Bookavore

Today, YA book group spoke with Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother. The conversation actually ended up being as much about politics as books, but if you’re read Little Brother, that probably won’t come as much of a surprise. Below, some selected quotes from the conversation (thanks to Cory for allowing me to re-print them; I have done minimal editing for the sake of comprehension and flow):

On reading and writing YA:
“My favorite author has always been Daniel Pinkwater, whose Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars may just be the perfect YA novel (though he also has a YA novel called Young Adult Novel that gives it a run for its money). However, I started writing YA after some of my writer pals got into it and showed me how much fun it could be — and how cool it was to have young readers, who engage with text in a way that adults rarely do, using it as both a guide to how the world works and something to argue with when it doesn’t match their views and experiences. The first one to help me see this was Kathe Koja, whom I got to know when she was writing “splatterpunk” graphic horror novels like THE CIPHER. She gave it up to write YA — actually let the horror books all go out of print, which I think is a real shame — and had nothing but good things to say about the experience (plus her fiction kicked 11 kinds of ass). Then my friends Justine Larbalastier and Scott Westerfeld (they’re married) started writing YA too, and they were clearly having a high old time at it — we stayed with them in Australia while I was passing through on a lecture tour on our way to Tokyo just as Justine was finishing up her second or third book, and we had all these great talks about what made YA fic work and how it was different from writing for adults.”

When we asked how writing YA is different than writing for adults, he linked to a recent essay he wrote for Locus Magazine (very good, definitely worth reading), and quoted from it:
“Writing for young people is really exciting. As one YA writer told me, “Adolescence is a series of brave, irreversible decisions.” One day, you’re someone who’s never told a lie of consequence; the next day you have, and you can never go back. One day, you’re someone who’s never done anything noble for a friend, the next day you have, and you can never go back. Is it any wonder that young people experience a camaraderie as intense as combat-buddies? Is it any wonder that the parts of our brain that govern risk-assessment don’t fully develop until adulthood? Who would take such brave chances, such existential risks, if she or he had a fully functional risk-assessment system? So young people live in a world characterized by intense drama, by choices wise and foolish and always brave. This is a book-plotter’s dream. Once you realize that your characters are living in this state of heightened consequence, every plot-point acquires moment and import that keeps the pages turning.

And also:
“Risk-taking behavior — including ill-advised social, sexual, and substance adventures — are characteristic of youth itself, so it’s natural that anything that co-occurs with youth, like SF or TV or video games, will carry the blame for them. However, the frightened and easily offended are doing a better job than they ever have of collapsing the horizons of young people, denying them the pleasures of gathering in public or online for fear of meteor-strike-rare lurid pedophile bogeymen, or on the pretense of fighting gangs or school shootings or some other tabloid horror. Literature may be the last escape available to young people today. It’s an honor to be writing for them.”

This is a long conversation, so I’ve posted the rest of it after the jump. Read on for his thoughts on Obama, American politics, and the three crucial things teens need to do if they still want to have rights when they become adults: Read more »

Sorry for my continued absences.  I’m still getting the hang of having a second job in my schedule (although barista is not a bad job to add to bookselling–I’ve been selling books while serving coffee!)  But I did definitely want to post about how my store has been promoting and using IndieBound.  Monday and Tuesday of this week we changed the windows to promote, changed one of our main display tables to echo the windows, and changed the BookSense Picks table to the Indie Next List table.  I’ve also started explaining all the ins and outs of the changes to each bookseller in the store individually, and so far the response has been GREAT!  I couldn’t have hoped for a more excitement and acceptance.

So, here’s a picture of the EAT SLEEP READ window to whet your appetite:

And here’s the link to a Flickr set of pictures from the last two days: IndieBound photos.  Enjoy, and feedback VERY welcome.  I’ll keep updating our progress with IndieBound as it occurs–my next step is to start playing with and using the Identity Manager.  What has your store done with IndieBound so far, or what are you working on?

Lots of goings-on here in the store.  We’re gearing up to finally have a sizable manga section and expand our graphic novel section (YAY!), so I’ve been working on those opening orders piecemeal all day.  Suggestions welcome; so far my order is based around the most popular series.  This expansion is being accompanied by a big floor and shelving move in the kids’ department that will probably take the better part of the month to get completely done.  And we have a ton of great events coming up, including a midnight release for Breaking Dawn, the latest Twilight book, and a big big big children’s author in October.

On top of all this, I thought it would be a great time to start up a weekly e-newsletter from the store, to go out every Tuesday morning.  Head Buyer named it The Bookmark, which seemed overly simple to me at first, but it has since grown on me.  We’ve been shocked by the great response!  I thought people were so sick of email that we’d have half the list unsubscribe, but we’ve only had a few people drop it.  And surprisingly, we even had people ask to be added to the list.  In a personal triumph, I even got an email from a customer saying how impressed she was!  So, definitely worth losing a piece of my Monday.  I’ll gladly add you to it as well–just email my work email (stephanie at moravianbookshop dot com).

