Tuesday, April 21, 2009

helpful guidelines for visiting a bookstore

For those authors who are like me and never know the proper etiquette when visiting a bookstore (I am usually the "surreptitious" though I have been guilty of being the "sneaky") Josie Leavit at Shelftalker has this great post, with the following excerpt:

Authors tend to be readers and we love them for that. We love them for creating the works that we can so enthusiastically sell. But authors who just happen upon a bookstore act one of three ways: the upfront, the surreptitious and the sneaky.


Don't miss it!

2 comments:

Kimbra Kasch said...

Funny how famous people can be sooo shy or, maybe, it's humble.

Christine Tripp said...

The second surreptitious drop-by is when authors just checks out the shelves for their book. Often times they will face out their book or somehow make them more prominent on the shelf.

I admit to being one of those. Not my books but others, those authors or illustrators I know by name. I will be in Chapters book stores (the Canadian equivilant of the US Barnes and Noble I guess) and if I know the person, I face their book OUT! I make no appologise for this when it comes to the mega chains, as they only feature the mass market commercial books that are selling in any case. I would, however, never do such a thing in a small indie book store. They work very hard to keep their small book store going and that is something I would not compromise. The big chains however, are fair game to me.
With the large book store chains, well they might only have one or two of my books in stock in any case, so it makes no never mind to me or my sales.
I've never had a book store even care that I'm local so I do what I can for the people I know but more important, the people I admire.
If it means "facing out" a book by Jeremy Tankard, great books for kids, so, sue me:)