Anne Sexton is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who suffered depression and manic episodes throughout her life. It was actually her therapist who suggested that she take up poetry, and she quickly became known for her deeply personal and emotional work. I find her poems haunting, with the kind of depth that makes me take a hard look at myself, too. If that is your thing, make sure to pick up a copy of The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton, which we should have available in the store or online.

“Her Kind” by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

And just a quick #1b1t update for the non-tweeps: You can vote on the final book here, although the point seems pretty moot by now. Every time I look, American Gods by Neil Gaiman seems to have gained another 200 votes or so. Despite some dissatisfaction among the Twitter crowd, I’m thrilled- it’s one of the few books I haven’t read off of the final list, and also one of the few books by Gaiman I am still missing out on. Plus, he is very active on twitter (@neilhimself), something none of the other authors have going for them. Good choice for the first One Book One Twitter worldwide read, I’d say.

It didn’t work.  There was too much overlap among the social networks of the various co-publishers, leading to many people seeing the same tweet several times.  The book world has responded at first with confusion, and then moved quickly to anger, scorn and ridicule.  As Electric Literature editor Andy Hunter said in commenting on the blog HTML Giant, “One problem with the copublishing is that the people getting multiple feeds are the people who avidly follow publishing and literature – bloggers, media, other publishers, etc. Not a good group to annoy! They shape the narrative.”  Yesterday afternoon, I made the difficult decision to stop co-publishing the story.  I did this primarily because it’s December, and I needed the full power of my Twitter feed to promote the store at this crucial time.  The addition of my own Tweets interspersed with those of the story was too confusing for many people, and I just couldn’t afford that with the holidays approaching.  If the story had run in April, I’d have let it finish.  As it is, I think it was a noble failure.

Okay, so the publishing and bookselling world didn’t love it.  Should that matter?  What about the people outside the book and publishing world?  Aren’t those the people we should be trying to find and reach?  Did the Moody story reach any of those people?  I think it did, whether the literary world wants to hear it or not.  When I announced that we were ending the experiment, @minorheroine said “WAIT! But, are you gonna do this again?! I LOVED IT!!”  Others retweeted lines they particularly enjoyed.  Some people, it seems, were enjoying the experiment, even if it annoyed people who follow lots of book feeds.

The Moody Twitter experiment (and Moody wasn’t to blame for its failure, though I’m sure the first couple comments will be “ZOMG!1! Rick Moody is teh suck!1!!1″) depressed me for a number of reasons.  First, it made me wonder what we’re all doing on Twitter.  If so many of my followers are book industry people, am I wasting my time with it?  All this time, I’d hoped I was reaching customers.  To be sure, Twitter is useful for talking to colleagues in the book industry, and I’ll continue to use it for that purpose, but if it doesn’t have a reach beyond that, I’m not sure what the point is.  So much of the dialog that happens on Twitter and on the literary blogs feels masturbatory to me.  It’s the same couple hundred people talking about the same issues to the same audience.  Is that what I’ve been doing these past few years?  Is that what the book business is at this point?  If it is, then to quote the modern day philosopher Bunk Moreland “We ain’t about much.”

The book business is in major decline, and while we can all howl about the reasons why, the main one, it seems to me, is that not enough people read (and those who do, read less than they used to).  There are more ways than ever to get your entertainment and information, and books are having a lot of trouble keeping up.  Those of us who rely on selling books for a living need to devote a lot of time to finding people who are not readers.  We have to grow our market, or we are in for a very dark future indeed.   The reaction to this Twitter experiment seems to indicate to me that we’re not all that interested in doing it.  Or maybe we are, as long as it doesn’t interrupt our conversations about ebook formatting and the National Book Awards.

In the evening on Monday, one of my Twitter colleagues remarked that she couldn’t believe “Moody” hadn’t become a trending topic on Twitter for the day.  Really?  I can.  You know why?  Nobody cares.  Oh, not nobody.  A few thousand people care, the same few thousand who care about the National Book Awards and ebook formatting.  Those few thousand are enough of a market if you’re set up to do business that way.  But it’s not enough to support the whole industry.  To the general public, Rick Moody’s name probably rings out only as the guy who wrote the book that the movie The Ice Storm was based on, if that.  Books simply don’t have the cultural reach of movies or music or sports or politics.  And that, right there, is the problem.  But from where I sit, much of the book industry seems content to talk amongst themselves.  For recent evidence of that, look at Book Expo America deciding not to open its doors to the general public.  As Richard Nash put it, “Don’t want to have to rush erecting our foamcore cover mock-ups.”

