Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Written Nerd Link Added

I've added Jessica Stockton's Written Nerd to my links.

Not only is the Written Nerd a great resource for all things happening in the book world, and not only have I been reading it for a couple of years and feel silly for not including it in my links in the first place, but she has picked up the Larry Portzline story (see my version below) and is running with it. She has quite the readership and hopefully can get something done or at least make the proper people feel guilty for their inaction.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Read This Long Entry Because It's Important!!! Bookstore Tourism, or The Death of a Great Idea

Larry Portzline is a great guy from Harrisburg, PA who I met at the beginning of this year at an Opening Your Own Bookstore conference on Amelia Islannd in north Florida. He's one of the friendliest, smartest guys I've ever met and we had a great time hanging out drinking beers talking about our ideas on stores and books, the whole nine. Larry thought up a great idea a couple of years back: what if he chartered a bus, sold tickets, and went to New York City to visit as many independent bookstores as possible in a day? Well, he tried it, sold out the bus far more quickly (far more quicklier?) than he expected, and the trip was a huge success. That first trip focused on bookstores in Greenwich Village--Three Lives & Co., Partners & Crime, Biography Bookshop, and so on.

Since then Larry has been working his ass off to promote Bookstore Tourism all across the country on his Friends of Indie Bookstores blog, writing guidebooks for how to run your own bookstore tours, doing interviews (here's a good one with LitMinds), shaking hands and kissing babies with all the powers that be in the independent bookstore world. They loved the idea. OF COURSE they did, they were getting customers bussed to their front doors, people pre-disposed to buy books who were giddy with the thought of not shopping in a Barnes & Noble or Borders. (Sidebar: I happen to like Borders, some of them anyway, and have found myself plenty of times shopping at the fantastic B&N at Union Square simply because I couldn't find a book somewhere else and because I hate ordering books online, but let's be honest: shopping in an independent bookstore is about a gazillion times better than any megachain experience, hands down, no arguing, and it always will be.)

One busload of shoppers coming into your store on a Saturday or Sunday if you're a small indie store can make not just your day but your week and possibly even your month. It's a landfall on wheels.

THEN, Larry got an even better idea. He decided to tour the country to visit independent bookstores. An On the Road of independent bookstore shopping. He was going to try to hit 200 stores in 50 days (or 60, can't remember and it doesn't matter, it was definitely 200 stores) and blog the entire experience, get stories into newspapers, on local tv, all that. He even had two reporters lined up who were going to travel in the van with him for the first four or five days to kick the whole things off. I was going to fly out west somewhere and join him for a week or two just because it sounded like a kick-ass idea and a hell of a lot of fun and I like road trips.

He had the support of the ABA and the various regional booksellers associations. The ABA--or American Booksellers Association--is the trade group that fights for and represents as a whole independent bookstores to the publishers. And they are a good thing. There are more member stores in the ABA across the country than there are Barnes & Nobles and Borders stores put together, though you'd never know it from the media because of the way the publishing industry operates right now. The two big chains, along with Amazon and increasingly the discount clubs likes Sams and Costco, hold all the power in publishing. In fact, there's one buyer at Barnes & Noble who--if she doesn't like a book or decides B&N isn't going to carry or make a big buy--can single-handedly get a book canceled or otherwise change a publishers whole plan for a book. (This is not an exaggeration, it's common knowledge at the NY publishing houses, especially in the editorial and sales departments, and I could give you her name but I don't want Len Riggio's henchmen coming after me.) The ABA does not have that kind of power because they have no influence on the buying patterns of their member stores. They can't guarantee, as B&N can, a buy of 20,000 copies of a books. So while the ABA does incredibly wonderful things, (for example, they brought the class-action lawsuit against the publishers a few years back when the publishers were giving unfair and illegal discounts to the chain stores which they weren't giving to the indies,) and while they're run by wonderful people, they don't necessarily have much foresight and even when they do, they can't put any money into their initiatives because membership dues are low.

Why am I going on about this? Explaining all this? Because Larry has finally given up on getting any help whatsoever from the insanely short-sighted ABA or the regional associations like North Atlantic Independent Booksellers Associations, SouthEastern Booksellers Associations, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, and so on. There are 7 or 8 of them and they're even less organized and less forward-thinking than their parent organization. Why has Larry given up? Because earlier this week someone finally told him that no help was coming. They LOVE the Book Tour, they LOVE Bookstore Tourism, but they can't put any $$$ behind it because they have all these other concerns. (I guess that's why, I'm speculating at this point.)

So guess what? Not only is the Tour off--and I'm pissed because I was really looking forward to driving around in a van with another big hairy man visiting bookstore after bookstore day after day; I mean, seriously, is that a frickin' dream trip or what?--bur Larry has gotten so frustrated with these people, justifiably, that he's quit the Bookstore Tourism effort entirely! And who can blame him!?! When the very people who would benefit most, when the amount of publicity that could be generated for something like this outweighs anything any single one of these indie stores could do for themselves, when this Tour makes so much frickin' sense and would generate so much frickin' business, well that's definitely when they should pull their support and not lift a goddamn finger to help... to help themselves...

Great thinking, guys! Hey, let's just let all the independent bookstores shutter their doors and we'll all buy whatever the fuck that one B&N buyer thinks we should read. Sounds good to me.

(Wondering why there's no links to any of Larry's websites? That's because he's already shut them down.)

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Jen Ferguson's Art in Chaos

Jen Ferguson is a really talented artist and she happens to be one of our friends. Her work falls into three categories: whimsical and fun watercolor and ink sketches; whimsical but slightly more serious oils; big, sprawling and "serious" architectural painting. All of it is fantastic. Here's a link to an example from her site: Jen Ferguson's brilliant art. It's called Roasting Marshmallows in Hell. (I would have it show up here but I haven't quite figured that out about Blogger yet.)

Bad Elves

Anyway, her web site is called Art in Chaos and it's a lot of fun to look around. Jen is incredibly friendly and if you're interested in any of her pieces I'm sure she'd be more than happy to help.

Hustle

(Both of these are pieces Margaret and I own and my lame attempts to photograph them should in no way influence your opinion of her stuff.)

If you want to see a piece in person, I'm told there's one hanging near the bar at Bar Great Harry.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Fish Prints

Yesterday Margaret and I got to meet Annie Sessler of East End Fish Prints. Annie does this amazing thing with fish, real fish, and it ends up looking like this:


According to her website, fish printing--or gyotaku--was developed by Japanese fishermen as a way to record their catch in the days before photography. Annie's husband knew about it and showed her how it works and now she makes her living doing this while her husband goes out and catches the fish, which they then eat for dinner. It's a very economical and efficient system.

We first learned about them on CBS' Sunday Morning news show which is one of our favorites. The story aired a couple weekends ago and I looked her up, found out she would be in town yesterday at the Holiday Crafts Park Avenue show. When we got to her booth, she was in the back breastfeeding her seven-week-old boy. Though this flustered me, she wasn't bothered by my presence and wanted to carry on an extensive conversation en media feed. I acted cool and we talked fish and I told her about the time a five-foot barracuda tried to jump into my boat while fishing in the Bahamas. Anyway, after deciding we were spending way too much money, we ended up getting a print of a mahi-mahi and the green grouper above (both of which I've caught numerous times in Florida and both of which are delicious to eat). One of them is a gift for my father and the other is a gift probably for us.