The Written Nerd

I don' t often use this blog to plug stuff going on at McNally Jackson, but sometimes it's just too good. Thanks to the diligent efforts of mixmaster Steve and blogmaster Dustin (who, incidentally, will be ably taking over my job as McJ events coordinator as I move on to Greenlight), the McNally Jackson blog is now a talkie. It's our inaugural event podcast ! We've been sound recording author events for months now, hoping to preserve some of the great live conversations for posterity. At last, we've edited and hosted one of the best -- the star-studded March 30 poetry event with Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, and Philip Schultz. Click over to the McNally Jackson blog -- if only to see the awesome picture of Dustin attempting to stuff a book into his ear. The audio sounds great -- all those resonant poet voices! Leave lots of comments so we know you're listening, and we'll feel all motivated to do some more.

Okay, I'm back from zombie sick land, and not a moment too soon. There's so much going on around shopping at indie stores, AND the brilliance of buying books for the holidays, that I'm going to have to do link madness on a Friday. Shopping Local First, do not fail to remember that tomorrow, Saturday November 22, is America Unchained ! Communities across the country will be encouraged to shop only at independent locally-owned stores -- just for one day. If you care about the economic health of your community, the statistics are persuasive: Studies in Maine and Austin , Texas demonstrate that locally-owned businesses generate 3.5 times the local economic activity as chains. A study of 10 independent businesses and 10 chains in retail, restaurant and service in Andersonville , Illinois demonstrates independent businesses generate about 70 percent greater local economic activity per square foot and slightly more sales per square foot as chains. A study in San Francisco d...

I'm deeply immersed in a fact-finding mission this morning -- gathering contact names and emails for every bookstore in the five boroughs, in hopes of getting a critical mass of us together to talk about forming some sort of alliance/association/co-op/cabal/something. I'm working with the awesome Kelly Amabile at Book Culture and our respective bosses -- more details to come. (And if you're an NYC bookseller and you want in, you could email me to make it easier...) So for the sake of quickness, let me just put up two links that should give you plenty of reading today. Random House sales reps extraordinaire Michael Kindness and Ann Kingman have created a blog called Books On The Nightstand -- but it's not a Random House blog. Instead, Michael and Ann have created a space to talk about all the books they love, from any publisher, both in written and podcasted form. The powers-that-be at RH have okay'ed the project, but this is all Michael and Ann, as true a pa...

Carolyn Bennett, my coworker at BookStream (at least for the rest of this week) and fellow (anonymous) blogger, is a big fan of "link love" -- the affectionate exchange of linkage between bloggers who read each other, in order to increase traffic for all. "Comment love" is another aspect of this, one I admit I'm a bit weak on -- though I read (and skim) tons of lit blogs, I'm often very lazy about posting comments, which is probably why this blog is not so commenty itself. But I'm resolving to be better. And how better to start off than with a link to a new website/blog I helped create: BookStream.com ! If you ever clicked on this URL before, you may recall a fairly staid page with contact information and company description. Now, however, you've not only got yer contact info and yer special title offers and yer bookseller terms -- standard company stuff -- BUT you've also got archived back issues of The BookStream Current , and book recommend...

Thanks to Shelf Awareness (a great electronic resource for those of us in the print industry, as many of you know), I spent all morning reading this article in Newsweek about the Kindle , the new e-reader just released by the same company that runs Amazon. I know that name -- and often, the concept of internet book sales and digital books -- is likely to incur hisses from the bricks and mortar booksellers. I admit to feeling some stirrings of indignation myself at the sometimes smug sense of inevitability with which the author (as most journalists, seemingly) wrote about the increasing viability of digital tools for reading. But, as is my habit, I'm trying not to make this an us-vs.-them thing (i.e., those vapid digital people vs. us serious print people, or those hopelessly old-fashioned meatspace people vs. us progressive connected people). Because as usual, I don't think a viable e-reader and a healthy book market are necessarily mutually exclusive. (For example, I us...