Not particularly bookseller-related, but here anyway:
I’ve posted the tracks and art from one of my old CDs, Jerusaklyn, online at the Internet Archive. It’s a collection of instrumental tracks that I recorded in Brooklyn between 1986 and 1989 and released in 1999. So this is the grand tenth anniversary reissue. Or maybe the twentieth anniversary. [...]
Tuesday’s Ann Arbor Chronicle has an open letter from the owner of the Shaman Drum Bookshop. His store has apparently suffered even more than most. The biggest problem? Textbooks:
The crisis at Shaman Drum Bookshop is due to our loss of textbook sales. This fall the university introduced a program which allows professors to list their [...]
What is the one thing that booksellers would most like to know about our customers? It’s why they leave without buying things, either specific things or anything at all.
(OK, we would also like to know the phone numbers for some of them, or where the frak they got their attitudes, or occasionally more fanciful and [...]
Here’s a good and relevant one from Saturday’s New York Times. Writer Caitlin Kelly tells of her second job, working one day a week in a clothing store:
Sometimes I feel like Alice slipping through the looking glass, toggling between worlds. In one world, I interview C.E.O.’s, write articles for national publications and promote my nonfiction [...]
Some things spotted while zooming from store to store on a day off (of which I have far too many):
At Target, a wall of sheets, pillows, quilts, and the like were on clearance. One sign proclaimed, hanging askew from a shelf, proclaimed that everything was at least 90% off. Another, shoved onto the shelf next [...]
Here are a few things that I’ve run across in a day’s catching up on RSS feeds:
From the Book Marketing Floozy blog: guest blogger Seymour Garte posts on Selling Your Book to Readers — Part II
As a follow-up to that post, another guest blogger, Michelle Maycock, posts A Bookseller’s Perspective on How to Promote [...]
Romance writer Dee Tenorio has posted to the Romancing the Blog group blog about some of the problems facing writers of some of the more traditional, less explicit books in her genre.
It’s not an area to which i’ve paid a lot of attention, except when shelving them or looking up books for customers. But it’s [...]
While we keep hearing good news of bookstores opening here and there, a dismaying number of stores are shutting down and laying off staff. Most of us probably know booksellers who have lost their jobs recently.
Penelope Trunk, on her consistently excellent Brazen Careerist blog, has a compassionate, clear-minded post on how to talk to a [...]
The customers came barrelling up to me with the dull glare that suggested that they expected me to cause a problem. “Where your biographies at?” one asked.
People expect a simple answer to this. There isn’t one. Our corporate powers made the unusual but defensible decision, back in ancient days (well, before I joined) not to [...]
Now we know where all the customers had gotten to over the holiday season: they were all frozen in snowdrifts, unable to escape. But this weekend the temperature, to our amazement, actually stayed above freezing for two nights running. And the customers awoke, spotted the strange green patches on their lawns, and came lumbering out of their icy crypts, arms outstretched, moaning “Boooks… Booooooks…”
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