Tag: barnes and noble

I buy books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading1 Comment

This week involved– this is not a joke– both having a condom thrown at me and being inadvertently punched in the balls by a student, so, having survived it, I was in serious need of some retail therapy. I went to Barnes and Noble.

Do both of us a favor and don’t add up the cost of any of this.

I purchased Ron Chernow’s doorstop-sized, thousand page, recently-released biography of Mark Twain immediately, but not from Barnes and Noble. This one was expensive enough that I actually ordered it from Amazon, while still in the store, for 2/3 of the cost. It’ll be here tomorrow.

What I’ve started doing when I’m in bookstores is buying books I wasn’t previously familiar with, rather than grabbing things that are already on my wish list. I’ve learned that if I walk into my local B&N looking for something specific I am sure to be disappointed. It will not be there. (To wit: I have the absolutely gorgeous Broken Binding edition of Joe Abercrombie’s new book, The Devils, and was looking for the standard edition as a reading copy. Couldn’t find it. Unbelievable.)

Anyway, this caught my eye, and as a standalone and a debut novel it felt like the perfect kind of bookstore buy.

Then I decided to look around for a specific book that I’d seen the last time I was in the store, The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali. It wasn’t there! Again, any time I’m looking for a specific book, it is never there. But her debut novel was:

So, two or three purchases depending on how you’re counting, one by an established author that I’m certain to enjoy, two debut novels that I’m rolling dice on, no series fiction. So far so good! But then this one caught my eye:

I’m not even completely sure what drew me to this, and I picked it up and put it back down a couple of times, as the plot feels a little been-there-done-that in some ways, but by this point I was in full “fuck it” mode. Speaking of:

I did not buy any Dungeon Crawler Carl books, but these hardcover editions are appealing to my inner book-collector magpie; they’re big chonky bois in bright, appealing covers and I bet they’ll look great on the shelf. I also suspect they might be terrible? I dunno. Anyone read them?

My final purchase was this one:

This was actually the first book I physically touched after entering the store, as I saw it before the Twain book. I have not heard of the author, nor have I heard of his first book, and after flipping it over I realized that I have also not heard of any of the three authors with big pull quotes on the back, nor have I heard of any of the five books of theirs that were mentioned, and the quotes are genuinely wankstrous. Shit, this was probably a literature. I put it back.

Then, while looking for the Kamali book, I went back to the new fiction section to make sure it wasn’t still there, and … well, it turns out that Kamali and Larison are right next to each other on the shelf. So I picked it up again, leafed through it a bit, and put it back again.

Then, while deciding on The Outcast Mage, I decided that even though I’d had a vague plan to pick up three standalone books, and Outcast wasn’t one of those, I could still get it if I bought another standalone in addition to it, and somehow I ended up walking out of the store with The Ancients as well, figuring that this was a pretty precise example of how sometimes the books decide I’m buying them and not the other way around. I think this is the literary equivalent of being adopted by a cat. Hopefully I enjoy it.

I almost want to make this a separate post, but it is just my Barnes & Noble that is really hitting customer service and talking about books super hard, or is that a corporation-wide thing? Because the woman at the register was practically fucking interviewing the two people in front of me, making each transaction take so long that they had to call someone else to run a register because the line was building up. I was simultaneously stressing out about the conversation– what the hell is the name of the book I’m reading? Who is the author again?– and quietly scorning some of her choices, because I swear by God and sunny Jesus that if I walk up to you with a handful of fantasy books and you do what she did to the guy in front of me and ask if I’ve heard of Brandon fucking Sanderson, I may not be able to keep the look of disdain off of my face. She pivoted from “have you heard of the single most famous author in this genre in a generation” straight to recommending the Licanius trilogy by James Islington, making the second time in a row that I have been at that Barnes and Noble and someone has recommended those books, and I had the same reaction both times, which is that I usually don’t believe people when they tell me they’ve read them.

Also, there are like fifteen steps in fantasy book-reading between Brandon Sanderson and James Islington. It’s like finding out someone enjoys Goosebumps and recommending Lovecraft to them.

