Small Bookshops and E-Readers

I’ve just stumbled upon some potentially great news, starting this month it looks like small bookstores will be able to break into the e-book market, this is thanks to a new deal between ABA (American Booksellers Association) and Kobo. Through this deal indie bookstores will be able to sell Kobo e-readers and accessories in their stores, and the store will then gain a profit from any kobos that, that store sold.
Kobo which has never held many American consumers is hoping to use this as a way to spring board into a higher state of public awareness.
I just wish that I would be able convince the owners of my shop to try this out with Kobo, I’m not too hopeful as we’re not allowed to have a website or even a facebook page.

 

 

The Rage- Irish Crime at its Best

Rating 4.5 stars
Good crime novels have always been a particular favorite of mine, something about incurable rogues will always delight me, and on top of that I do have a wee bit of an Irish obsession. This most likely due to my heritage and the fact that there is little better in this world than a nice bottle of John Jameson. The other day an advanced reader copy of The Rage came into the bookshop I work at and now I can add another thing to the list of things I love, the books of Gene Kerrigan.

Mr Kerrigan has written a wonderful, quickly paced story with incredibly well designed and intriguing characters. A former nun hiding from a shameful past within a monastery, a decent cop who tries to toe the line, and a street hood fresh out of prison and looking for the big score, no more petty jobs for him.

Gene Kerrigan also does a fantastic job of transporting the reader into a modern day Ireland, without over romanticizing the land by over-embellishing the land with a few too many emerald-green glens like other authors have been wont to do.

The only problem there might have been with this books was I finished it far too quickly, and I am eagerly looking forward to reading more from this author.

The Rage
by Gene Kerrigan
ISBN 9781846552564

 

Quirk Books and Publishing

Another one of these, this time thanks to Quirk Books publishing.

 

America’s 16th Slayer… I mean President.

Here is a trailer for the new film, the book to movie adaptation that the world needed.

I will say that after listening an audio copy of the book, I thought it was exactly how I anticipated. It is certainly the ultimate book about Abraham Lincoln hunting vampires, it blows all the other books about this particular subject out of the water.

To find a copy please shop IndieBound:
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A New Lemony Snicket Series

After writing a book under the pseudonym Daniel Handler, Lemony Snicket returns to writing under his proper name. He of course is still discouraging people from reading the terrible and soul-destroying books. The new series “All The Wrong Questions” will be a supposedly highly biographical account of Snicket’s childhood and will be published by Little Brown Books for Young Readers. The first book in this series Who Could that Be At This Hour will be released in October.
Little Brown plans on printing around a million copies and Snicket is left puzzling in an email “Why anyone would be interested.”

Thanks to the Huffington Post

 

The Yard: A Preview

I love a good mystery, and I’m also very interested in Victorian London, which meant when an advanced reading copy of the upcoming novel The Yard by Alex Grecian came into Indigo Books my manager made sure I got my hands on it. After basically reading it nonstop the biggest problem is it will be at least until June before the rest of you can read it.

The Yard takes place shortly after Jack the Ripper went through his spree in Whitechapel, and I was very grateful that the notorious man didn’t make a cameo appearance in the novel, with the exception of a dream or two. The London presented by Grecian has not been whitewashed, it is a dark, gritty and horribly inhospitable place. Children are kidnapped forced into workshops or up chimneys and in just the month before the book takes place at least 96 men with their throats slit were fished out of the Thames. Grecian certainly doesn’t try to portray the city through an inaccurate nostalgic lens.

Our main characters are the boys from The Murder Squad, the twelve detectives charged by Scotland Yard to handle every murder case that happens within London. These men are given strong and vivid characters and each one of the detectives is clearly and compellingly distinct from the others. The novel debuts with the discovery that one of their fellow detectives has been murdered, and if that wasn’t enough for them another serial killer has begun a reign of terror in the city. The novel also shows us the birth of forensics to solve crime with Dr. Kingsley the Yard’s first Forensic Pathologist.

The actual mysteries in the book are not the main focus, we regularly follow the villain’s perspective, so we know who the guilty parties are well before the end of the book. . The book’s real strength is in the polices interactions with each and the stresses of trying to rebuild the reputation of The Yard after the Ripper fiasco.

The Murder Squad is based an actual and similarly understaffed division of Scotland Yard that was created to try to curtail the bad press that Jack the Ripper caused.

This is a great work by a debut novelist, and I can’t wait to read more books in this series.

