For Girl Pirates Everywhere

I want...*

*Yes, even if I don't have a clue what it is about.

UPDATE: You can read all about The Dust of 100 Dogs here, (and you should as it involves pirates, curses, reincarnation, and being a teenager!) and A.S. King here. You can also friend her on MySpace (HTC, this means you).

Author Stalking, Requests, and Questions

Chelsea Cain is proving to be a hard woman to track down. Considering that she’s written for several papers in the area I thought for certain that she would have some sort of contact information on the internet. I’m so naïve…naïve and a little perplexed that the HeartSick site isn’t fully up and running yet.

(C’mon guys, if you’re giving away 4,000 ARCs in early June, you might want to get this up and running.)

I recently discovered that one of my coworkers works for one of the same papers she does, and I’m trying to think of the most casual way to ask him if he knows her. “Oh, you work for the ____________? Really? Do you know Chelsea Cain?” Every time I approach him though, he’s on the phone (big surprise, us being in a call center and all), and we never seem to have lunches that coincide. Curses, foiled again!

Meanwhile a friend is designing a letterhead—as well as business cards—for me to use when writing Minotaur for an ARC of my own. Going through official channels with the publicity department seems very not stalker-worthy. I mean really, what kind of book stalker tries to be all professional and business-like, I ask you? Still, since they’re hyping this book like crazy, hopefully they’ll feel I’m worthy of a copy to help keep the buzz going.

It turns out that not all publicists and publicity departments feel this way. I was emailing back and forth with another blogger, and she told me that she’s actually had publicity departments respond to her request for one title or another with, “No, we don’t want you to review book A, but we’ll send you a copy of book B which you expressed no interest in.”

Um, excuse me. You don’t want Book A reviewed? Why not? Is it that bad? Is it above being reviewed? What?

What does that say about the author and the book when the publicity department doesn’t want to take advantage of the possibility of free publicity?

I mean, maybe I’m not seeing the bigger picture here and this actually has something to do with not having enough ARCs or not wanting to just give books away to anyone, but to completely ignore a book request? If I were the author I would want some answers from my people, pronto.

Speaking of book giveaways, there are going to be some here over the next couple of weeks. All of the authors I’ve lined up interviews with have been kind enough to send me ARCs or finished versions of their upcoming books, and I like to pass those on to you. All you have to do is comment on the author’s thread or send me an email regarding the author interviewed and what you might like to see in the future and I’ll enter into a drawing for the book in question. Here’s a chance to check out a new to you author and get some fun summer reading without spending a dime.

If you’re an author interested in an interview or guest blog, you can email me as well and we’ll see what we can set up. I need to collect enough interviews and guest columns to supplement the month of July while I’m in school. I’m hoping to have enough content before I leave that I can get it all loaded into Blogger and just be able to hit post every morning. If you’re interested, email me at the email in the sidebar and we’ll see if we can set something up.

Until then, now that I’m working at a job where I sit upright (thus spurring my ability to get stuff done), I want to do more with this blog. If time restraints allow, I’d like to be get to two posts a day: one very focused on the industry like an interview or links to stories on the publishing world, and another that’s me just blabbering away. I’ve also recently agreed to write a monthly column for Romancing the Blog and to do every second Friday reviews for Paperback Reader, so here’s hoping my productivity stays strong.

So, if you want me to focus on something for this blog in between calls where I take people’s money and tell them horse stats, just drop me an email or leave a comment. I’ll take it into consideration as well as all those things I’ve started in the past but never finished. With the Belmont leg of the Triple Crown not until June I’ve got a couple of weeks to pack in the content.

Thoughts?

Book Stalker

I’ve decided I’m going to begin stalking authors. Not in a “sneak around outside their homes, hide in the bushes, follow them to their local coffee shop and become this like them in a Single White Female” kind of way, but in “get over your damn shyness and email them” already kind of way. I need to get started now because I’ll have a box of homework by the 20^th and severely less time (especially if they keep me on for a few more weeks with the bookie job).

And the first author I plan on stalking?

