The customer seemed almost too eager to buy things. She had only been vaguely aware of eReaders before, but when I gave her a very brief demo of ours, she bought it. Offered the company’s Rewards Plus cards, she bought it. I mentioned several books that she might like, and she bought all of them, [...]
Tagged linkedinWell, we survived. For now. The company published the official list of store closings, and we’re not on it — in the current wave, at least.
There may be a significant “Lesson Learned” moment for business, legal, tech, and journalism folks in how this played out.
After many days of working out the details, the company filed [...]
The one question I get asked more often than any other (yes, more often than “Where are the restrooms?” and “Why is there a giraffe on top of that bookcase?”) is “When are you closing?”
For a long time, my default answer has been “At 10 PM, but we’ll open again tomorrow morning at 10.”
Now, however, [...]
Things were busier in the store on Sunday than I expected them to be. Perhaps it was the warm weather. Some patches of snow had melted a little, and I thought about not wearing my gloves in the morning (though I did end up putting them on).
As I walked through the children’s department at one [...]
The customer placed seven mysteries on the counter. Two were large print editions. The rest were mass market paperbacks, three in the newer taller model (is there a term for those?) and four in the standard size. “Gotta have my mysteries,” he said. “I love when I get the large print, but I’ll read them [...]
Tagged linkedinPearl lumbered into the store late in the day, head down as usual, clutching a cardboard box that appeared to be full of wires. Had this been another city, and had i not known Pearl, I would have worried that it might be a bomb. Here, with her, I didn’t.
I said “Hi” as she passed [...]
“Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects onto your country from the air. And some of these objects will be useful. And some of them will just be odd. Proving that these oddities were produced by a people free enough to think of making them in the first place. [...]
Tagged linkedinWith the release of The Book of Voices by Apocryphile Press, and all the attendant activity, I’ve been blogging over at http://thebookofvoices.com/blog. I’ll blog here in the future, especially as the probable publication of 19th Nervous Breakdown by a not-yet-named small press nears, but for now, I’m focusing my attentions over there. The site has [...]
I just realized that, while I had posted about this to my site’s main page and to thebookofvoices.com, I hadn’t blogged it. So here it goes (in somewhat more detail than the brief notices at the other places).
The Book of Voices will be published this coming November by Apocryphile Press. I was very pleased with [...]
Well, the Book of Voices is done, or at least at a point where I can feel comfortable submitting it around. I did write the eight interludes, which pull things together more effectively, and make points in the 49 stories reinforce one another.
This also entailed a bit of rewriting of the stories themselves, which also [...]
There's more at josephzitt.com.
From the author of 19th Nervous Breakdown: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce
"Customers have told me that I approach bookselling like a ministry. Sometimes I find people exactly what they want; I hope that sometimes I find what they need. And helping the store make a profit is probably a good thing, too. But what I look for is the human contact, the communication, the chance to help people leave the store happier than they came in."