Friday, May 27, 2011

Downsizing

Just over a decade ago, Joseph Epstein wrote an essay called "Books Won't Furnish a Room."  In that essay, he talked about the process of trimming his personal library; Epstein cut a collection of 2000 volumes down to about 400.  At the time of publication, that essay filled me with the kind of cosmic dread usually reserved for the doomed narrators of Lovecraft's stories.  Dear God in heaven -- weed four books out of every five?  How could anyone force himself to do that?  Easier to saw off your own leg, I thought.  Shows how wrong you can be.  I didn't know it at the time, but I'd already started that process myself.

When my wife and I moved from Chicago to Kansas 25 years ago, we shipped more than a hundred cartons of books.  They weren't small cartons, either; we worked for Kroch's & Brentano's bookstore in downtown Chicago for nine years, and when we packed all those books we got publishers' shipping cartons from the stockrooms.  The cartons would hold 25 or more hardcovers, 50 to 100 mass market paperbacks.  Our house once had 8 or 9 bookcases in the main living areas and two or three 6-foot metal utility shelves in the basement, all double-rowed (some triple-rowed) and sagging, and some boxes stashed in closets.

Most of the books on those shelves are gone now.  They've been given to libraries, or sold to individuals and second-hand book dealers.  It wasn't nearly as painful as I'd thought it would be, because quite a few of those departed books are still here.  The nicest thing about ebooks isn't price or search functions.  It's the space savings, the fact that ebooks let you eat your cake and have it too where shelf space is concerned.  Just replacing Stephen King's hardcovers with ebooks freed up something like 6 feet of shelf space.  We've been replacing print with ebooks for a decade, and while we haven't chopped 80% of our print volumes yet we're getting there as more backlist titles finally see ebook publication.  Thanks to ebooks, we've been able to keep our personal library while achieving Epstein's goal of living in a home where not every wall has a bookcase.

Of course, downsizing the physical space doesn't mean that the book collection has actually been downsized.  Anybody with a serious book-buying habit learns quickly to buy 'em when they're there, because later they might not be so easy to find; that's not as true in these days of online booksellers as it was pre-web, but habits are habits and they don't die easily.  And that means, at least in my case and I'm not unique, that I'm still buying them faster than I can read them; changing to ebooks hasn't changed that even a little bit.

In "Paladin of the Lost Hour," Harlan Ellison's protagonist talks about his library and says "Who wants a library full of books you've already read?"  Well, having a library full of books I've already read will never be my problem.  Leaving the question of catching up with the backlog -- these days, the books in the collection represent aspiration far more than they do accomplishment.  Bet I'm not unique there, either; but that's a subject for a little later.

----

A brief commercial and free ebook offer -- skip it if you like:
I've got a few short stories available at Amazon's Kindle store, Smashwords, and other ebook sites, and I'm hoping to see comments from reviewers, so until June 7 I'm making 100%-off-purchase-price coupons available at Smashwords.  You can find the ebooks at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TonyRabig

One story, "Ghost Writer," is already available free at Smashwords; the other two titles are usually 99 cents each, but you can get those free as well until June 7 by using the coupons at the time of purchase.
Smashwords coupon code for "The Point" is NL93T
Smashwords coupon code for "The Other Iron River, and Other Stories" is QP57C.

If you use the coupons, please post a review at Amazon, Smashwords, and Goodreads at your earliest convenience.

Thanks in advance, see you next week, and bests to all,

--tr

Friday, May 20, 2011

Who Is This Guy, Anyway?

A retired librarian, bookseller, teacher, and computer programmer, not necessarily in that order.  The publishing business is currently turning itself upside down and inside out and nothing works the way I used to believe it did.  So naturally I'll start writing now, when most of what I thought I knew about the bookbiz no longer applies.

While working at the above-mentioned trades, I wrote, but not nearly enough.  Most of my effort went toward paying the bills, and writing was backburnered.  Well, the mortgage is paid now and I'm working part time instead of full time plus extra, and the family won't have to eat cat food if I spend more time writing now than preparing reports for the office.

There's just one problem.

When you backburner something like writing, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get back into practice.  I wrote on and off, and it's coming back, but so very slowly -- if I hadn't written at all during those years, chances are that there wouldn't be anything left.

This will be a blog about books, ebooks, dealing with the eternal book-lover's problem of limited shelf space, writing when it feels like the faculties are so atrophied that you can't put together a single coherent sentence, the amusements of formatting and publishing your own ebooks, and the even greater amusements of trying to figure out how to market them, and any related subjects that come to mind.  I'll try to be pleasant and entertaining about it, I'll try to post every weekend, I'll try not to bore your backside off, I won't spend every blog post trying to get you to buy my stuff, and if I stumble over something that would be useful to those of you out there in the same situation, I'll pass it along.

And right now, the most useful thing I can say to those of you who want to write but spend most of their time paying the bills is this: Do as I say, not as I did -- make time, because the writing muscles are like any others and you've got to use 'em or lose 'em.

And on that cheery note, hello, welcome aboard, and see you next week.

Bests to all,

--tr