Bookselling

Amazon's Price War

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The President is coming to my home town on Tuesday to speak at a new Amazon fulfillment plant about the middle class. I expect his speech will be akin to what he has been saying this week, what he calls “a better bargain for the middle class.” He told a Knox College audience:

I’ll lay out my ideas for how we build on the cornerstones of what it means to be middle class in America, and what it takes to work your way into the middle class in America: Job security, with good wages and durable industries. A good education. A home to call your own. Affordable health care when you get sick. A secure retirement even if you’re not rich. Reducing poverty. Reducing inequality. Growing opportunity. That’s what we need.

John Mutter suggests Amazon has a close relationship with the Obama administration, which may be the reason the president is speaking there, may be the reason they are upping the ante in their price war with bookstores. Yesterday, Amazon discounted several bestsellers even more than usual, 50-60% off retail, which industry insiders consider a declaration of war against offline booksellers. This may be the result of what Mutter says was a favorable resolution to the e-book case before courts this month. Amazon won out, when Apple’s efforts to change the model for releasing and pricing e-books failed.

Some people continued to worry that Amazon will price booksellers out of business, and so offline browsing and friendly recommendations will be go the way of the buggy cart. But I doubt that.

llibreria - bookstore - Amsterdam - HDR

Bookselling

Actually, writing this post is the most interesting thing I did today

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The last day of my stay-cation. My big project was running around to hardware stores, looking for replacement furnace filters. Did not find what I needed. Bought one online instead, which probably worked out cheaper. But let the record show, I endeavored to support businesses in my community.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that Baen has put my novel Wolf Time on sale again in e-book form. They promise to have it on Amazon soon. I’ll try to keep you posted.

Love that cover. It has nothing to do with the story, but it’s a great cover.

Uncategorized

Screwtape's Letters in One Line Each

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In college, my world literature professor introduced us to Shrink-lits, humorous little poems that sorta-kinda summarized important works like The Iliad, Hamlet, and Crime and Punishment. Now, Andy Naselli has summarized each of Screwtape’s letters in one sentence to the benefit of readers around the world. Now, if he could sum up each chapter of Anna Karenina, we would all be blessed.

Here are three from the list:

  • Make him live in the future rather than the present.
  • Encourage church-hopping.
  • Encourage gluttony through delicacy rather than excess.
Bookselling

I am the one percent

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I learned by way of our own Phil Wade that Bethany House has made J. Mark Bertrand’s novel Back on Murder (which we both reviewed very favorably, here and here) free in Kindle form for a limited time. We’re Bertrand boosters around here, and this book has the coveted Brandywine Books imprimatur.
Another vacation day for me. Today I took on a project I’d been dreading on general principles, replacing one of the leather handles on my Viking chest. You can see this chest in the right background in this old photo, from a Boy Scout event back in 2010:

When I built the chest, I made the decision to use leather handles, for two reasons. One, it’s cheaper than getting period iron ones, and I cheated on all the hardware on that project. But also I’ve seen an old immigrant trunk from one of our ancestors that came over from Norway with leather handles, and I always thought that was kind of cool. Easy on the hands. (Except not really. The flexible handles tend to squeeze your fingers when the chest is heavy, which this one is).
The very handle you behold in that photograph broke on me a little while back, and I dreaded the process of replacing it. But I took it on today, replacing it with a sturdy piece of belt blank I acquired a while back for tooling and never got around to using. It came out well.
Also I mowed the lawn, which was as exciting as you imagine.
But the big deal was that I got my official score for the Miller Analogies Test in the mail. After having to take it twice and beating myself up at getting a score of 475 out of a possible 600, I learn now that 475 puts me in the 99th percentile, which even I can’t find a way to disparage. Why anyone would design a test with a 200 to 600 scoring range, where the top 100 points are almost never used, I can’t imagine. No doubt they have their reasons, just as I insist on putting leather handles on chests.

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Noah, the Enviromentist

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Darren Aronofsky is making a movie about the patriarch Noah, and some film people are talking about the script they have read, which may or may not reflect the final story. Peter Chattaway offers some thoughts and a bit of criticism of what Brian Godawa said about it. There’s no blood on the ice here, just a little back-and-forth.

The biggest issue plebeians like us will notice is the heavy environmentalism. In this story, original sin led to violence which led to the greatest of all evils: environmental waste. From what Chattaway can tell, the story may be thought-provoking, if we can hold our noses through the eco-propaganda. I wonder if the world will be a rainforest paradise after the flood washes through. (via Jeffrey Overstreet)

Writing

Summer days report

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Apologies for not posting yesterday. The day went in a direction I hadn’t planned.

This week I’ve been taking what’s now known as a stay-cation, loafing some and pottering with things I’ve been putting off handling. Yesterday I’d planned on going to dinner with a friend I see periodically, and somehow that restaurant date turned into a reunion with other old friends, and then an evening at the home of one of those old friend’s relatives, up in the trackless wastes of the far northern suburbs. We spent the hours talking about old times, some of which I’d shared in, and it was pretty late by the time I got home.