To pre-order a copy please shop IndieBound:

 

Three Chains Strong Against Amazon

Indigo Books and Music has joined other bookstore chains Barnes and Noble and Books A-Million in vowing not to carry books published by Amazon’s publishing imprints. Time will only tell if it will put any dent on Amazon’s sales or not. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if indie bookstores didn’t regularly carry Amazon published books, although in order to survive I’m sure they would still happily fill out a special order for any book that their costumer wants. Because when it comes down to it, the ultimate goal of running a bookstore is to get the costumer the books they want and will enjoy.

As more stores are standing against Amazon, talks about the online super store opening brick and mortar stores are popping up again.

I have my doubts that a physical location for Amazon will truly work out, some much of their advantage is the fact that the online stores carry almost everything, and you don’t have to leave your house to shop there. A physical place unless it takes on a Costco like atmosphere as a warehouse store can’t possibly hope to offer the same amount of variety and discounts in items.

 

Sailing Through Outer Space

I have been under the weather these past couple of days, and such I was on the look out for a good book to read. On a recommendation from Vaguely Piratical I decided to pick up the book Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell. I’ve since read it and quickly moved on to the other books in the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series.

Despite this being a sci-fi book I greatly enjoyed it. I’ve always been a fan of science fiction in principle but in practice I’ve very rarely ever been compelled by the stories. I think the problem I have is sci-fi tends towards the space opera and a large epic where small things like character development get left to the way side. We do not encounter that at all in Quarter Share.

In the novel there are no space based dog fights or alien creatures trying to wipe out humanity, instead The vast majority of the book takes place on a space-faring clipper ship. We experience living within the spaceship as it travels through the cosmos on trading missions, and Mr. Lowell does a tremendous job of setting the feeling of living onboard this ship. The act of working on a spaceship doesn’t seem that foreign from the idea of working on a 1700s sailing vessel. Throughout the book there are several allusions to Melville’s Moby Dick and Forester’s Hornblower books, which makes it clear that the author has certainly gone through some effort to understand sailing life and how it has to compare to spacer life.

I will admit that at times we got a little too bogged down in the ideas behind trading and how profits work, but other than that I have no complaints what so ever about these books.

This is all around a great story for anyone who loves the idea of space travel or loves a good seafaring yarn.

To find a copy please shop IndieBound:

 

Literary Super Bowl Build Up

As the Super Bowl quickly approaches even those in the non sports publishing world are getting excited. In the intensity of team rivalries two small publishers Beacon Press of Boston and Other Press of New York have placed a unique wager on the outcome of the game.
The publishing company from the town that hosts the losing team “will promote two of the other publisher’s titles for a week on the web, featuring the two titles on their website and promoting the titles across social media platforms.”

In the spirit of fair play the winning publishing house will also have a few conditions to live up to as well, they will have to promise to give away free books to the winner of a special draw that you can enter through this link.

I will admit that this is the first I’ve heard of these two publishing houses, but I’ll have to take a look at their titles to see who I’ll root for this Sunday.

This wager was apparently made during a heated dinner at The Digital Book World Conference last month. One can only imagine the amount of liquid libations that lead up to it.

 

Bibliopirate/Indiebound Alliance

One of the reasons I left wordpress.com for my own privately hosted website was so I could join an affiliate program and thus be able to earn a commission off of the books I reviewed here. I don’t expect to be able to make my fortune or ever be able to run this blog full-time, but it would always be nice to earn something to help feed my reading problem, which will lead to more reviews.

Once I’ve decided to join an affiliate program I had to sort out which program was for me, the first thought was of course going to Amazon, they are without a doubt the leading seller of just about anything and have a well established affiliate program. The idea of using amazon though wasn’t sitting right with me, while in principle I have nothing wrong with the giant online supermarket, I don’t feel as if they need any help coaxing people to buy from them. In my heart of hearts I want to support my indie booksellers no matter what and I would feel the biggest hypocrite if I ever sent anyone to Amazon for a product they could&nbsp; get elsewhere.

So not knowing where to go I’ve spent a few days looking up various programs I had my eye on the Google program for a bit, but was still undecided until I saw that Indiebound has an affiliate options, once I knew that, there was no question. Indiebound is for me.

I’m a great lover of the Indiebound organization and for years I’ve always collected their monthly publication Bookpage, for those of you who don’t know Bookpage is one of the best monthly book review magazines out there, and many bookstores and libraries carry free copies. So if ever there was place to send shoppers this is it. The Bibliopirate and Indiebound Alliance has been formed.

Please shop Indiebound and support small passionate bookstores.
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