ot: Heyer e-book sale?

[filkferengi]

This came from the Heyer list this morning. Since I don't have an e-reader, I can neither confirm nor deny. I hope it's true, so everyone can get in on the fun in more ways.

filkferengi

There are a whole bunch of Heyer ebooks on sale for $1.99 - 80 hour
sale? At B&N, Kobo, Amazon.

MWT blogs about Discovery

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

A couple weeks Megan had this on her Tumblr page and said it was ok to repost it here.  Thoughts? Ideas? How about an old fashioned discussion?

From MWT:

I don’t think I can say anything about Diversity that hasn’t already been said better by people like the late Walter Dean Myers, Erika L. Sánchez, Cindy Pon, Malindo Lo and the many voices at We Need Diverse Books.

I’d like to say something, though, about Discovery.  It’s my particular hobby horse and I could talk about it forever, (and I am about to, sorry) which is probably why I don’t get invited out much, now that I think of it.

Anyway.

When a Librarian suggests a book to a patron, it’s Reader’s Advisory.  When we go looking for ourselves, it’s called Discovery.  Reader’s Advisory is the bomb, and I still think that best way to get something new to read is to have someone who knows what you like do all the work of finding books and then recommend them to you.  But it’s a bad method of Discovery.

I think we have to invent new, better, methods of Discovery if we want to increase Diversity.  I think we have to change our business model for selling books.

The current business model for books is – hunt for the Best Seller that will make profits that in turn carry other less successful books. So– the majority of every list will always be books that the publishers have selected as potential bestsellers.  They need to hit the jackpot from time to time in order to keep their bottom line in the black and that means they need to buy a lot of tickets for the lottery.  They make ARCs and hope their ARC will be the one out of five or six or thirty that a reviewer reads.  They hope that the reviewer will write an eye-catching review that will beget more and more readers and reviews and buzz for that book will rise in a self-feeding cycle.   Other ARCs fade into the background until everyone online is talking about Harry Potter or Eleanor and Park or Dumplin’ and there’s one book you can pretty much guarantee will be faced out in every single Barnes and Noble you go into.

Forgive me if I use the word wrong because I didn’t study this in school, but I think the word for this is normative.  Walter Dean Myers wanted it to be -normal- to see a story about an African American on the NYT Bestseller list.  That is a goal worth reaching.  On the other hand, I still hate this system because it leaves so many other books almost invisible.

Old books for example (another favorite topic of mine, sorry).  Books drop off the radar so fast, books with minority characters or issues, even faster. A library can build up a lot of books over time on diverse topics and they will still be invisible on the shelves.  And there will always be more different kinds of people and stories than can fit on a list ten books long.  Even if you have two lists.  Or six, if most of the stuff overlaps.

Goodreads and Tumblr and even WNDB work best when people devote a significant amount of time to learning about books they don’t want to read in order to see the few that they think do.  Those are your sophisticated Discoverers.  We need a means for the unsophisticated. The young, the disenfranchised, the occasional reader.

Reader’s Advisory is the bomb, and Librarians are the best.  But too many people don’t have a librarian.  We need systems that work for them.

There was an exchange a few months back on Holly Black’s Tumblr.  I’d be a hypocrite not to confess some sympathy for a person who wants the world to crowdsource diverse books and put them on the NYT Bestseller list for easy pickings.   But I don’t think trying to get our own favorite thing into a NYT Best seller is the best goal.  Not when pushing something else off the list means pushing it off a cliff.

I think we have to create a way to make finding books easier. I think we have to break loose from the Normative Best Sellers and set our sights on smaller sales as a sign of greater diversity. If it were easier for people to find the books they want, it would be cheaper and more profitable for publishers to deliver those books to them.

Kameron Hurley recently wrote the average book sells 3,000 copies in its lifetime.  These are the books that best sellers support. I am pretty sure that publishers could make money on 3,000 books if they knew exactly how many books to publish and if they knew they could get those books into the hands of the people who wanted to read them without spending a blockbuster’s budget on advertising.

I’d like Cindy Pon’s Serpentine to be a mainstream bestseller, but honestly it’s more important to me (Sorry, Cindy!) that that one kid in New England who needs to read it is able to find it.  If that kid’s life were better for reading Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, by Virginia Hamilton, I want them to be able to find it.  Easily. When there are hundreds of thousands of invisible e-books in my public library, I want kids to be able to pick their way through some prompts and come up with a personalized list of great stuff to read–things they could have picked for themselves, things they never knew they’d like until they saw the synopsis on the screen, old stuff, new stuff, safe stuff, powerful stuff.  I want them to be able to connect safely with people like them in other communities so they can share recommendations. I’d like moms or dads who aren’t readers themselves to be able to pick out ten or twelve likely books for their fourth graders.

So, please, if you are a librarian, or a Library School, or an IT person with a computer in the garage, please try to come up with better ways to Discover books.  Because I’m very lazy.  And I’d like you to do the work for me.  Thanks.