I’m not arguing that books aren’t important or an inherent good for society, nor am I arguing that we’ll see the disappearance of the book anytime soon.  But we have to ask ourselves if we’re producing and selling something that fewer and fewer people want to consume, why are we doing it?  And if attempts to reach new readers like the Moody Twitter experiment are met with instant derision, how will we reach those people who aren’t currently reading?  I don’t have the answers, I don’t think.  At Vroman’s, we’re willing to try just about anything to get people into the store, and to be honest, we don’t care if they’re readers or not.  We sell all sorts of non-book products, including clothing for children, stationery, toys, musical instruments and food.  And that seems to anger some people, as if selling those products makes us less of a bookstore.  It’s the same thinking that leads book industry types to force something like the Moody experiment to failure.

We need to consider what people like Gary Vaynerchuk are doing to sell books.  Here’s a guy who put up billboards for his book, who went on a 24-hour airport signing tour, who bought video ad space at gas station pumps.  Did it work?  Well, his book debuted at #2 on the NYT Bestseller list.  But many in the book world dislike him, as he has repeatedly stated “I don’t read books.”  Exactly.  If we’re trying to reach people who don’t currently read, maybe we should be paying attention to them.  Since the Twitter experiment didn’t work, the attitude should be “What do we try next?”  That’s question I’d like to see answered.  Maybe I’ll ask it on Twitter.

[If you were enjoying the Moody story and would like to see it through to the end, I encourage you to follow @ElectricLit on Twitter.]

I’m in a creative writing class, and when we discuss each other’s work there’s always the issue of technology.  Doesn’t this character have a cell phone, we ask.   They’d be able to trace the credit card sales! we say.  Technology has caused fiction writers a lot of grief.  In the old days — the early 90s, say — a character could pretty much disappear from sight.  Messages were lost, people raced against time.  Now, they have a device that connects them to the world in their pocket at all times.  Anybody writing a thriller or mystery has had to reckon with that for a few years now, but literary fiction seems content to ignore the times, or at least the technology of them.  Doctorow’s book, while maybe not strictly literary fiction, is the first novel I’ve read that even mentions Twitter.  Only a handful that I’ve read mention blogs.  And yet these things, along with Facebook and the rest of the net, are parts of our daily lives.  Shouldn’t our fiction represent that?  Why doesn’t it?

The most obvious reason is timeliness.  It takes a few years to write a novel, so the fiction coming out now is actually a few years old, in terms of when it was conceived.  Twitter and Facebook have only just broken into the common consciousness.  Blogs are a bit older, but they have slightly higher profile in fiction than the new “social media.”  In two or three years, don’t be surprised to find characters tweeting and facebooking all over the place.

Another reason, and one I find somewhat less defensible, is that of dating the material.  Novelists — some novelists, at least — are weary of referencing too many specific pop culture items because it can date the book to a specific time and place.  To be sure, it’s important to guard against too many references, as it’s difficult (maybe impossible) to know what will survive.  God knows I felt like a fool for writing that book about the Beanie Baby-crazed gangsta rapper who maintained a geocities site about the Clinton-Lewinski scandal.  That book is going nowhere.  But seriously, though, some pop culture references are fine (Look at Ulysses, one of the greatest books ever written.  It’s loaded with all kinds of arcane references to turn of the century Irish pop culture and politics).  The way I see it, Twitter and Blogs and social media are a part of how we communicate, so writing a book where none of the characters ever use them is pretty strange.

What do you think?  Will we see more characters using social media and the web?

What has felt a little more fun, a little more happening, are feeds.  I’m talking about Twitter and Tumblr, mainly, though Facebook, at its best, gives me what I’m talking about.  I’ve been putting a bit of thought into why this kind of web interaction feels more compelling to me, and what I’ve come up with is curation.  When I look at Google Reader, it’s essentially a bunch of sites that I found.  While they’ve tried to build in a social aspect to the reader, I haven’t been able to make it work for me.

But a feed — like my tumblr feed or my twitter stream — that’s content curated by other people.  Sure I decided who to follow, but the links, the posts, and the tweets that those feeds bring to me (this is key–they come to me!) are selected by other people.  I find that this leads me further off into the web, and facilitates discovery and serendipity much better than the static blog set up.

As such, I thought I’d use this Friday afternoon post to point you to a few great sites that came to me through my feed.  It’s kind of like my own Follow Friday.

