Okay, so during this venture into self-publishing, I have had two questions come up. First one is fairly simple to mock. More than once I have gotten the question from other authors and/or book people:
How can you ruin the indy store and then claim to be indy?
First of all, I am not that powerful. If I could destroy something don’t think I would do something that wouldn’t put thousands of people out of a job? I mean, I am a bitch, but not much of one. I would spread world peace, feed the hungry, get John Boehner an intervention for his tanning addiction. But, alas, I do not have the power.
Here is my thing. Ebooks, and the authors of said ebooks, are not killing bookstores. Bookstores killed bookstores. I can rehash everything that has been said about chain bookstores for the last few months, but their problem was easy. The made it a retail enterprise, stashing extra crap all over the place and replacing booksellers with barely trained cashiers. Also, they had practices that were barely legal and in some cases, step over the line. (looking at you BORDERS)
Indy stores, well, I am a lover of the indy store. I loved old stores that sell new and used, or I used to. I am a strick ereader now. I just cannot pick up a physical book. Just my preference. I do not begrudge anyone their love of paper. I think everyone should just be happy with their medium and go with it. But indy stores like to throw the name INDY around, but then they haven’t been a friend to indy authors for awhile. See, I have been around 8 years. I was in one of the very first books Loose Id put out in print in 2005. I could not get any indy store to order me. Not ONE. Because I was not with a big publisher. Even the local stores. Then they started accepting them, because they were in distribution. For those not in the industry, distribution mean we pay someone to handle distributing the books. That’s it. See, I think that is stupid, but that is the way it was for a long time. So these “indy” stores started to require you had distribution. How do I know? Because I go to cons and I have to bring my books in this year to Authors After Dark. A lot of cons use indy stores in the area to supply the books. NONE Of them will order your books, and some make it damned hard to hand carry in. I have no problem with that because you know what I can do? I can sell my books at cost because
share on:
