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Author Archives: Booksellers Without Borders

Five Minutes with Marni Bates

It’s been a while since we’ve featured an author interview, so we’re excited to be joined today by Marni Bates, author of Awkward, as part of her blog tour this month.  We reviewed Awkward yesterday, so check it out if you haven’t already!

Marni Bates blog tour

[Booksellers Without Borders]: Why should anybody buy your book?

[Marni Bates]: Erm . . . this is hard to answer without sounding like a pompous jerk. But I think that Awkward is a real fun book with loveable characters that will make you laugh and groan and (hopefully) swoon. Have I mentioned that there’s a really hot guy? Because I think Logan alone is worth reading the book . . .

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The Death of a Bookstore

The Death of a BookstoreIf you never worked at Borders, you may have already acknowledged the company’s sad passing and moved on.  If you spent several years of your life selling books and are still seeking other employment, however, it’s a bit harder to let go.  We know.

Today we would like to highlight a piece written by Tom Schwider, who worked at the beautiful Michigan Avenue store in Chicago (store 58, for those of us who identify by store number).  Store 58 was already scheduled to close long before the company declared bankruptcy, but got a one year extension that made the closing date fall only a month before the bankruptcy filing.  Tom highlights the death throes of a bookstore in honest, yet poignant, vignettes about people and experiences in those final days.

It’s a long read, but well worth it.  Settle in and give yourself some time with this one.  It gives a truer glimpse into the world of corporate bookselling and bookstore liquidation than anything else I have read.  A bittersweet memorial to the job we loved, and hated and, in the end, loved anyway.

Special thanks to Tom for sharing his words and allowing us to pass them along to you.

Read The Death of a Bookstore

 
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Posted by on January 13, 2012 in Other Writing

 

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Ode to an Indie

Unabridged Bookstore

Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago, IL

Indie Thursday came early this week.

For those of you who are unaware, Indie Thursday is a weekly Twitter event/meme/hashtag thingamajig started by friend of the blog Jenn.  Basically, it’s a way to share what books you purchase at independent bookstores each week, by tweeting about it with the hashtag #IndieThursday.  It comes a convenient 24 hours before Friday Reads, which is a similar method of sharing what you are reading every week.  #FridayReads promotes reading as a social experience; #IndieThursday builds off of its momentum and promotes buying your reading material from human beings who live and work in your community.  This blog strongly supports both.  Obviously.

More often than not, my #IndieThursday books are purchased from Unabridged Bookstore in Lakeview, a neighborhood in Chicago, both because I have to drive past it several times a week and because it’s a wonderful bookstore in just about every way possible.  I love bringing my nephew to the store after picking him up from daycare to let him choose a book to take home, and sometimes I splurge and get one for myself, too.  They also order books for me that aren’t in stock, and it’s always been a fast, pleasant experience.  I’m a fan.

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Posted by on December 7, 2011 in Bookstore Spotlight

 

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Guest Interview posted at Jenn’s Bookshelves

Murder, Monsters, MayhemWe’re proud to be participating in a month of Murder, Monsters, and Mayhem over at Jenn’s Bookshelves!  Our contribution has just been posted – another interview with blog favorite John Connolly.  This time we asked about the dark side of his writing.

See the guest interview here.

Read our previous interview with John here.

Thanks to Jenn for hosting us!

 
 

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John Connolly and Stuart Neville at Centuries & Sleuths

Neville and Connolly

Stuart Neville and John Connolly with BwoB admin Rachel

As most of you know, we are huge John Connolly fans around these parts.  When we heard he was going to be in town with fellow Irish crime writer Stuart Neville, we were excited!  We got to spend some time with them during the day and live-tweeted during the event itself.  Here are some tweets and pictures for any of you who were not able to attend in person.

@BksellerExpats: What a beautiful day for a book signing in Chicago! We’ll have @jconnollybooks and @stuartneville updates all day – keep checking back.