• I’ve blogged before about You Might Find Yourself, but I will link to it here again and recommend it to anyone interested in fashion and photography, especially men’s fashion.  YMFY consistently posts the most gorgeous clothing presented in the most pleasing way.  Through in the occasional shot of a beautiful model or a thoughtful article, and it’s pretty much the perfect Tumblr blog.
• Also on the fashion blog front is Put This On, another Tumblr blog that offers great fashion content for men.  More of a guide than YMFY, PTO offers shopping and style tips, and recently featured a video about denim shot partially in Pasadena.  (A word to the wise, though:  Don’t start following this blog if you don’t want to buy some clothes.  It’s simply too painful.)
• LOLerature is exactly what it sounds like:  LOLCats for book lovers.  The tagline for the blog is “I CAN HAZ CANON?”
• If you enjoy laughing, you must follow some of the funny Twitterers out there, including Twitter superstar Just_Alison.  Not only is she very funny, but she’s a fan of Vroman’s.

Enjoy your weekends everyone.

On Wednesday, I have the privilege of appearing on a panel at the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf).  My panel is called I Tweet Therefore I Am: Where Do Personal Identity and Brand Identity Meet?, and it is at 2:05 on Wednesday at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.  If you’re coming to the conference, you absolutely must come to my panel.  It will be rocking.  But don’t come for me; my fellow panelists are Mark Tauber, publisher of HarperOne (@MarkTauber), Debbie Stier from Harper Studio (@debbiestier) (Debbie set the whole thing up and is one of the really forward-thinking people in publishing) and actress and writer Mariel Hemingway (@marielhemingway).  I am, of course, @vromans.

In the meantime, I thought I’d open this post up to you all to comment on a very simple but important question:  What have you read lately that you’d like to recommend to everyone?  It can be a book (obviously), a blog, an article…anything really.  Let’s open it up and get some interesting conversations started, and I’ll see you all on Thursday.  Have a great week.

Don’t.

This is more important than that, and now is the perfect time to think about whether you want to trust one company to dominate the book market, or any market, for that matter.  The benefit of having  a rich, diverse ecosystem of vendors and suppliers has never been more obvious:  many sources of information equals choice, and choice equals freedom.  It’s actually your freedom that’s at stake here, and putting things back the way they were, fixing the notorious “glitch,” won’t change that.  Because your freedom was at stake long before this recent de-listing experiment. Anytime you limit yourself to fewer suppliers, especially of something as vital as information (and if you purchase a Kindle, you’re effectively doing just that, limiting yourself to a single information provider), you’re putting yourself at the mercy of that provider.

And what kind of a provider is Amazon, anyway?  They’re not the most transparent of companies.  In fact, they’re among the least transparent.  They give jack to charity, they don’t pay state sales tax despite doing much business in every state, and they aim to be nothing less than the sole provider of media on the planet.

Do you want that much power in the hands of one company?  Even those among you who believe in the benevolent dictator model must be worried about this.  Think for a second about what Amazon did here.  In the world of ecommerce, the search is king.  Almost everybody who shops online visits a site to find a specific product.  By intentionally obscuring and manipulating the search results of your site, you are making a clear statement:  We don’t want you to read these books.  I can tell you from experience that if something is difficult to find through a search, it will not sell.  Not only was this a suspicious action on Amazon’s part, it had the potential to be very “successful” (ie, it would’ve greatly decreased the sales of those titles).

I know you think I’m overreacting.  You say, “So what?  They’ll list the books again, and surely they won’t be stupid enough to try something like this again.  After all, we caught them, didn’t we?”  True…this time.  My point still stands.  Concentration of power is a dangerous thing.  “But what if it was a hacker?”  I think the point still stands.  This is the proverbial putting of eggs in too few baskets.  I think independent publisher sales rep John Mesjak put it best when he tweeted this statement: “I haven’t read all of #amazonfail, so I am likely repeating, but my takeaway: this S#!T happens with monoculture gatekeepers. Go IndieBound!”

It’s worth noting that Mesjak uses the word “monoculture” here, a word derived from agriculture.  It’s taken us some thirty years (since the passage of  Earl Butz’s “Get Big or Get Out” Farm Bill in the 1970s) to realize that having a few corporations control our food supply was a really bad idea.  What have we seen as a response to this?  A rise in small, local farms, increased urban farming efforts, and a locavore movement that allows people to opt out of a corporate food culture that is destroying our bodies, our country and our planet with alarming speed.  The small, local farm, something that was all but extinct ten years ago, is beginning to make a comeback, as communities realize the value of growing their own food.  As we see small, independent, locally-minded bookstores closing every day, ask yourself whether you want a future where certain books are unavailable to you because of corporate fiat or whether you want the freedom to choose.  It might cost you a dollar or two more, but isn’t it worth it?