Chelsea Cain.*

Ms. Cain has gone from writing funny memoirs and a satirical take on Nancy Drew to writing Heart Sick which contains a serial killer that sounds like she could take on Hannibal in the twisted department.

From Minotaur:

Portland Detective Archie Sheridan spent ten years tracking Gretchen Lowell, a beautiful serial killer, but in the end she caught him. Gretchen kidnapped Archie and tortured him for ten days, then she released him, and turned herself in. Now Gretchen is locked away, while Archie is in a prison of another kind—addicted to pain killers and powerless to erase those ten days from his mind.He continues to visit Gretchen in prison once a week, saying he wants her to confess the whereabouts of more of her victims, but he knows the truth is that he just can’t stay away.

When another killer begins snatching teenage girls, Archie knows that he has to pull himself together and investigate the murders. Newspaper reporter Susan Ward begins following Archie’s investigation, sparking a deadly game between Archie, Susan, the new killer, and even Gretchen. They need to catch a killer, and maybe somehow Archie can free himself from Gretchen once and for all.

Intrigued? I am. Being from the Northwest, with our preponderance of serial killers, the idea of a female serial killer pulling the strings of some other character is fascinating to me. So to is the idea that this all takes place in Portland where the “keep Portland weird” culture—if done right—could practically be another character. But if that’s not enough, look at the galleys** (which sparked my stalking needs weeks ago)!

Way to push me over edge of want to need. I must find Chelsea Cain and fast.

*Here’s hoping she compulsively googles her name and contacts me, thus making this whole stalking thing that much easier.

**Pictures shamelessly stolen from Super Librarian whom I’m jealous of because she has a copy.

Books: Want, Need, Desire

First off, for those of you who live in the greater Oregon area and would like some cheap books, the Clackamas Town Center Borders Express is being closed as part of Borders 200 store closing initiative. As of Friday all of their stock will go to 40% off.

Now, I can tell you from experience (and the fact that I had a long talk with the manager) that it will go no lower than this, but 40% is a damn good deal. They have a lot of stock left and it looks like they were still receiving shipments up until last week. Here's a chance to go pick up some new books (or old books that you really wanted to read) at a very deep discount, so go spend your money.

Second, I want this book. Not only are they sending out the ARC in an evidence bag with a free DVD tour of the book's setting, but the whole novel happens to take place in my town! Who better than a resident of Portland, Oregon to review a fictional novel about a Portland serial killer? I could give excellent feedback, I tell you.

Anyone close to the nice Publicity folk at Minotaur?

I'd give the book away after I read it. Promise.

Third, I don't know if you care, but my book review on Lisa Kleypas's Sugar Daddy will be up on Paperback Reader tomorrow...despite the fact that the book is not a paperback. The ARC I had was one though, and that's good enough for me.

That's all for now, I've got a temp job to go interview for. Who knows, tomorrow I could be learning the fine art of taking horse racing bets.

Only in it for the Books

I was discussing possible five year plans with the boss (Alvina, I’ll be contacting you soon about the Denver program), and after I laid out my thoughts my boss laughed and said, “Admit it, you’re doing it for the free books.”

I’m so transparent.

We’re all going to miss them: the free ARCs, the advanced access to the street dates, the odd titles that happened to make their way into the store, and being able to check any of these out if we wanted without necessarily having to buy them. I’ll miss opening the boxes and discovering books I’d never even think to search out or a highly awaited title. I’ll even miss the Manga kids who would start appearing in our store early on shipment day to ask, “Anything new?”

The boss and I are trying to convince one of our Manga experts to start her own online Manga store. We’ve got a list of over a hundred emails for her to use (collected for a store Manga newletter that never quite got off the ground), and some of those people regularly came in and dropped fifty or sixty dollars weekly on her recommendations alone. If nothing else I’m hoping I can convince her to set up her own Amazon store in conjunction with the MySpace she promised to run for the kids so that she can make some money off the whole process.

We’re all in a state of wondering (what are we going to do next? Why? How?), and any inkling of planning seems like a giant step forward. Still, while I’m waiting for coworkers’ resumes that I can fax around to my company and others, and still figuring out what I should write on my own (how does one catalogue seven years with one company in a variety of job titles), I’d like to do something that I can look at and say, “I did that.”

