). Any yet, they seemed to me to be quite enthusiastic--everybody had a book they'd read, or wanted to read, or one they wanted my opinion on. Maybe reading is still a legitimate leisure activity after all.

This post is in response to the Huffington Post article [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erik-ose/why-wont-borders-donate-t_b_389060.html] which exposed the practice of “stripping” mass market books—tearing off the covers and returning only those to the publisher for credit whilst dumpstering the rest of the book. Borders (at which I work) was singled out in this article, and in response the CEO made placating noises about stopping the practice.

Let me first say that I think stripping books is a god-awful thing and I am all for stopping it. This post [http://thelatestoutrage.blogspot.com/2009/12/pulping-is-publishing-industrys-dirty.html], referenced in the HuffPost, makes a very good argument and points out several salient facts about the practice and how it could be stopped.

However, I take issue with the HuffPost, which is as sloppy a piece of reporting as I have ever seen, and I also take issue with Borders CEO for making nice when what he should have done was stand up and say, “Not my doing—go talk to the publishers.”

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The saga of my search for a copy of the Lego Star Wars Visual Dictionary began last week when I discovered my nephew wanted it for Christmas. His mother seemed slightly perplexed, but I knew exactly what it was, having received a large Lego display for the bookstore along with several copies back in October. I knew we had sold out of the book and gotten in a second shipment, and sold most of that. I had idly noted that it was doing very well.

So when I went into work the next day, I looked for a copy. Not on the shelves. Oddly, Borders had decided to shelve it in the adult SF section rather than in kids, so I checked both places, but to no avail. I looked it up on the computer--only one left in stock. I checked the slush carts and other spots it might have migrated to, but I couldn't find it and my co-workers informed me we were sold out. No biggie, I think to myself, I'll just order it from Borders.com when I get home.

At home that evening (well, very late at night, well into the wee hours if you want to be particular) I went online only to discover the book is backordered on Borders.com, so no discount on this for me . I shift over to Amazon--but it's backordered there as well. B&N.com, same thing. Powells, too. I still don't get the message, though.

A couple of days later I'm back at work and I try to order it through Ingram. They're out. I call our local distributor--they're out. I call the local B&N, who are also out. Really odd, I think, I haven't seen a thing about the sleeper bestseller status of this book anywhere. I still think I can probably find one lingering on a shelf somewhere, so the next day (which happened to be yesterday) I settle down on my couch with my laptop and the phone and start in.

By late afternoon, I had gone through every B&N and Borders in Manhattan (with a couple in Brooklyn and one or two in NJ for good measure) who were listed as still having it in stock. Nobody actually had it. University Bookstore in Seattle claimed to have it, so I called them only to find out they didn't. I brought up a list of independent bookstores and called all of them. No luck. Nobody, apparently, has seen a copy since November, and we're looking at February before DK manages to push out any more.

But what amazes me is how under the radar this phenomenon has been. In all of my calls to these bookstores, several people knew they were out of it, but none of them seemed to know the entire country was out. Everyone seemed to be surprised to find they couldn't order it. Out of curiosity, I googled it but not a single news story came up (granted, I didn't scroll through more than the first two pages).

Anyway, I bought another book for my nephew and he can have a pleasant surprise in February when I can get my hands on the damn thing again.

Just got word from my publisher: A SPIDER ON THE STAIRS will be released on July 20, 2010. It's the next book in my mystery series featuring Bethancourt and Gibbons. Here's the cover by Sergio Baradat, which I love to death:

Had a very productive day yesterday, stuffing my head full of information about English jurisprudence and (much more fun) taking the Scrivener tutorial. I've only just begun to use it, but I think I'm really, really going to love it. Because normally I have a Word folder entitled Book5 or whatever and then full of various documents incorporating various incarnations of the narrative, plus a whole bunch more full of to do lists, notes, plot points, character lists, outlines of the scenes written to date, etc. Usually during the course of writing a book, another folder emerges which is full of old notes and ideas which are no longer relevant, but which I am loathe to delete, just in case. And it is not at all unusual to find me opening and closing one doc after another, trying to find exactly where I put that particular piece of information, or where I made that important note.