Anyway, the new register person ended up helping me, and did so without any unnecessary questions, which is good, because there was no way I was getting out of that conversation without some form of idiotic faux pas.

The end.

On the books I read, and where I get them

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading1 Comment

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For the last several years, I’ve basically been boycotting Christmas.  With the single exception of my son, I’m done buying gifts for anyone at Christmastime and I don’t want anyone getting anything for me either.  I’m not a Christian.  I’m a grown man with his very own job and in general if I want something I can get it for myself.  The fact that the right wing has managed to make how I greet people during December into a shibboleth doesn’t help, either.  Fuck it, all of it.  I’m out.

My mother has had… some trouble with this concept.

I’ve tried to redirect her always-considerable Christmas energies (my list of “what I got” when I was a kid was regularly two or three times as long as anybody else’s, and we were never rich– Mom just really prioritized Christmas) away from my wife and I and toward my son, but “No, really, don’t get me anything” hasn’t sunk in.  She’s still getting me things, although I’ve gotten her to tone it down to one or two smaller gifts.  This year it was a Barnes and Noble gift card.  Just that.  And she practically begged me to use it.

I should not be surprised that my mother knows my weak spots.  Okay, fine, I’ll bend my principles and go get some free books, geez.

She also got my wife a card, and my son had some free-floating cash around, so we piled into the car yesterday to go to Barnes and Noble, and Christ if I wasn’t reminded yet again why I get every damn thing I read from Amazon now.  I used to shop at Barnes and Noble all the time and then they moved their store to the mall, and since then damn near every time I walk into the place it generates a blog post.  The mall is seven million miles away and the weather was absolute shit yesterday and the crowds and the parking lot and jesus why the hell am I doing this to myself and my family.  

A brief diversion: I have, for the last couple of years, been trying to aggressively diversify my reading, if not in subject matter than at least in terms of the authors I’m reading.  I’m always on the lookout for new authors, and in particular I’ve been trying to focus on women authors and authors of color for the last couple of years.  I wrote my top 10 books of the year post yesterday, and while part of me looked at it and went yeah, mission accomplished— eight of the eleven books were by women– another part of me noticed how blindingly white the list was.  Nine out of the ten authors.  In other words, white women, specifically, appear to be the beneficiary of this policy.

Okay, cool.  So this year I focus more on authors of color, right?(*)

Y’all have any idea how hard it is to find authors of color in the science fiction/fantasy section at Barnes and Noble?  Way harder than I thought it was going to be.  I started by going through my Amazon wish list and trying to find some of those books.  No luck on 90% of them.  I wanted to just scan through the new books, but they’ve gotten rid of that section in SF&F recently and everything is spine-out now.  Okay, start looking for authors with visibly ethnic-sounding names and/or using initials instead of first names, which is generally code for “woman author.”  No luck.  Hell, just finding books by women was difficult enough.

I mean, I eventually found three books, two from my wish list and one that I literally grabbed because I’ve heard of Wesley Chu and he’s Asian and I’ve never read anything by him.  But the whole process was unpleasant and took much longer than it ought to have.  Turns out discovery of new books is kinda complicated if all you have is the spine and the author’s name to go on.

And then we got up to the counter and the salesperson gave my wife her spiel about the membership card.  And we’re cool with that!  It’s your job, you go do it.  And then I got called over by the salesperson next to her and she did the same thing, and my son made it obvious that he was standing in between his parents and the first lady realized we were together.  And I didn’t have a card either, because the card costs $30 annually and I really don’t spend the $300+ every year it would take to make the card worth it at Barnes and Noble any more.  I’m not arbitrarily adding $30 to my sale so that I can save money $300 worth of purchases later.

So she leans over to me and snarks, again, in a really shitty sort of tone, “You’d have saved nearly half the cost of the card already if you joined up!”  And it’s at this point where you’re no longer just doing your job and you’re kind of being an asshole.  I already said I don’t want your card.  You’ve had the card for years.  I get it.  I have to spend $300 before I save any money and I’m not going to.