Today I went to the post office to get my picture taken so I could send in my passport renewal form. I wanted to do it at mid-morning so I wouldn’t be slowing down a long line of customers. The clerk who helped me was the nice-looking lady there I’ve long admired, which may explain a certain wistful look in my eyes in the picture (I think I’m the only person in the world who generally likes his passport photos).

Then I found out the renewal fee. When in the name of all that’s wholly unreasonable did the price of renewing a passport get to be $110.00? Plus the cost of the photo and certification of the letter? I’d write to my congressman if he weren’t Keith Ellison.

Then in the afternoon I gave blood. This was at my favorite hemorrhaging venue, the VFW in Golden Valley, where they serve you sloppy joes as a reward for your suffering. I got the pretty technician, which should have put me on alert from the start. Pretty women almost always end up hurting me, and this one didn’t break form. She finally had to get another tech to find the right place to puncture my vein. In fairness to them, I’ve given a lot of blood and there’s a great deal of scar tissue inside my left elbow. Nobody’s ever been able to get anything out of the right arm.

And then home. Some reading, and then I worked a little more on revising the last completed novel I’ve got in storage, which may or may not come out as an e-book after a while, depending on how diligent I am. I’m worried about one character – someone I don’t like, and who was intended as a caricature of a kind of person we all know. I don’t like plain caricature in other people’s novels, and I need to get past it in my own. I’ve got to find something admirable or sympathetic in this person. I’m working on it.

Authors

Veritas Magis Amicitiae

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Chekov writes to his brother, a drunk in 1886: “Smash your vodka bottle, lie down on the couch and pick up a book. You might even give Turgenev a try. You’ve never read him. You must swallow your pride. You’re no longer a child. You’ll be thirty soon. It’s high time!”

Bookselling, Publishing

Platform, People Who Care, Sell Books

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Joel Friedlander draws lessons from the J.K. Rowling as Robert Galbraith episode. Galbraith’s book was highly praised, but sold 1,500 copies before the Rowling news. Friedlander explains: “My opinion is that it was the complete absence of any platform for Robert Galbraith, the lack of any fans, anyone who cared about him, the lack of anyone willing to host him on a blog tour or help him set up readings at bookstores, or a tribe that would greet his long-awaited first book with enthusiasm that held back sales of what’s obviously a well-written book.”

Fiction, Reviews

Season of the Witch, by Arni Thorarinsson

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I am brought out of my musings by Jóa, who produces a plastic bag from the roadside café in Varmahlíd. She takes from it two small chocolate eggs and offers me one.
“It’s a bit early, isn’t it? A week before Easter. Aren’t they for Easter Sunday?”
“That’s so last century,” answers Jóa like a continuation of my thoughts at the wheel. “Now everything is allowed, always.”

Back in 2008, I posted a reading report on an Icelandic play called “The Wish,” by Johann Sigurjonsson. It’s a drama about a young man who throws his life away in pursuit of power and self-gratification in magic. Oddly enough, that play (under an alternate title, “Loftur the Sorcerer”) is at the heart of a mystery novel I just read, Season of the Witch by Arni Thorarinsson. I’ve been dipping into Scandinavian mystery novels for a while now, and as often as not haven’t been much impressed. Season of the Witch, I’m glad to report, pleased me quite a lot.
Einar (I’m not sure if his last name is ever given. Can’t find it) is a recovering alcoholic and a reporter for an Icelandic newspaper. He used to cover crime in Reykjavik, but a recent management shake-up sent him up to the small northern town of Akureyri. Here, along with a couple of colleagues sent into exile with him, he’s reduced to reporting on petty crime and local politics, and asking “Questions of the Day” to people on the street. He hates it. He also hates his local editor. He’s attracted to the female photographer who is the third exile, but she turns out to be unavailable. Also he’s separated from his daughter, the only person he really cares about.
But then things start happening. The wife of a local industrialist is killed in a kayaking accident, and her old mother insists she was murdered. Then a popular high school student who was to star in a school production of “Loftur the Sorcerer” is found murdered in a junk yard. There are rumors of drug dealing, and tensions rise between native Icelanders and immigrants (this book was written back before the Icelandic financial crash).
Einar isn’t the kind to settle for easy answers. He keeps poking at the evidence after everyone else is satisfied.
But he does more than that. Einar also acts as a dispenser of grace. He performs kindnesses for people he doesn’t like, and covers up evidence in cases where the law would only add to the tragedies.
Not at all a Christian novel, Season of the Witch is a Christ-haunted novel. Einar walks in a culture full of the old landmarks of the Faith, and the absence of faith is always conspicuous in his mind. Without offering specific answers – aside from allusions to Jesus and to the Christian play “Loftur the Sorcerer” – this story asks all the right questions.
Cautions for rough language, adult situations, and earthy humor. I liked the book, and I especially liked the hero Einar. Recommended.
Kindle here. Paperback here.