Saturday, June 19, 2010

Loving Books on a Budget

Nicola Morgan writes today that she's deeply unhappy about the state of publishing. Reading her blog post, it's hard to feel any other way.

The best thing we can do for our industry is to buy lots of books. But that big recession that's making it hard for publishing? We all know it's making it hard for us too. It isn't easy to find the money to buy new books, especially if, like most writers, you have a big pile of unread books in your house.

There's a post here by Lisa Schroeder, about how to help writers when you have limited finances. As book bloggers, we're probably all already doing most of them. But it's no harm to refresh our memories.

One thing I am lax about is linking. I blog about books quite often (although the authors are frequently dead - Dodie Smith, Kathleen Winsor et al) but I never link to them. In future, I will link to somewhere where the books can be bought (I hate to put temptation right there, but you never know who might surf in and decide to buy if I make it a little easier, right?), and if the writer has a webpage or a blog, I will link to that. I usually buy a lot of books as Christmas gifts (my family are all big readers) but I'll make more of an effort with birthdays. I recently spotted a book that I haven't read myself (Gail Carriger's Soulless - see what I did there?) that I wanted to buy for Writer Friend, and I didn't - because I hadn't read it and couldn't endorse it. I've read enough reviews of it that I now think I should have taken the risk.

Anyway, I hope there's a few things in Lisa's post that make you all think - and that we can all come up with more ideas, and new ways to keep books moving and publishers signing contracts :)

3 comments:

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  2. I read Nicola's blog post with a sense of impending doom. I know things are tough right now, but you're right: there are things we can do to hlep authors! Funnily enough India Drummond blogged about this the other day: www.indiadrummond.com.

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  3. Thanks for the links and suggestions! I think posting reviews on Goodreads & Amazon, esp. for the debut and midlist authors helps, too. They'll reach those who DO buy books, even if the book you read was a library check out. And libraries buy books, too so we should all just read more dang it!

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