From Publishers Weekly:
A number of industry members have gotten together to form Love Your Bookstore, a campaign aimed to help draw attention to all physical bookstores as the holiday shopping season begins
“Bookstores are amazing and important places for us all culturally, and we know that booksellers help readers discover and share the magic of books,” said Dominique Raccah, publishers CEO of Sourcebooks and a member of the steering committee that created the campaign. “They create communities of readers that make a difference because books change lives. We want to give everyone a way to celebrate their favorite bookstore.”
. . . .
A key element of the initiative is the week-long Love Your Bookstore Challenge. The challenge encourages readers and authors to go into their local bookstore and take a picture of the book they are most excited to gift this holiday season or a book you love or want to receive.
. . . .
“Any grassroots campaign to promote reading and great books in such a positive, spontaneous way is balm for America’s soul during these times,” said Lennertz. “I truly hope this new campaign becomes a new annual tradition!”
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
I’m sure all the little neighborhood independent bookstores would have appreciated this support when Borders was wiping them out.
Exactly. Pure self interest masquerading as concern and support for reading and readers. It’s the masquerade that infuriates me.
If it makes you feel any better, they probably wouldn’t have time to do this sort of thing if business was good.
“Bookstores are amazing and important places for us all culturally”
No, they are not. They are businesses selling a product.
“and we know that booksellers help readers discover and share the magic of books”
Discovery only of the fraction of available books they choose to stock. And are paid to push. Sharing only if they run book clubs, events etc which libraries usually do better in any case. Not to mention Amazon and various online resources for discovery, and various online communities and other resources for sharing.
“They create communities of readers that make a difference because books change lives.”
Perhaps some do in a small way. The best communities of readers are online. Communities like Mobileread, KBoards (at least until recently) and hopefully the new Writer’s Sanctum and others are far superior to a few people having cheese and biscuits with a glass of cheap wine at the local book store. Libraries do communities far better than any bookstore I know.
“We want to give everyone a way to celebrate their favorite bookstore.”
Like Amazon? My favourite physical book store (in Australia) is QBD, a growing chain of stores. Back before I started reading only ebooks I loved them because they had a good range of heavily discounted books. No book clubs or community building or pretentious events. Just good books cheap. Being a voracious reader in those days was an expensive hobby. The chain continues to expand using the same formula. I now visit rarely and seldom part with any money. My only purchases in recent years have been a copy of “Soul Surfer” for one niece and a set of board games for another.
A sudden wave of disgust and fury just surged through me upon reading this.
Here’s a bunch of trad pub kingpins determined to make time stand still so that they can keep doing everything the same as always and still make a profit. Okay. I get it, but I don’t like it.
After fleecing, “culling,” and otherwise exploiting authors for decades, with ever increasing rapacity, they are now trumpeting more loudly than ever that they are the angels, source of all things good and cultural and worthy. It just makes me feel ill.
They have to keep tooting their own horn – too many writers are leaving or otherwise ignoring them.
Writer 1 “Did you hear something?”
Writer 2 “You mean that agent over there crying that no one thinks they’re worth losing 15% to?”
Writer 1 “More of a whine, must have been the wind. You still on schedule to get your latest book out this week?”
Writer 2 “Rendering the cover as we speak, I wanted the lights to tease about where he has his hands on her.”
Writer 1 “Oh hell, you didn’t give him three hands again did you?”
Writer 2 “Sure I did! The fun part is seeing how long it takes before somebody notices!”
Must be insured by All State. “The good hands people.”
There was some romance book out that when moving the hands the artist forgot to remove one of the old ones. 😉 I can just picture some smart-arsed indie doing it on purpose …
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble has its balance sheet in a pneumatic vise, squeezing every drop into dividends.
“Any grassroots campaign to promote reading and great books in such a positive, spontaneous way is balm for America’s soul during these times,” said Lennertz. “I truly hope this new campaign becomes a new annual tradition!”
Oooooh! I get such a warm, fuzzy feeling reading the above quote.
TTFN, gotta go chug some Karo and molasses now.
Well… my upstream webfilter blocks access to the domain http://www.loveyourbookstore.com as a security threat, possibly because it’s not found. Fail.
I would be interested in hearing who these “industry members” are, because the simplest way for publishers to love bookstores would be to give them better discounts on small orders. Good luck with that.
From the website:
“The Love Your Bookstore initiative is the brainchild of book lover Dominique Raccah, the Publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks and PW’s Publishing Person of the Year (2016).”
“Steering Committee
George Slowik, Jr.
President,
Publishers Weekly
Dominique Raccah
Publisher and CEO, Sourcebooks
Carl Lennertz
Executive Director,
Children’s Book Council
Becky Anderson
Owner,
Anderson’s Bookshops”
The website says sponsors are PW, CBC, Sourcebooks, and Bookcon.
The very definition of grassroots, right?
Or not…
If you need an astroturf campaign to convince people you are necessary, you aren’t.
“A number of industry members have gotten together to form Love Your Bookstore, a campaign aimed to …”
“Any grassroots campaign to promote …”
I hate to tell ‘Publishers Weekly’ but that smells more like AstroTurf then it does grass … 😉