I opened my mouth, and alternate-universe me snapped “If I wanted to save money I’d have bought this shit from Amazon” back at her.  This-universe me, luckily, has a bit more sense and just said “No, thanks” again and we left, driving another seven million miles in snow and over ice to get back home, and I resolved to let the Goddamn post office do the driving for me from now on.  Because I’m in sales right now and I’ve worked a register plenty of times before and I try my very hardest to never be anything but perfectly nice to anyone on the other side of a register from me.

So quit making me work at it.

Also, lady?  Did you notice we were buying with gift cards?  Somebody else already spent that money.  I’m not getting your loyalty card today.  Between the two of us we got five or six books for like $10 and I don’t care about your card right now.

Ugh.

(*) Miss me with it if you have any plan to quibble with how I arrange my reading, okay? There are millions of books out there and I can’t read all of them, so I’ll use whatever the fuck criteria I want to decide which ones I spend my time on.  Thanks.

All my books now available everywhere!

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I figure this is worth posting.  You can now get whatever Luther Siler books you like, from whatever website you like.  Am I missing anything?  Let me know.

The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1, free everywhere but Amazon:

The Sanctum of the Sphere: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 2, $4.95 everywhere:

Skylights, $4.95 everywhere:

You can also get Sanctum or Skylights autographed by me for cheaper than you’ll get them from Amazon.

Happy reading!

Question for the writerpeople

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

121228063239-barnes-and-noble-blog1Does anyone have any experience with nookpress.com?  I popped in at my local Barnes and Noble this afternoon and spoke with a (genuinely!) helpful and nice manager about potentially doing a book signing there some time after Sanctum comes out.  The good news: they’re completely willing to work with independent authors and don’t particularly care that I don’t have a traditional publisher.  The bad news: they do care that my print books are printed by CreateSpace, because Amazon owns CreateSpace.  Interestingly, the print edition of Skylights is available at Barnes and Noble.com, but corporate policy states that they won’t stock CreateSpace books in-store and therefore they can’t do signing events with authors published through them, since they order the stock themselves when that happens.

Print sales of Skylights have been minimal– I have sold seven copies, total, and I know who ordered six of those seven.  I suspect I also will eventually find out I know the seventh person as well.  So even if Amazon’s not willing to carry a book in print if it’s printed through B&N, I don’t know that I’m hurting myself if I can sell print books a few times a year at author sales– at least not right now, although if I somehow magically hit the big time that’ll become a problem quickly.  If Amazon is willing to carry Nook Press books, the only problem is that NP charges a bit more than CreateSpace does and the price of the books would have to go up a buck or so.  Then again, without one in-hand … maybe there’s  a quality difference, too, y’know?

Anyway, back to the question: anyone used this service?  Advice is gratefully received at the moment.

THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES now available basically everywhere

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

bacover3dSmashwords has finally pushed the manuscript through to all the big online markets, so you can now download The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 to basically any device you want!  The price is currently 99 cents everywhere.

Hooray for choices!

 

A few additional BA details

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment
  • It’s now available on Smashwords, here, for 99 cents.  There are a variety of file formats available.
  • Apple bookstore, Barnes and Noble, Oyster, and several other stores are coming and will be linked to at that time, but you can download it in whatever format you like from Smashwords.
  • There’s gonna be a 15% preview available on the Goodreads page in a few hours once they’ve processed the file I sent them.  Check… tomorrow, I guess?

I didn’t get any actual writing done today– at least, not yet, and it’s 9:15 so that’s probably it for the day– but I feel like I got enough authorstuff done to call it a decent day.

In which I am Not an Asshole: a brief true story

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, Reading, Television4 Comments

UnknownThe wife and I just got back from a brief shopping trip that included a stop at Barnes and Noble.  This is an educator discount week (25% off of everything) so it was worth it to putter around a little bit.  At some point I overheard someone a few aisles away bitching vociferously about people spreading spoilers about Game of Thrones.  Bitching loudly enough, in fact, that she would have herself spoiled the events of the Purple Wedding to anyone around her had they been nearby and not wanted to know.

In a fucking bookstore.  Where the actual books were no more than fifteen to twenty feet away.

