My favorite bookstore…
In my stories, I have several cameos where I become a bookstore owner. Ever since I realized as a tween that I had no future as a major league catcher (my hero was Roy Campanella, by the way, not Yogi Berra), I wanted to become a writer. Barring that, because I was an avid reader, a bookstore owner.
I browsed bookstores as a precocious tween and teen as much as I did our public library, both like an old 49er panning for gold. I’d read books like Brave New World and 1984 long before I had to study them in a special extracurricular early-morning high school class during my senior year. Back then, bookstores had few lounging areas and no coffee and pastries. Times have changed, and they’re mostly more welcoming now. (Many smaller ones still ignore self-published authors, of course. Maybe because of space limitations, they’ve become faithful sycophants of the Big Five publishers.)
I expect online bookstores to be welcoming as well. Amazon fails miserably in that sense (as well as many others, of course). They’re an online version of Walmart filled mostly with cheap trash (or maybe Walmart makes the mistake of emulating them?), denying its origins as a lowly bookstore to become the country’s biggest retailer. The many products of questionable quality that they sell includes many books I refuse to read. (Shlock from the Big Five’s formulaic authors or from some ghostwriter penning a book for a celeb just doesn’t interest me.)
I usually don’t promote commercial enterprises in this blog or on my website, but I’ll make an exception now for Barnes and Noble (B&N). They have become my go-to bookstore, both in its local stores and online where I can easily browse at either one. While you might have other places to browse for new (and old!) books, my book links in the ads found at the end of blog posts like this one generally take you to B&N’s online store.
For the most part, these links are included just as an aid your browsing. You can purchase my books (most of them are downloadable ebooks) wherever quality ebooks are sold as well as “borrow them” from many lending services because I distribute them widely via Draft2Digital and Smashwords (now one and the same outfit). B&N is one of many retailers I distribute to (Amazon no longer is), but it has the advantage that it’s both a physical and digital bookstore! Moreover, I like the way they present my books to readers, organizing series with nary a word from me, for example. And they don’t sell a lot of other merchandise to confuse your book buying like Amazon does. (I don’t know why the latter retailer has such a large percentage of book sales, in fact. They certainly don’t deserve them because they’ve expanded so much into e-commerce hell and done a lot to maximize the torture!)
B&N’s physical bookstores have always been a nice place to hang out too, often containing little snack bars and comfortable seating for readers looking for their next book, or even just to pass the time browsing. In fact, I believe there’s a new policy where different physical bookstores can become creative with the perks they offer to readers who visit.
I suppose I should up my level of cameos? Maybe I should pretend I’m the CEO of a great service for readers like B&N’s? I’m all for a bookstore that helps readers find exciting books to read, after all. B&N offers that in spades!
***
Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules found on my “Join the Conversation” web page.)
“Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” trilogy. I put the protagonist, ex-USN Master-at-Arms Maria Jose Melendez aka Mary Jo, through a lot of bad situations in these three thriller novels. They’re centered around campaigns by various powers, Russia, China, and the US, who want MECHs tech (that’s “Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). In the first novel, Mary Jo gets blamed for both Russia’s stealing of MECH prototypes and killing her sister and brother-in-law; she must save the MECHs and clear her name. In the second, both Russia and the US are after the MECHs (Mary Jo agreed to let them try to live a normal life in the first novel), and she acquires a stalker just to complicate things. In the third, China tries to force Mary Jo to divulge the MECHs’ whereabouts. Readers will experience near-future mystery, suspense, and thrills as they read about Mary Jo’s wild adventures. Or is it a possible present we don’t know about?
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