Which is where you come in. Noticed any broken or old links in the sidebar lately? Let me know so I can change them. Come across some fantastic new reader/writer/publishing blogs or sites lately? Let me know. Did I even know that Nancy Pearl had a wiki or what? Yeah, I’m behind on getting it up. Sorry. Sheesh.

Oh, and any suggestions you have on who I should contact about getting the coworkers signed up as book reviewers to receive ARCs would be greatly appreciated. They’ll gladly spread the book word via online if they don’t stay in the business.

Yeah, sometimes I think they’re only in it for the books too.

That Time of the Year

On this day in the year 1862 the Mexican army defeated the French in the Battle of Puebla. A century (plus a decade or two) later, on this very same day, a squalling baby girl was born into (unto?) this world, and was greeted by the sights of piñatas and streamers and the sounds of the mariachi. While these things had absolutely nothing to do with her birth (and everything to do with handing the French their ass) the little girl didn’t know this, and grew up believing that Mexico loved and celebrated her existence, which may explain her unusual dependency on tequila, guacamole, and carnitas.

Eventually the girl did learn a few simple truths:

• Jose Cuervo is not your friend (or really even a tequila).


• Piñatas are a lot harder to break than they look.


• It’s hard to speak a second language while inebriated.


• And maybe, just maybe, Mexico doesn’t care about this strange cosmic coincidence, but it doesn’t hurt to try and let them know.

So basically what I’m saying is, “Feliz cumpleaños a mi!” Break out my men, Don Julio and Patron, and slice me up some orange (the viewing audience is free to try this at home). I made it through another year without doing any lasting physical harm to anyone (including myself), this deserves a round…and a celebration, so join me, Mexico.

I was going to be good and try to compile the list y’all have been building of your favorite midlisters, but you’re going to have to wait a day or two to see the final results. I’m not feeling too literary at the moment, so unless someone wants to offer me a ARC of Victoria Finlay’s newest, Jewels (which really is a very unselfish request as it’s really for me, the artist and the professor, the last two of whom will not buy the book until its out in paperback anyway, but why should they suffer that long), the new Shannon McKenna that’s not out yet (and if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right), or Wentworth Miller’s phone number (‘cause I think the man went to college for some literary degree or the like), this book chick will be out of commission for today.

And possibly tomorrow.

But rest assured, I’ll return a little older, a little wiser, and quite possibly a little hung over, but without a permanent police record.

So stop reading this and go add your midlist authors to this list!

Have you told an author you love them today?

Who's that Book Chick?

That scream you heard from somewhere on the West Coast Tuesday around 1:20 pm? The one that sounded like a cross between a squeal and an "Ohmigawd" gasp?

That was me.

We got in the ARC for the new Christopher Moore novel and I may have also wept (I was alone in the backroom so this went undocumented and cannot be fact-checked). I would like to claim that my absence over the last few days is Chris's doing (because dear sweet lord I have the new Christopher Moore book!), but the truth is I've barely gotten past page one. Not Chris's fault at all. My own hectic life getting ready for a visit from the inhabitants of the Mother Ship at the store. Making everything perfect, and submitting to the Planogram (shudder) as much as we could make ourselves, which admittedly was only on a very surface level.

Luckily, our minor rebellious points were viewed as brilliant, and I may be in love with the new inhabitant of the Mother Ship because the new inhabitant (from now on known as NI) gets it. My bookstore does not have the same clientele as the bookstore five miles from me, even if we share part of the same customer base. My people come into my store looking for A and they might go into the other store to look for B (for example, I know that there are a lot of customers who only buy their "fun" novels on the weekends, hence the higher sales of Romance, Mystery and SciFi/Fantasy in most suburban vs. urban stores). I accept that, even if I occasionally try to get them to change their mind.