@BksellerExpats: “What I realized is that, by and large, my readers would prefer it if I died, as opposed to Charlie Parker.” – @jconnollybooks

@BksellerExpats: (We are live-tweeting the @jconnollybooks@stuartneville event tonight, in case you forgot.)

@BksellerExpats: Ooh, @jconnollybooks is reading the first chapter of the next Parker novel! Nice.

@BksellerExpats: “I’m usually about a third of the way into a book before I find out what kind of shape it’s going to be.” – @stuartneville

@BksellerExpats: “I can’t even read in a car, and I don’t think Rachel wanted a car covered in vomit.” – @jconnollybooks on writing on tour

(NOTE: We have it on good authority that no, she did not.)

@BksellerExpats: “Art comes out of hacking away on all those days when you want to be doing anything else.” – @jconnollybooks on having a writing schedule

@BksellerExpats: “Sometimes you just need an alleyway. And then you think, as far as my books are concerned, I’m God.” – @jconnollybooks on fictional alleys

@BksellerExpats: “After you read a book, you’re never the same person. You just can’t be.” – @jconnollybooks

Connolly / Neville signing

Connolly / Neville signing

Connolly / Neville signing

 
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Posted by on September 23, 2011 in Events

 

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Finis

The End

When I set up this blog, my friends and I were about to lose our jobs as booksellers, and the store we called home was about to close forever.  My goal was simple: to give us a place to continue sharing our love of reading, and to keep passing along the knowledge we had gained from working with books for so long.  I made a conscious decision not to discuss the specific company we worked for.  (I also decided not to mangle sentences in order to avoid ending them with prepositions.)  There was no need to discuss the company’s mistakes; we lived in their shadow for years, and haven’t escaped it yet.

I made an exception and posted pictures of our store in The Ghosts of Borders Past because I wanted to share our personal experience with this corporation’s downfall.  We are real people who took care of our books and had pride in our stores.  We also watched everything we had built through the years get destroyed in a matter of weeks.  Then we lost our jobs.  I still didn’t feel that I wanted to write about it on our blog proper, but I let the pictures tell the story.

Now the last store in the company has closed, and there’s not much left to say except goodbye, and we will miss you.  I still don’t want to use my blog for that purpose, but our friends at Word Hits have kindly hosted a fond farewell by yours truly.  You can read it here: Closed Book: The Last Days at Borders.

Word Hits has previously hosted my guest blog A Former Borders Employee Says Shop the Sales, in response to their post entitled Caveat Emptor: Skip the Borders Fire “Sale”.  We were also featured in their discussion of Books, Dialogue, and Community during Book Blogger Appreciation Week (BBAW).  We follow @WordHits on Twitter and like Word Hits on Facebook and think that you should, too.

If you want to know what the end of a once-great bookstore chain means to me, I invite you to click on the links above.  Here, we are back to reviews, interviews, and author events starting…now.

 
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Posted by on September 19, 2011 in Industry News, Updates

 

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Five Minutes with Julie Kramer

Julie Kramer

Julie Kramer

Julie Kramer is a former television journalist who now writes a series of mystery novels starring investigative reporter Riley Spartz.  Her books were among our favorites to hand sell, and we are sorry not to be able to do so in person any more.  You should be sure to pick up her fourth and newest title, Killing Kate, which will be released July 26th.  (Our review will be posted early next week.)

[Booksellers Without Borders]: Why should anybody buy your book?

[Julie Kramer]: Because angels might be the next vampires or demons or zombies. And KILLING KATE deals with a killer who draws chalk outlines shaped like angels around victims. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible features angels as messengers. So what message is this angel of death delivering? After a career in television news, some of my former colleagues believe I’ve been too candid reinventing myself from journalist to novelist. “Did you have to tell them, if it bleeds, it leads?”

Besides a stay-up-late read, my books also give you an inside look at how newsrooms function amid crime and chaos. Whether the issue is which missing people get publicity or why animal stories get good play in newscasts, you’ll see the media in an a more desperate light after you read my series.

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