May

19

Unbridled Books Partners with ABA for Exclusive 25-cent EBooks Sale

2011 at 6pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

unbridled books

There are already about a million reasons to love Unbridled Books. Here’s one more: June 9th-11th, Unbridled Books will be offering e-books of 25 of their best titles for 25-cents each EXCLUSIVELY through independent bookstores who use the eCommerce system.

Unbridled has partnered with the ABA (American Booksellers Association) to make this possible (more details on that below). Not all independent bookstores use eCommerce, so this is a special offer that is only available through participating stores. Check out this list of independent bookstores that sell Google ebooks.

If you don’t want to miss this awesome opportunity from Unbridled, or if you’re looking for an indie bookstore to support with your e-book purchases, please allow me to recommend my hometown favorite Fountain Bookstore. Bravo to Unbridled Books for a creative solution to encouraging indie bookstores to sell e-books and introducing indie bookstore shoppers to the Google e-books system.

Here’s the official news from Unbridled. Find the list of books that will be available June 9th-11th for 25 cents each after the jump.

Since the announcement late last year that independent booksellers would soon be selling eBooks from their bookstore websites and the launch of the Google portal on the ABA’s eCommerce stores, Unbridled has been following the developments of this promising alternative for eBook customers.  We followed the creative and proactive ways in which booksellers have been educating their customers about purchasing eBooks from independent stores.  We also visited many of the eCommerce store sites to see what they were doing to highlight their new eBook sales option.  While the major e-retailers have a big jump on the market, we felt that the independent booksellers should be applauded for their response to this new market.  We began talking to the staff at the ABA about the progress of eBook sales and offered to help.

Unbridled Books offers nearly every title in eBook format, and as an independent, for-profit publisher, we understand the struggle involved in bringing awareness to the readers.  So to help entice readers toward this new channel of eBook sales, we are partnering with the ABA on a promotion that highlights 25 Unbridled eBooks that booksellers can sell for three days (June 9th, 10th and 11th) for 25 cents each.  These 25 titles include 16 Booksense/Indie Next titles, two of which are former Booksense or Indie Next #1 selections.  This promotion is designed in support of ABA’s eCommerce stores; there are an estimated 250 bookstores in that program who are now selling eBooks on their websites. The ABA and Unbridled Books hope that this offer will help those 250 stores to increase awareness that customers can purchase eBooks through their local independent bookstores and can, for a limited time, buy their copies of Unbridled’s remarkable list of titles for a few pennies.

Read more

Filed Under In the Media, Issues in Publishing
11 Comments
 

Five More Ways to Support Your Bookstore

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Yesterday’s post about Borders’ bankruptcy and the reminder it brought that where we buy our books matters triggered wonderful discussions here and on Twitter (and in my poor email inbox, which is still quivering in the corner) about what we as readers—as consumers—can do to support bookstores and help them thrive. The first and most obvious action is the one I mentioned yesterday: do your book buying in actual bookstores. Or, as my pal Ron Hogan said so succinctly, leave the house!

But getting your butt off the couch and into the bookstore isn’t the only thing you can do.

Attend events. A bookstore’s ability to secure authors for readings and signings often hinges on its ability to demonstrate that it can attract an audience and that the audience will—wait for it—buy books! If you are fortunate enough to live near a store that currently offers author events, go check a few of them out. Take a friend. If, after hearing the author speak, it turns out that you’re not all that interested in his or her book, pick out something else to purchase instead. Try not to view author events as free entertainment; the store may not be charging admission, but they have to see profit from events in order to continue making them available to the community.  Read more

Filed Under In the Media, Issues in Publishing
19 Comments
 

Get Thee to a Bookery! [or Borders Went Belly-Up. Now What?]

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Borders announced that it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday (after 2010 losses topping $168 million) and will close 200 stores within the next few weeks (with potentially another 75 to follow), and of course, the interweb is aflurry with opinions and obituaries and cries of “it’s the end of publishing!” This comes as no surprise to those of us who live our lives in the online book community and follow industry news, but for normal readers nationwide, I imagine it is quite a shock.

In fact, I know it is because I’ve been hearing from folks who had no idea that Borders—or the industry as a whole, for that matter—was in any kind of trouble. And that indicates that it might be high time for publishers and booksellers (and bloggers, hi!) to make a more concerted effort to educate their consumers and communities. Read more

Filed Under In the Media, Issues in Publishing
32 Comments
 

Let's try this whole "having a conversation about a difficult topic" thing again.

2010 at 7am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Most days, I am proud to be a member of the book blogging community.

This Monday was not one of those days.