O yeah, and I think I almost understand co-op, thanks to Melissa Lion and a boatload of prompt and brilliant sales reps.  Melissa kindly provided her notes from her days in co-op, which helped settle a lot of random questions I had.  Thanks Melissa!  Then I wrote an email to all my big reps Wednesday, and by Friday I had heard from almost everybody at least once–giving me more information and ideas, answering my questions, and being excited for me that we’re finally doing it.  <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 my sales reps!

Link of the day, sent from NAIBA: an intriguing article by Nicki Leone, a former/current bookseller, on her idea of the perfect online bookstore.  Very intriguing for those of us looking to the future decades of bookselling.

In an attempt to catch up the books I’ve been reading, here are some recent lunchtime reads, one sentence each:

57. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron (FSG, 2007).  YA fiction.  A sweet and captivating story that is as quiet as its protagonist but also just as powerful.

58. One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead (The Penguin Press, 2007).  Hahaha, this was my staff pick for my newsletter last week, so I can just cut and paste its description here: “Now that we’re in the thick of wedding season, Mead’s book makes great reading for anybody planning or attending a wedding.  She looks at how the wedding industry grew to its current size (over $160 billion a year!) and what weddings mean in modern-day America. Her writing is funny and well-researched, with fascinating information like the fact that there are occasionally rivalries between Las Vegas wedding chapels, and that the diamond engagement ring didn’t become traditional until after World War II. This might not make a good wedding present, but you could slip it to the mother of the bride or the maid of honor!”  Let me just add that if you are trying to convince somebody to elope, rather than have a wedding, this would be a good choice.

59. The Facebook Book: A Satirical Companion by Greg Atwan & Evan Lushing, illustrated by Aurora Andrews (Abrams Image, just out).  I mean, this is pretty funny if you use Facebook, which I do; not sure if it would make sense to the other 85% of the country.  But then, it’s not supposed to.  (Why, I remember when my college had to sign a petition to get ourselves on Facebook!  And then we had to walk to dinner barefoot in the snow uphill both ways!  And then we all felt silly when the whole world could get on Facebook without any trouble 18 months later!  I’m just never sure who will buy a book like this, because though it’s funny, I don’t think I’d read it again.  On the other hand, I wasn’t sure who would buy The Truth About Chuck Norris, and we’ve sold 75 copies of that since November.  So clearly I know nothing about the appeal of novelty books about the internet.)

I swear I’ll blog the rest of the great unread masses soon.  It’s just that when I get home from work, I prefer to read books, rather than write about them.  Which probably explains why I have chosen bookselling, rather than book reviewing, as a career.

I disappeared! I currently don’t have internet access at home, so I haven’t been able to update (I haven’t even been able to catch up on blogs!) But today, I brought my laptop into work so that I could update on my break, because I wanted post some links that have been sitting on my computer, and also to put up the pictures from Idlewild Books.

Okay, three quick links:

1. Another winner done on Jezebel’s Fine Lines feature: A Wrinkle in Time. Loved this, and was pleasantly surprised to see that many of the lines and scenes from the book that are burned into my brain were burned into many other brains.

2. A great article by Ma Jian on Chinese-American relations. Okay, maybe this is not immediately book-related, but I’m really looking forward to reading his new book, and it’s sort of about freedom of expression.

3. From Kash’s Book Corner, a brilliant article that starts: “Buying new books for the store, the crux of my job, can be an exercise in absurdity and futility. It’s an antiquated, inefficient system that hardly takes into account the invention of the personal computer and completely ignores the existence of the internet.” It only gets better from there. Great reading for fellow buyers and for folks who want to understand why the book business is the way it is (well, maybe not UNDERSTAND why, but at least understand the crazy).

Last Friday, I went on another Book Buddies expedition, this time to Idlewild Books. This issue of Shelf Awareness has an article about it. You might have seen an article about the store in PW, or on BoingBoing. After the cut, pictures of the store–they have great pictures on their website, as well, but I just had to take some of my own because I love the space. Also, a cat picture!

Read more »

Jennifer of Books, Inc., aka literaticat, answers the question What advice would you give to someone just starting their first job at an independent bookstore? Her answer is not only good advice for new booksellers, but a good reminder for veterans:

“I get a lot of dreamy-eyed people telling me how jealous they are that I get to work in a bookstore. ‘Imagine!’ they’ll say, ‘all that time to read!’

Um, not really, unless you are in a failing bookstore.

My advice is, don’t read at the counter, don’t stare off into space, be self-motivated and find things to do if you aren’t busy with customers (make cute displays, shelve, dust, etc) - greet customers, make an effort to figure out what the neighborhood is into. Learn at least a couple books in every category that you can handsell, even if it isn’t something you normally read - you always want to give the impression that you are intimate with every part of the store, even if that isn’t exactly true. Be confident, people like buying things from experts, you are an expert. Get used to being poor.”