NI (heee, Ni! Sorry, sleep deprived) realizes that providing good customer service is not just the interaction between bookseller and customer, but also the interaction between customer and book (an interaction that is usually longer than the time spent with the bookseller). Customers don't always ask for help or want to be stalked, but they do want to pick up books, read the back, look at the cover, etc. So part of good customer service in this area is providing the product--up front and accessible--that your busy customer expects to find. In other words, goodbye planograms, nit-picky details, and the same freakin' book in five different places, and hello to official condoning of the behavior we've already been practicing: give the customer what they want. Order it in from an outside source if necessary. Get it on those front tables. Make up your own endcaps.

Freedom.

Finally, official word that we can run our bookstore as the best of both worlds, book selection of an independent with the customer service standards and branding of a corporation. Oh, the possibilities.

Of course, I've apparently "value beauty and pleasure but recognize their dangers, as well."

Oscar Wilde: The Portrait of Dorian Gray. You are a horror novel from the world of dandies, rich pretty boys, art and aesthetics, and intellectual debates between ethical people and decadent pleasure-seekers. You value beauty and pleasure but realize their dangers, as well.


Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Snagged from BookGirl's Nightstand.

SBD: Romance Expert Redux...

We’ve started a sign-up for a romance emailing list exclusive to my store. In it the customer will receive advance warning about street dates (and changing street dates), chances to win Advance Reader Copies, information on hot new titles, and discounts specific to our business only. In future months, if anyone is interested, I plan to expand it to include short author interviews, as well as listings for local romance signings.

It’s perfectly free, all you have to do is sign up your email…

…Which I will then harvest and turn over to the company, so they’ll stop threatening to lower my store standing and take away my raise.

And you thought I was doing this out of the kindness of my heart, or for my love of the genre.

Or perhaps it was my deep my desire to be the Romance Expert slipping free once again?

Ha, Ha! Poor, innocent consumer, don’t you realize that the name of the game is email collection these days? My company places more importance on that than sales and percent over last year combined! If I do not collect one or more emails for every hour I work, I’m a loser who is “not trying hard enough.”

I obviously don’t love the company.

So I better watch out,
I better not cry,
I better not pout,
I’m telling you why,
The company is watching my asssssss.

Shades of Big Brother, comrade.

The sad fact of the matter is that I would love to do this for my customers under normal circumstances. It’s an idea that I’ve been kicking around for awhile to provide them with an extra level of customer service (and the first step to building my book empire). It just angers me to no end though that I have been forced into following up because I want to save my raise (not that it will be that big anyway).

Sure, it will be useful. The Romance email that the company does professionally always seems to be a couple weeks behind with its picks and announcements, even though the buyer has access to this information months in advance. And my ladies seem excited (although I’ve got to come up with a snappier signup sheet because the one I have is just blah). I just hate that it had to come to this.

Don’t they read Fast Company? Don’t they know that email collection is rapidly going out because people are getting wise to the schemes? Or, at least, couldn’t they make it a little easier for them to sign up because having people write? Not pretty. Handwriting, especially legible handwriting, has gone the way of the dodo bird thanks to computers. All of which means that even if I get someone to submit their information, the brain trust in charge of entering it into the system may not be able to read it (and considering that these are the same people who have come up with eight million different ways to abbreviate words, names, and titles that bear absolutely no relation to however they did it before, I don’t have a lot of faith. Is it too much to ask for one set standard guideline? Do I need to spend five minutes trying to figure out what they did to shorten “America” this time?).

Argh! This isn’t particularly funny or even ranting on romance, so much as me just being frustrated (or flustrated as my father says). I really want this email list-serve—or however we end up setting up—to succeed, but not because I need it to so that I get my their email. I would have done it without the threats hanging over my head, but now I don’t have a choice.

And it’s tainting my experience.

Don’t they know it’s practically the season of giving (they should, they’ve been shipping Christmas books to me since August), and instead of focusing inward, they should be looking outward to help their fellow (wo)man? Not slamming her down with unrealistic goals regarding email collection.

Is that too much to ask?

I mean, it’s not like we don’t have enough to deal with, what with the holiday season, and a person quitting, and three weeks worth of deliveries that we can’t put out because they won’t give us a comprehensive returns list!

At least give a girl an office hour and an internet connection so she can do this at work, or chip in for the Comcast bill I’ve got to pay in blood every month.

