{"id":75,"date":"2008-08-04T13:44:01","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T18:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=75"},"modified":"2025-07-31T10:19:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T15:19:59","slug":"what-have-you-done-for-me-lately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/what-have-you-done-for-me-lately\/","title":{"rendered":"What have you done for me lately?"},"content":{"rendered":"

PUBLISHERS<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to see new and different in romance. It took Ellora\u2019s Cave<\/a> and Loose Id<\/a> and Samhain<\/a> to break you out into genres you wouldn\u2019t touch before (and no, they\u2019re not all erotica).<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to see you lead the way into e-publishing but again, you didn\u2019t get in gear until the above-mentioned trailblazers kicked your butts. Apparently not even Baen<\/a> was able to get to you like those three did.<\/p>\n

INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The consignment system of inventory management is, I believe, in its late afternoon and Barnes & Noble CEO Riggio wants to push it into that good night<\/a>. Agent Richard Curtis (and foresightful creator of e-Reads<\/a>) points out that it\u2019s not going away–on the dead-tree book brick\u2019n\u2019mortar playground, but, he says,<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You\u2019re welcome to try to reform the old business, Mr. Riggio, but that\u2019s no longer where the game is being played. While bookstore chains have battened on the consignment system, a new, virtually returns-free distribution model has arisen based on Internet fulfillment, prepaid orders printed on demand, and on e-books, a format that Mr. Riggio\u2019s company abandoned years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So I think Mr. Curtis saying, \u201cYa snooze, ya lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, also? Quit being snobs about what you stock. The blog post Helping Those Who Help Themselves<\/a> in which Wendy Crutcher states,<\/p>\n

The vast majority of independents have done an excellent<\/em> job of convincing me over the years that my reading choices are 1) poor 2) not valid and 3) that I must be an uneducated moron with latent Fabio fantasies. So why exactly do I want to encourage their narrow-minded way of thinking by giving them my hard earned money? I\u2019d much rather give my money to an evil corporation that has a well-stocked romance section.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and followup comments were depressing observations (albeit by definition anecdotal) about what independent booksellers stock and what they don\u2019t. If people don\u2019t converge on your stores with vibrating credit cards in their hands, it\u2019s probably because you don\u2019t care about what they\u2019d like to buy \u2026 because you can send them back to the publisher on consignment and not worry about stocking to your customers\u2019 preferences. Nice. Which part of \u201cRomance fiction is the biggest fiction category<\/strong> in 2007<\/a>\u201d do you not get? Apparently, Title Wave<\/a> in Alaska(!) is the Cool Girl you should all be imitating.<\/p>\n

One good place to start your renaissance might be the Espresso Books<\/a>. If America still had the malls of my youth, there could be a POD book kiosk right next to the food court.<\/p>\n

Commenter JulieW8 said in a previous post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The publishing industry sounds a lot like the music industry and I think it is and will continue to experience a lot of the same kinds of pains due to emerging technologies, wider acceptance of digital media, distribution through organic and nontraditional means, coupled with the demand by readers to read more than what is hand-picked for them and the innovation by authors seeking to deliver their stories to the masses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Independent booksellers, let me present your future<\/a> (from printisdead.com):<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PUBLISHERS I\u2019d like to see new and different in romance. It took Ellora\u2019s Cave and Loose Id and Samhain to break you out into genres you wouldn\u2019t touch before (and no, they\u2019re not all erotica). I\u2019d like to see you lead the way into e-publishing but again, you didn\u2019t get in gear until the above-mentioned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[544,546,537],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookselling","category-marketing","category-print-on-demand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16821,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/16821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}