But Scrivener gives me a place to put all my notes, etc. and actually attaches them to the document they belong to. Actually, it doesn't just give me one place, it gives me multiple places depending on what kind of note it is. Which suits me down to a tee. On top of that, there's the automatic synopsis and the cork board. Because once I'm fairly far along and have hit the middle-of-the-book doldrums, I usually need an overview and end up spending time working my way through the book, writing the kind of outline writers who use outlines to start with usually have, only of course mine only goes up to where I've stopped because I can't use an outline to write.

(An aside: John Grisham always sounds so wonderfully organized when he talks about his process, it makes me quite jealous. I sit and listen to him in wonder, knowing that I could never, ever write a book that way, but rather wishing that I could. This may be a case of "the grass is always greener"…)

Anyway, I had a very satisfying day off, and am ready to go into work tonight and arrange Wimpy Kid books all over the place.

Well, SOTS is off to my long-suffering editor at long last. Time to take a look at what went wrong in the writing of it and what I learned from the experience. So herewith is the post-mortem.

A quick recap: it took me over a year and a half to write it, and it wasn’t because it “grew in the telling” or anything. It was simply because I had trouble writing it, in a way I’ve never had trouble before. Hence this attempt at analysis. I think I have learned from the experience, although there are still things that are a mystery to me.

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I did 5,000 words yesterday, which makes for a total of something over 10,000 since I started writing the "wrap up." Who knew the damn book had that many words left in it? Certainly not me. I really have got to find some way to get better at estimating how much is left to write.

I’ve been thinking about the reasoning behind the whole Borders make-book idea, and it has struck me anew how little common sense corporate America seems to have these days.

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The new MacBook has arrived! It's beautiful. I love it already.

I've not yet been able to retrieve anything off the old iBook, although I'm hopeful that I'll manage that at some point. More importantly, I have not been able to install Word successfully. It keeps telling me my key is wrong. I'm guessing this is because I used the same key to install it on the iBook. I figure as well that there must be some way to do this because, after all, everyone periodically gets a new computer and has to install software on it. So I skipped on over to the Mactopia site on Microsoft and tried to post the question. They wanted to me to register, okay, so I filled out the form and typed in the string of funky letters that proves I'm human. Result: MS says I typed in the letters wrong. I tried again. Same result. I tried multiple times, but it won't let me register. I hate Microsoft.

And this is holding up work on the book, since I cannot very well work on a Word file if I don't have the damn program running.

ACK!!! The computer died! Have I mentioned that this bloody book is jinxed?

I've not been too happy with 2009 so far. This is how my year thus far has gone:

1. My hours at work were drastically cut.

2. My maintenance fees went up. A lot. (Anybody seeing a problem here?)

3. I did not finish my book when I thought I would. In fact, I have still not finished it. I find this unbearably depressing.

4. I got the swine flu.

5. It's not just that I got the flu, it's when I got it. A lot of the reason for #3 is that, just as I was on verge of pulling it all together, Borders decided that the store needed to be completely re-arranged. 2600 sq. ft. of books. I got to be lead on this project because it's my kind of thing. This lead to my working virtually full-time, which was a help with numbers 1&2, but made it impossible for me to get much written.

But look on the bright side, right? I'm organizing the kind of project I love and I have got it all under control and at least I will not have to declare bankruptcy.

Only then I get the swine flu and have to abrogate responsibility for my pet project. Plus I am no longer earning any money, thus enabling numbers 1&2 to raise their ugly heads again.

So now I have no money, I have no book, and I have a sinus headache. I want a do-over!

Update 23 June 2009:

I now have a number 6 (oh, joy ).

6. Someone backed into my car.

I've just finished the third book in Lisa Lutz's wonderful mystery series. I laughed out loud through all three, and much admired the unusual structure of the books. I just wanted to post a quick recommendation here, because I really, really enjoyed them and am looking forward to book 4!

That would be Jove (imprint of Berkley, owned by Penguin), who recently published Amanda Quick's latest mass market (The Third Circle). As opposed to Pocket Star (Kensington), who have just reprinted three of John Connolly's backlist titles.

Quick's book is a new paperback release, and Jove has elected to issue it in the new, larger format, priced at 9.99. This format has become increasingly popular among mystery/thriller publishers, but the romance people have thus far eschewed it, so Quick's book stands out. The problem is that in this economic climate, nobody wants to pay $2 more for a mass market book. So, yes, Jove is reaping an extra $1.20 per book sold, but I work at a bookstore in a hard-hit area of the country, and from my point of view the extra $1.20 is not making up for the sales they're losing.

I sell a lot of romance at my store, and Amanda Quick is a popular author. I've never seen one of her titles move so slowly. I've actually overheard customers say, "Oh, wait, why is this more than the others?" and put the book back. And, as I mentioned, The Third Circle is new in paperback--at my store, a great many of the romance customers wait until the paperback comes out before they buy, so the new ones usually go very quickly.

The three John Connolly titles, on the other hand, are not new--they're reprints of older books, and they're priced at $4.99. I really only put them out on the new book table because I was a bit low on titles, and normally I wouldn't have expected them to sell very well. But lo and behold, they flew off the table. I had only put out one of the titles, so I ran and got one of the other ones to fill the gaping hole in my table. And boom! by the end of the weekend, that one was gone, too.

Entertainment historically does well during economic downturns, but there's a lot more entertainment options out there than there used to be, and much of it is cheaper than the current prices of books. Publishers can't afford to rest on their laurels, and I think this example, anecdotal as it may be, shows pretty clearly what customers are looking for when they go into a bookstore these days.

So we're supposed to sell these bunnies. We (and I assume all of you as well) get lots of notices about how important it is to sell bunnies. The sale of our bunnies is being tracked. (Full disclosure here: I actually think the bunny is cute.) I don't know exactly how many bunnies we've sold, or if it's come up to the number AA thinks our store should sell, I only know we don't have any left. We're sold out.

So yesterday I went through the new shipment. No bunnies. I looked again. My SM looked. My GM looked. Nope, no shipment of bunnies. How, exactly, are we supposed to sell them if they don't send them to us? This is insane.

Yesterday I unwittingly paid $3 for a tomato and all I can say is WTF? It was not a particularly large tomato, nor was it small--pretty medium-sized I would say. It was an Ugly Ripe tomato, which are the ones I usually buy if they're available because they often *are* vine-ripened and thus taste much better than the usual supermarket cardboard ones. But when did they start charging $5 a pound for them?!!! Is it just me, or is that a pretty outrageous price?

The scary thing is I have to wonder how many other $3 tomatoes I've bought without noticing? (And I must note here that I am not currently in a financial position to be paying $3 for a tomato.) I only noticed the price of this one because I only bought three things at the store yesterday: a bottle of OJ, which I know to be $5, some light bulbs, which I happened to notice were $2, and the tomato. So I was a little surprised when the tab was $10. Because, really, I was thinking that a single tomato would be something under a dollar. I am very bad with numbers, though, and if I had been buying all the ingredients for dinner, or even if I had just added two or three other items that I didn't know the exact price of, I probably wouldn't have noticed the $3 for the tomato. Which leads me to think that this had been going on for some time, a sort of stealth drain on my already straightened circumstances. Good grief!

This book is jinxed. No, really. I got it unstuck, and was thinking that by the end of next week I would really have gotten a solid chunk done. Then I got my work schedule--four days instead of two! I can really use the money, but what rotten timing…

My book is stuck again, mostly this time because of outside economic worries. Finding and plotting out practical back-up plans is very time-consuming, not to mention mentally draining. And I still have to run numbers (ick). And it never seems to fail that when something like this comes up, other things happen, too. Like a friend having eye surgery.

But today is my day to try to get my writing back on track, so I've got my fingers crossed.

Bookselling is sometimes very odd. Take last January. We received a directive to put up a "Winter Reads" table in the fiction section. This is the kind of thing we do all the time, and it seldom does very well. This time, we put the table at the front of store, behind the bestseller tables, but I still didn't expect much from it. Then it turned out that we had hardly any of the titles that were supposed to go on the table in stock. So I filled it with similar titles we did have, mostly fairly serious fiction titles that had done well when they were on the "Buy 1, Get 1 Half Price" table, along with a couple of others that I just liked. And it sold like crazy. I had to keep re-stocking it. I still don't know why. Was it the placement of the table? (And yet we have had similarly themed tables there in the past that never did particularly well.) Was it the titles I picked out? Or were people just more inclined to look at a table of winter reads this year? Like I say, very odd.

We got our copies of Lamentation in at my bookstore today and they look really great. I'm going to give them a prominent place on my new release bay tomorrow--here's hoping they do well. Two of us at the store have already read the ARC, so we'll be hand-selling it.