You’ve got to give to receive.

Even if all you want is an email.

Soooo...wanna help a girl out and hand over your email address?

*blinks innocently*

I'll tell you about all sorts of cool romance type stuff...

Smart Bitches Day: Romance Expert or Romance Dud?

It’s Smart Bitches Day, which I somehow forgot as I got myself all geared up to type a column on my Brigadoon calendar store by flipping through other people’s blogs and then I saw Beth’s entry. So now I’m torn, do I do: the Brigadoon entry that I have already written (but not typed) that will leave me enough time to get ready for work, or trust that my own brain power this morning will be sufficient to come up with something smart and bitchy about romance novels.

Given that I’m a procrastinator by nature, I’m going for smart and bitchy…or maybe just a confessional. You see, on the Friday before last I tried to become a Romance Expert (capitalization and boldness necessary)!!!!

(Cue the theme music, which sounds vaguely like the Pussy Cat Dolls because they’re stuck in my head. Damn you, MTV! And damn you, PSC, for your slightly annoying, highly grammatically inaccurate, but totally infectious song…)

Don’cha…

Er, right. Back on track. Not dancing in my chair at all.

Nope.

Romance Expert.

It sounds like someone who is a matchmaker to the stars, or the name we gave my A.P. English teacher in high school after she choreographed a sex scene for the school play so it wouldn’t be offensive to parents (she succeeded, hence the title). It does not sound like something that I would want to wear on my name badge as I’m walking around my store, especially with the smart asses that shop there (I already had four people ask me in the last two days if I could help them find a “winning lottery ticket”). And yet, I’m tempted, oh so tempted, by the offer of Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs), and the idea that someone would actually listen to my opinions.

So on that Friday before last when I walked into my work and my boss handed me the memo from the company, I was intrigued. Despite the fact that there was much giggling from my coworkers (and my boss) as she gave me the paper because they do not read romance and never, ever will. One is interested in reading a historical to—in her words—see how truly horrible they really are. I replied that her secret corset fetish was showing, and did her husband know about that? Yes, that’s what life is really like in a bookstore: middle school redux.

But again I digress.

The job sounded interesting. Not only would we be getting ARCs, but we would be getting them at the same time the Romance Buyer did, so we could actually influence (in theory) the books purchased by the company. We would be given the sacred number to the Direct Line of the Romance Buyer, something you usually can’t pry out of the cold, dead hands of anyone, for any buyer. I should know, I’ve been trying to track down the Business Buyer for months so I can ask about ARCs for a big client, but I get no response. Nothing. His secretary never called me back. And I only got her voice mail because I tricked it out of an operator. They (the company) must fear that our power-mad, little minds would be overwhelmed by the freedom and go crazy. That they were even offering up the Romance Buyer to the hoards meant that a.) she’d pissed someone off, or b.) she genuinely wanted our help. Choosing to believe the answer was b I called the hotline number given only to be cycled through to the main office, and then back to the main office, and then back to the main office, because it was after business hours (on the East Coast) so I couldn’t track down someone to get me to an actual voice mail box. No big deal. I tried again on Monday.

Cycle. Cycle. Cycle.

Finally I managed to trip off the hamster wheel of corporate business lines and get a nice operator to help me. Turned out that the Romance Buyer’s mailbox was full and she (the operator) had actually started just taking a list of everyone who called. Our conversation went something like this:

Operator: Oh, not only was the extension given wrong, but her mailbox has been full since Friday morning. I’ve been compiling a list of everyone who’s been calling today.

Me: Is it a long list?

Operator (sounding perplexed): Yeah, it is.

Now I’m positive the list is so long because the majority of us are swag whores and not because we’re all genuinely interested in helping the company, but maybe I shouldn’t judge others by my own faults.

Not that Swag Whoredom is a fault. Because it’s not. It’s free stuff. And free stuff is your friend. God, next you are going to tell me that greed is a sin.

Sheesh.

Operator: So if I can just get your name, store, and number…

Me: [info dump].

Operator: Okay, I think that’s all the information that was asked for, right?

