Three quicks

Had a fun reading at Borderlands Books this weekend. Actually, it was the usual miserable reading, but many copies of The Last Weekend were sold, both in the lead up to the event and on the day itself. Local bookstore plus local story plus local author means local success.

I also whipped up a pre-order form for I Am Providence for people who want it from Borderlands. See?



Several were filled out. I am back to primarily linking to Amazon as my experience with Powells and publisher websites is that for the most part even interested readers will not buy from non-amazon links, even with extensive discussion of Amazon's labor practices and the importance of supporting small publishers by buying direct. Not just me either—this was an underdiscussed element of Jessa Crispin's kiss-off interview about the shuttering of her famed blogzine Bookslut:

Well, the only reason why Bookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it. It used to be you could get an advertiser for a month; now it’s all directly linked to how many pageviews you get. So you can’t write about obscure literature that only ten people care about and make eight cents. You have to write about the books that all the people already know about. And then it just orients you toward clickbait, and you have to come up with stunts and your design has to be beautiful. The only program that actually gives you money is Amazon. We used them back when we were profitable — we paid some writers back when we were profitable — and then, at some point, I realized they were fucking trashing the industry. Then we switched to Powell's, which gave us absolutely no money.

It's not that Powell's keeps money; it's that people won't buy from Powell's.

So here's to trashing the industry...except that if you live in the Bay Area, please check out Borderlands. They'll make a big order, happily take the form, and I'll show up early to make sure all orders are personalized. They'll also sell books when they arrive, instead of holding them in embargo till August the 2nd.


In other weird news, I was interviewed along with several other newer "horror" authors—Laird Barron, Molly Tanzer, Sarah Langan—for The Federalist.

I am just as confused as you are by that.


Finally, today is the last day for California residents to change their party identification to either Democrat or Decline to State in order to vote for Bernie in the primary to Peace and Freedom and thus actually have something to do with real socialist politics. Your county information is here.