Category Archives: Bookselling

Not without honor in my own city

Today provided another of those little rewards that make being an author almost worth the trouble. I spoke on the phone to a lady from Ingebretsen‘s Scandinavian store.

If, for some obscure reason, you don’t live in the Minneapolis area, you probably don’t know about Ingebretsen’s. It’s a community institution. It started (if I have the story right) as a neighborhood grocery on Lake Street, catering to Scandinavian immigrants, back in 1921. The neighborhood remains an immigrant center even today, except that the immigrants now tend to be Mexican and Sudanese. But through all the decades, Ingebretsen’s has remained on the old corner, faithful to the neighborhood, dispensing lutefisk, flatbread, goat cheese and herring to a small but grateful public.

Somewhere along the line they expanded to include a Scandinavian gift shop, and they’re the best and most successful brick-and-mortar enterprise of that sort in the metropolitan area. I make a pilgrimage every Christmas season, and it’s usually a long walk from wherever I can find a place to park. Before stepping inside to join the throng, I have to make a conscious effort to abandon all concept of personal space.

I wrote to Ingebretsen’s, along with a couple other midwest dealers in the same sort of line, after West Oversea came out. I enclosed copies of reviews and a free copy of the book. The lady at Ingebretsen’s told me she’d read the book and enjoyed it, and had added it to their winter catalog (which I knew about) and to their web site (which I didn’t).

Don’t mess with me. Among Minneapolis Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns, I now have street cred.

Does It Matter What It Costs?

Sarah Palin has a memoir coming out next month, Going Rogue: An American Life. You can pre-order it from Amazon for $9–the same at Walmart. Buy it at Books-a-Million for $15.65.

I very well may buy this book, but should I go for the $9 or the $15 price? Why are deep discounters able to discount some books so deeply? Should I care about paying too little for a book, or should I let the publishers figure out their stupid business models by themselves?

In related news, political pundit Bernie Quigley talks about the messages within the titles of Palin’s and Mitt Romney’s upcoming books. Romney’s book, to be released in March, is called No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. Quigley says that title focuses on the past.

“There is hubris and a kind of conspicuous arrogance to it, which he asks us to wear with our chests out. Romney’s title suggests a full endorsement of the Bush II paradigm without a moment’s introspection,” he says. “Going Rogue, however, suggests a new direction, a new adventure, something just ahead there in the great unknown. It is a very good title and speaks in essence to the frontier spirit of those who venture beyond the Hudson River or the Beltway.”

“The West Oversea Experiment”

I missed this while I was off in Minot, and it was only brought to my attention a couple days ago. Our friend Dr. Gene Edward Veith posted this entry on his blog on Sept. 28, asking his readers to go buy West Oversea and drive my Amazon ranking up (in spite of what Phil posted below, I have to admit I do check my status occasionally).

Much thanks to Dr. Veith for this support.

Vote for Your Favorite Book

The National Book Award wants you vote for the best of six award winning choices.

  1. The Stories of John Cheever
  2. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
  3. The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
  4. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
  5. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
  6. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

I won’t tell you who was winning when I voted, but I will say it was the one I picked.

With Greater Demand Comes a Higher Price

D.J. Taylor asks why Dan Brown’s new book is so heavily discounted when thousands of people are eager to read it. Why not capitalize on all of the hype by asking readers to pay full or slightly-off-full price? The reason is that the hype and discount will get buyers into the store and maybe, just maybe, they will buy something else. How does that figure, Taylor asks. Won’t it drive the price for other books down?

I agree, and as thrifty buyer (more or less) I balk a paying $25 or more for a book. I remember seeing Robinson’s Gilead in the store after much praise, and I wanted to buy it. I was even a little excited. But I think was priced at $28.00, and it was much smaller than I had imagined. I passed it up.

But Brown’s fans are even less hinged on reality than I am, so make them pay $20 or more for the most anticipated novel of the year. Tell them it sells for $35, but they can get it for $22.50 if they give the secret word. They love stuff like that, and some will even pay $35.

2009 Cybil Nominations

This year’s CYBIL Awards, the Children’s and Young Adult Blogger’s Literary Awards, will start taking nominations for books published primarily this year on October 1. Learn more about the award and how to nominate your favorite book on their website.

Book-ordering day, 2009, fall edition

Today was one of the great, dreaded days of my year as a bookstore manager. I finally had in hand the book orders from all (and by all I mean most) of the instructors, for texts they want their students to have this fall. So I sat down at the phone and started placing orders, relying on my efficient and elegant Microsoft Xcel-based system.

And it went pretty well. I finished all the orders, I think (got to double-check tomorrow), except for the one publisher who put me in a call queue this morning until I gave up, and then put me in a call queue this afternoon when I tried again. I left my number on voice mail.

The most harrowing order is always Zondervan (last in sequence because it starts with “Z”). They have a fully automated ordering system which depends entirely on pressing the buttons on the phone dial. I ought to love it, as it involves no actual human interaction, but I think I fear numbers even more than I fear people.

It’s an odd phenomenon I’ve noticed in the last few years, that I never seem to experience particular satisfaction anymore when I finish a major task. Even when I complete a whole novel, I’m left with the feeling Flashman had at the end of Flashman at the Charge, when he’d finally made his way over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, having fought, lied and skulked his way through fire, blizzard and carnage, to reach a British post at last, and all the official had to say to him was, “Very good. This is a customs post, among other things. Have you anything to declare?”

The reason for the dysphoria, of course, is that I don’t try enough new things.

Oh well. I can live without particular satisfaction.

“Banned Books Week,” episode 743

I hesitate to call Dennis Ingolfsland, of The Recliner Commentaries, a “fellow librarian,” since he’s the real thing and I’m an on-the-job-trained poseur. But I know enough to recommend this piece about the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week.”

The fact is that there are no banned books in America. Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall seeing any articles in the Library Journal or American Libraries protesting that other religion and those other countries which really do ban books.

(Picture credit: Jupiter Images)