Well, in practically every college town or even major tourist
stop, I find little independent stores selling used book and sometimes a
curated selection of new books. On the
hip (for conservative Richmond VA) Cary Street Saturday (a cold day), I
stumbled upon Chop Suey Books, although I didn’t get to meet the store cat, who
was sleeping in a closet.
I’m beginning to believe that my little “Do Ask Do Tell”
series could catch eyes in places like this.
While some of the self-publishing companies have bookstore returnability
policies and campaigns to contact samples of them, it seems as though there is
a large number of smaller ones that I simply stumble on. Some of them also sell
antiques. It’s hard to imagine a
business model to sell self-published books in these stores that could work
with a reasonable logistical effort by the author. But it is something to think about as I start
working up my sci-fi novel.
In a meeting today with an attorney and would-be suspense
author, I was told that publishers are telling suspense authors to stay away
from depicting terror plots that are really too realistic and could actually be
carried out. I can recall right after
9/11, the CIA said, “what we had was a failure of imagination.” No longer.
I said, well, publish on Create Space. And he says, that destroys your
chance to ever sell. I also heard that
the most vulnerable pile of inadequately defended nuclear waste and raw
materials in the world is in Kazakhstan.
The lapse at the NSA leading to the explosion of malware
last spring may already be a case of life following art.
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