I did get a picture from Debbi Michiko Florence but I am not posting it because I think I look horrendous. However, I will link to her awesome book, China: Over 40 Activities to Experience China–Past or Present. It is great!

Jay Asher, author of the fabulous Thirteen Reasons Why (which YA book group read in March, and then Jay spoke with us by IM, and then I promptly lost the entire conversation) posted about BEA on his blog, including the part where he and Jill and I had drinks. Which was cool, except for how a gin and tonic costs $10 dollars in LA.

Two more great BEA reports:

From Pub Rants, another sum-up of the graphic novel breakfast, hers much better than mine, as well as a great picture of the signing lines. She talks about an author describing them as “horse racing in reverse.” Personally, I’ve always seen them as cattle chutes.

And from Bookselling This Week, former bookseller and author of Swollen and Upstream Melissa Lion wrote the funniest BEA article I have read. I share her sentiment about the ABA bookseller lounge, which was definitely an oasis: “I arrived at BEA and felt very fancy because I got to bypass the lines for tickets and march right up to the ABA Booksellers Lounge, which will henceforth be known as the Chill Out Room because I secretly hope that by calling it that, next year it will be rechristened and indie booksellers will say things like, ‘Enough with these publicists and their new, hot books, I’m going to the Chill Out Room.’”

In an odd piece of news, I was told by a reader of this blog that co-op is actually his dream job. Booksellers are free to look as flabbergasted as I did when I heard this. I offered him a volunteer position at the store doing co-op–all the ARCs you can read!–but he already has a real job, unfortunately.

And in a final note to myself: never, NEVER schedule 2 off-site events for the week you get back from BEA. Don’t even schedule one.

There is not much to say about Sunday except that I was completely exhausted.  (Still was, until today, when I slept through my alarm and was three hours late to work.  Ooooooops.)  Though I did see Debbi Michiko Florence, who I recognized from LJ.  Debbi, if you see this, send me the picture you took of us so that I can include it in this post!  Shipped 65 pounds of books home, and then wandered around LA for a bit before heading to the airport on one of the weirdest cab rides of my life.  That was Sunday!  And now I am home, and trying to incorporate many of the things I learned into what I’m already doing.  This week is full of off-sites, so it’ll have to start next week, I think.  But the store is psyched about IndieBound, and can’t wait for the Literary Liberation box, so that is great.  Will update in the next day or so with a LOOOOOOONG list of books that are patiently waiting to be blogged.  For now, I am diving back into the new Octavian Nothing book!

For once, papers were where I thought they were, allowing me to bring you these quotes in a timely fashion!

Art Speigelman:

“Roy Lichtenstein did no more for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup.”

“I learned to read while trying to figure out if Batman was good or bad, which is something that Frank Miller is still trying to figure out.”

“Picasso: the first cartoonist who could pass for a painter.”

Again, on this panel, for the third time in three days, I heard the phrase “comics are a gateway drug.”

Mike Mignola, on the difference between cartooning and Hollywood: “In Hollywood, you can spend a long time working on something and have absolutely nothing to show for it.”

Jeph Loeb talked about his first job for DC, where he was asked to write Challengers of the Unknown, and where he first worked with Tim Sale.  Still accustomed to the medium of film, he kept making Tim re-draw pages over and over to get the angles the way he wanted them.  On the first issue they did together, Tim drew a total of 72 pages, meaning that there are 64 unused pages of art floating out in the world somewhere.  Jeph also said that he thinks that comic movies are not going away–they are a new, solid genre of film.

In the question and answer session, Lucy of Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo, NY brought up a point that had been bugging me–there had been a fair bit of name-dropping of box stores and Amazon, but NO mention of independents (in my margin, I had scribbled, “looks like comics folk didn’t get the IndieBound memo yet”).  Which, as she pointed out, was disappointing, since she was carrying Raw since before the box stores decided it was popular enough to include in their stores.  Then Art Speigelman said, to applause, “There would have been no Raw magazine if it weren’t for independent bookstores.”  Thanks, Art!   Jeff Smith jumped in to apologize as well.

The only other note I can read on this paper is “I have never seen so many iPhones in one place.”  Which is true, I never have.  BEA was positively chockablock with iPhones.

Well, as you can tell from the last post, Saturday was just a blur. But here are some pictures to document that blur. Read more »

I will be posting an update about Saturday when I get home and have a way to get pictures on here, and have access to the notes I took.  It was a crazy day!  Short story: went to the graphic novel breakfast, walked around the floor and went to many booths, had a lunch meeting in the middle of a short food service worker strike, more floor, signings, more floor, signings, more floor, more floor, super swank Workman party, super loud PGW party, BEDTIME.  Today was much more laidback, thankfully.  Look for an update tomorrow.  For now, I am vegging in front of the TV until I leave for the airport in an hour or so.  Hehehehe, that’s right, a book conference has driven me to television.