Me: Actually, no, they asked for you to explain why you thought you were qualified to be a Romance Expert.

Operator: Oh.

Long pause.

Me: That…might be why the voicemail box filled up so quickly.

Operator: I take it there wasn’t a word limit?

Me: Nope.

Operator: I think I will just stick with the information you gave me if you don’t mind.

Me: Not a problem.

Could you imagine some of the impassioned responses that woman might have gotten? Not to mention the length. I’ve had customers go on for a half an hour about their favorite author/book/characters, customers who would steal my job from me in a heartbeat. I know that people just like this work in bookstores. I’ve worked with them! A recitation of qualifications would have started with when they started reading romance, segued into how many books they’ve read, followed-up with several from-memory summaries, and then ended with a dissection of how those characters affected their lives, or how those characters’ reactions were a reflection of true-to-life emotions.

But, as Dennis Miller always says, “That’s just my opinion, and I could be wrong.” Not everyone feels the need to talk and talk and talk (oh look, I’m on my fourth page), and talk…like me.

Er, no. Not me. Not me at all.

My own qualifications were going to go something like this (starting with the answers to question asked on the memo): “The couples were from Gabaldon’s Outlander series, Kenyon’s Dark Hunter series—although fans will argue the coupling you chose, and Brockman’s Seal Team series (I think there was another couple, but it’s been a week, so I don’t remember).” And gone on to briefly, briefly outline my qualifications.

• Awareness of up-and-coming new authors from the web and magazines


• Understanding what my romance customers want


• Broad understanding of trends


• Fast Reader

I think I could have kept it at 50 words, definitely under 100.

That’s brief, right? Just the facts, Ma’am and all that.

Right?

Oh, God, I would have ended up clogging her mailbox, wouldn’t I? I would have been the one I was rolling my eyes over when I talked to the operator.

I’m not worthy!

Since she never got to hear any of this, we’ll see if I get the job. If not, maybe it could make a good story. Can’t you see it?

I Was A Failed Romance Expert.

I know Springer is just waiting to have me on so that I could duke it out with the other ladies and scream obscenities at the audience. Oooh, then we could discover who’s my baby’s Daddy. If I had a baby who needed a Daddy, that is.

Which I don’t.

Contrary to popular romantic belief, it’s hard for a girl to find a Sheik/Duke/Playboy/Millionaire to accidentally impregnate her. What with birth control, STDs, a war in the Middle East, a bad economy, and the inbreeding of royalty, this womb hasn’t gotten close to any of the above.

I guess I’m not qualified after all.

Love and hate...

I have a love/hate relationship with my UPS man. It's a long one, paved with box dust and tears. He can be so sweet, but then the abuse...the product I don't want...

On slow days I'm over-joyed to see him with his mountain of boxes containing magazines, books, and paperwork. We smile and joke as he stacks them on the counter. I ask him about the weather, he asks me about work. The smiles are bright, the laughter easy. On those days it doesn't matter if each box is filled with books I did not order, or just returned, I love that he has brought me something to do.

He is so easy to love.

Lately, though, he comes during peak hours with boxes filled with crap I don't have room for and will never sell: magazines with a $1.89 price point, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, yet another copy of Naked (I have 50 already, and that's Sedaris's backlist people!). He refuses my cries to take them back, he ignores my curses and loud musings about whether his parents ever married. He's a cold, evil man who leaves me with a pile of junk that contains not one Advanced Reader Copy (ARC), or book I've been waiting to read.

I hate him, just hate him. I hope he never returns.

But later he comes back looking repentant with one lone envelope in his hand (that had become buried on the bottom of his cart and therefore escaped detection), one lone envelope sans invoice.

An ARC. Just for me.

And I love him, just love him. I call him my UPS Sugar Daddy. I offer to get him water. We laugh, all animosity gone. How could it have gone wrong in the first place? I have no idea either, but it will never happen again!

I'm really not sure how his wife feels about our relationship. I know I'm not his only stop. But I don't ask questions, and he doesn't ask me about my relationships with the FedEx Air and Ground guys. It's an open relationship.

I wonder what he'll bring me today.