I spent most of the weekend with my head in a book and off the internet, so I missed most of the now-controversial discussion about publishers whitewashing book covers. If you were as unplugged as I was, the in-a-nutshell recap goes like this: several major publishers have misrepresented the race of main characters on the covers of their books, particularly books directed at the young adult (YA) audience, by putting white and light-skinned girls on the covers of books whose main characters are people of color. This is hardly a new phenomenon in publishing, but it is certainly a problematic one, and it’s about time we had a conversation about it.  (If you’re looking for more background info than that, read this article from Salon.)

On Monday, a book blogger who has a large following and is well-respected in the YA blogging community wrote a post exploring the concepts of racism, white privilege, and the problems with whitewashing in publishing. Her post may not have been perfect, but it was a call to dialogue. It was a beginning.

Or, at least, it could have been. It should have been.

I don’t know this blogger very well. In fact, I don’t really know her at all. But I could see what she was trying to do, and I respected it.  She was taking a risk by writing a post about very sensitive, personal, emotionally-charged issues, and she was using her platform and her wide reach to try to make a statement of standards and expectations that had the potential to reach publishers.

It had the potential to make a difference.

Unfortunately, several people missed the point and threw away their opportunity to make constructive comments, choosing instead to hurl insults at each other and the blogger, and what I read in those comments made me embarrassed for them and ashamed to be associated with them.  I am not linking to the post because, really, those comments do not deserve any additional attention, and what I want to do is re-focus the blogging community on what this conversation was supposed to be about in the first place.

Because I am not involved in the YA community and don’t have emotional ties to anyone involved, I have the benefit of a little distance and detachment, and that, in case you’re wondering, is why I’m blogging about this at all. I do not presume to speak for all of us; rather, I hope to spark conversation that will lead to insight and better understanding and change.

The post I’m referring to was supposed to be a coming together of bloggers and readers—of people who buy books and promote books and support the publishing industry—and the beginning of a movement in which we tell publishers that we will not accept whitewashing any longer.

So people, let’s get it right this time.

A message to publishers:

We, the reading community, want to see diversity in the characters we read about, and we want to see those characters depicted accurately on book covers. And we have a few things to say:

White readers do not just want to read books with white characters and white people on the cover.

People of color do not just want to read books with white characters and white people on the cover, and your assumption that they do is insulting, degrading, and a sorry capitulation to the wrongheaded belief that people of color must secretly want to be white.

This matters because so much of how we make sense of the world and our own experiences comes from what we encounter in media (books, music, television, movies, etc.),  so it is important for media to offer accessible, easy-to-relate-to role models in whom people of every race, color, creed, and sexual orientation can see themselves and begin to shape their lives.  And it’s important for young people to be able to see people who are like them in the things they read and watch and to be able to imagine a life for themselves if their current location and circumstances don’t allow them to do it.

Additionally, whitewashing extends beyond the way you represent characters on the cover of books. It exists in your insistence on marketing books written by people of color as part of separate subgenres, even when their subject matter has little, if any, overlap.  The fact that a book is written by an African American author does not make it a work of “African American fiction,” and it is quite a stretch to say that all works by African American authors are thematically similar enough to be accurately grouped together in the (entirely unhelpful) subgenre, or that the only people who will want to buy books by African American authors are other African Americans. (I’m using African American authors as the example here because examples of this are most readily available.)

Classifying a book based on the author’s ethnicity rather than its content implies that the author’s ethnicity is the book’s defining feature.  Is that really the message you want to send?

We readers aren’t stupid. We know that you’re doing what you’re doing because it all comes down to dollars. And maybe you really do think you have to put white characters on covers and separate books by white authors from books by people of color in order to sell them. Or maybe you just aren’t thinking about it.

Whichever it is, it is a problem. And it has to stop. You can’t know that people will or won’t buy books with people of color in the pages or on the cover until you make those books available, and I’m willing to bet the feedback will be positive. And yes, we know that what you’re doing is about business, but it also has immeasurable social impact, and you should take some time to consider that as you make choices about which books you will publish and how you will package and market them.

These choices reflect your values as individuals and as companies, and we, your consumers, are paying attention.

We will choose to express our values and priorities in many different ways. Some of us are organizing a boycott. Others are planning to shine a light on authors and publishers who are leading the way.  Some of us will write posts about our favorite books featuring characters of color, or our favorite authors who are people of color, or the personal experiences that shape our understanding of issues related to race or minority status (because, let’s face it, we could have a similar conversation about many so-called subgenres), and some of us will chime in with supportive comments. We will speak with many voices but one message.

And we hope like hell that you’ll be listening.

Filed Under Issues in Publishing
Leave a Comment