I did not start loudly shouting plot events from the next two books.

But I wanted to.

I figure someone owes me candy for bein’ civilized.

In which Amazon sucks and I’m stupid

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

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I warned you that today would be whining.

I read a lot, right?  I read widely, I read voluminously, and I read fast.  I’m on something like my 95th book of the year; anyone reading this by clicking through my Facebook feed is already aware that most of what I use Facebook for is keeping track of how much I’ve read, an experiment that will last through 2013 and then end forever.  When you read as much as I do, and you read because you love books and not because you love stories (and this is not an unimportant distinction) you find that you end up spending lots of your discretionary cash– the majority of it, in fact– on books.  This hobby, unfortunately, is getting more and more difficult as time goes on.  First a perfectly good Barnes and Noble moved from a great location to the mall, which sucks.  Then Borders exploded.  Then Barnes and Noble decided to commit slow suicide-by-Nook; every time I go in there (and it’s been quite a while) I walk out insisting that I’m never darkening their door again and they’ll certainly be closed in a year.

I feel like this latest time I’m right, by the way, but that’s a different conversation.

This leaves me, in a town with just over a hundred thousand people, with one viable bookstore– the Notre Dame bookstore, which luckily probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon since it really doesn’t much need to turn a profit.  However, it’s inconvenient to get to, so most of the time I’ve been ordering everything from Amazon.

I do not like ordering anything online.  I’m hellaciously picky about the condition of my books, for starters; the book I’m reading right now, in fact, would have been left on the shelf because there’s a small tear in the corner of the cover.  They’ve shipped me three different books recently with huge stickers on the back that I had to peel off, a huge pain in the ass.  And then there’s the books that I wouldn’t have bought if I’d seen them in person because you’ve gotta be kidding me.

This, children, is Neil Gaiman’s newest “book.”   Note that 1) it is tiny, and 2) it is hardcover, and 3) — and 3 is a bit of a stretch, I’ll admit it– it’s got those annoying-ass shaggy-cut pages that absolutely no one likes and why the hell do they keep doing that.

177 fucking pages.  The book is called THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE: A NOVEL, because if it didn’t have the words “a novel” in the cover you’d sensibly think you were dealing with a novella.  That’s because it’s a novella.  A hardcover novella.  A hardcover novella that I’ll read in an hour that the multimillionaire bestselling author thinks people should spend twenty-six dollars to own.

(I know Gaiman doesn’t set prices.  And I got it for $16 after discounts.  All the same.  Shut up.)

I like Gaiman’s writing a hell of a lot, so ordering his book completely blind didn’t bother me at all.  But had I seen this thing in a store it would have stayed on the shelf and I’d have waited for paperback because– again– you’ve gotta be kidding me.  $26 for 177 pages is insane.  For a book that’s gonna sell a ton of copies, and not, say, some obscure academic-press book, it’s madness.  It’s even big, wide-spaced print.  So the manuscript he submitted had to be beefed up to get to 177 pages.

I have no doubt at all that I’m going to enjoy the story– again, I really like Gaiman.  But this is bullshit and ordering things online is bullshit.

What I’m going to have to do– because this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten burned by this nonsense– is start paying serious attention to things like the dimensions and page counts of the books I’m reading, which is information that Amazon makes available but it isn’t like they put it front and center.  That’s the “…and I’m stupid” part of the title of this piece, because this totally could have been avoided.  But you know how else I could have avoided this?  Buying the fucking book in a store.  Online is bullshit and I hate the future.

Ah, what the hell:  pictured below are the other two books I ordered along with the Gaiman.  THE THOUSAND NAMES was actually the most expensive in terms of what I paid, but all three were within a dollar of each other.  The cover price on the Hosseini is two bucks more than the cover price on the Gaiman book, but it’s over twice as long.  THOUSAND NAMES is over five hundred pages.

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NEVER LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD RANT EDIT:  It turns out that the son of a bitch was effectively a limited edition release, because it’s already out of print and has been out for like a week.  I have a John Scalzi book of similar dimensions that I ordered deliberately for basically the exact same price.  So.. uh… never mind?