Another one bites the dust: the wonderful Inkwell Bookstore, an indie in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the Cape Cod town I have been visiting in summer for 35 years or so, has closed. I will miss it. If you have a favorite independent bookstore, support it!
Categories: Books
Tags: bookselling · bookstores · Falmouth
My old friend John Kenney is a brilliant ad writer. He has created national campaigns that you would instantly recognize and Super Bowl spots, and traveled widely to research and shoot them. After twenty-plus years in advertising, he has a pretty good sense of what works and what doesn’t. Last weekend John sent me an [...]
Categories: Publishing
Tags: advertising · bookselling
Rummaging through my computer recently, I came across this ad (PDF) for The Strangler. It ran in the New York Times and the Boston Globe on February 6, 2007, and in the weekly Boston Phoenix at the same time. There was a radio spot airing that week, as well, which was very fun to hear [...]
Categories: My Books · Publishing
Tags: advertising · bookselling · The Strangler
Cory Doctorow and his publisher, Tor, have a neat promo for Doctorow’s forthcoming novel Makers. The novel will be published in November but is currently being serialized online in 81 installments. For each installment, Tor has commissioned a small square illustration. These illustrations fit together like tiles in any arrangement you like. Tor has assembled [...]
Categories: Books · Publishing
Tags: bookselling · Cory Doctorow
I began this blog for a purely mercenary reason: to sell more books. But I discovered to my surprise that I enjoy doing it. Good thing, too, because after three months at it I seriously doubt this blog will ever be an effective sales tool. Of course, the logic behind author blogs is unimpeachable. The [...]
Categories: Blogging · Writing
Tags: bookselling · featured posts · writing life · writing tips
Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge closed on Saturday. Kate Mattes held an event with an army of volunteers who helped pack the place up. I stopped by and chatted briefly with Kate, who told me she plans to spend the next year or so getting her enormous inventory properly cataloged online, as well as digitizing [...]
Categories: Books · Boston
Tags: bookselling · Cambridge
In a long and interesting interview with Poets & Writers magazine, Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has an interesting prediction for the future of book-selling: publishers, not online retailers like Amazon, will profit from selling directly to readers. It makes a lot of sense, especially as book-selling transitions more and [...]
Categories: Publishing
Tags: bookselling · ebooks · Jonathan Galassi
Obviously the internet has blown a hole in the business model of the publishing industry, and we have all heard dire predictions that digital will obliterate printed books altogether. The doomsday scenario usually maps to the demise of the music CD: Kindle equals iPod, Amazon equals iTunes, eBook equals MP3. The details may vary, but [...]
Categories: Publishing · Writers
Tags: bookselling · featured posts · Malcolm Gladwell · presenting
I once heard John Updike say in an interview that he could not imagine a day going by in which he did not produce “text.” The word jumps out of the sentence — “text,” so like the “content” the web feeds on. Updike was frighteningly prolific. Like the great Victorians, he seemed to pour out [...]
Categories: Blogging · Productivity · Writing
Tags: bookselling · featured posts