• Everybody is talking about digiARCs today, with Stephanie’s article in Shelf Awareness and Jessica’s post at The Written Nerd leading the way.  I would LOVE the ability to read ARCs on my iPhone, as it would reduce the clutter in my apartment.  As an inducement to publishers, it would probably make me much more willing to give your galley a shot.  I can see resistance from publishers, though.  If the physical ARCs they distribute now end up at The Strand, how long before the digiARC of Jonathan Lethem’s new book ends up on the internet somewhere, months before publication date?

• On the subject of ebooks, there’s a good post about the customer boycott on Kindle ebooks priced over $9.99 at Conversational Reading.   I’ve already left a comment on the post (click through to read it), but I’ll expand the point here.  This boycott is wrongheaded and it’s bad for everyone involved.  I think tiered pricing is the smartest, fairest model for e-content.  It won’t be the format of a product but rather the speed and the timing of how  and when the product is delivered that will determine the price.  If you want a book within the first few months it is out, you will pay a premium for it.  Not because it costs more for the publisher to make it (the cost of production, in this case, is wholly irrelevant to pricing) but rather because the demand for the book is high at this point.  As demand drops, so does the price.  Online music retailers have finally figured this out, so let’s all agree to skip the years of fighting about it and switch straight to a teired pricing system for ebooks.

• Today would be John Fante’s 100th birthday.  I think of Fante’s novel Ask the Dust as sort of the first LA novel.  Indeed, from Stephen Cooper’s appreciation in today’s LA Times:  “In Fante’s hands, the landscape of greater Los Angeles — from Pershing Square to the Santa Monica beach to Long Beach to the San Fernando Valley to Central Avenue and finally to the Mojave — became a three-dimensional character. Never before had the city been seen with such a penetrating, panoramic eye.”

• The Inside Flap, formerly the excellent blog of Harry W. Schwartz Booksellers in Milwaukee, WI, is back in action despite the Schwartz’s closing.  Hooray!

Each year in April, Los Angeles shows off its literary stuff at the LA Times Festival of Books.  The Festival features panels on subjects like “Mysteries in Black and White” and “Sports:  The Athlete as Role Model.”  There are stages featuring readings and talks by dozens of fabulous authors and celebrities, literary and non.  This year, the LA Times is running a new collaborative serial as a lead up to the festival.  And best of all, the local independent bookstores set up shop, hosting booth signings and selling all sorts of interesting books and gifts.

Vroman’s will be taking part in the festival in a number of ways this year.  First of all, we are once again running our popular Book Buses to the Festival of Books on Saturday, April 25.  What are book buses?  Each year for the past eight years, Vroman’s has run buses to and from the festival on Saturday.  Everybody who signs up for the bus gets a light breakfast of bagels and juice, then rides the bus to the festival, skipping the lousy traffic and even better, avoiding the huge hassle of parking in Westwood.  Each bus is hosted by an author who discusses his or her books and takes questions from the audience.  At the end of the day, everybody piles back onto the buses and rides home, tired but happy.  At the end of the day, each bus rider gets a bag loaded with free books and a coupon good for 20% off at Vroman’s for the next few days.

The authors on this year’s buses are pretty terrific.  Charlie Huston hosts the Mystery Bus, where he’ll regale passengers with tales of crime scene cleanup crews and much more from his book The Mystic Arts of Removing All Signs of Death.  Gustavo Arellano, author of Ask a Mexican and Orange County:  A Personal History, hosts our second bus.  Jerrilyn Farmer, author of Murder at the Academy Awards, will host the third bus, while bestselling thriller writer Gregg Hurwitz, whose latest book is The Crime Writer, hosts the fourth bus.  To sign up for one of the buses, just give us a call at 626-449-5320.

Vroman’s will also have a booth at the Festival of Books (Booth 367!), where we’ll be hosting an incredible group of authors, including Joseph Wambaugh, David Horvath, Pico Iyer, Jann Robbins, Andrew Sean Greer and many more.  We’ll have a selection of some new and noteworthy books as well as popular recommended titles from our massive inventory.  Stop by and meet the Vroman’s booksellers (including me!).  For a complete schedule of our booth signings, click here.

Finally, I will be participating in a panel called Publishing 3.0 with industry luminaries like Sara Nelson, former Editor-in-Chief of Publishers Weekly, Otis Chandler, founder of Goodreads.com, and Richard Nash, the former head of Soft Skull Press.  The panel will be moderated by LA Times book editor David Ulin.  We will be discussing nothing less than the future of the printed word and what place that future holds for publishers, journalists and booksellers.  The panel is on Saturday at 1:30 in Humanities A51.  Stop by for some interesting conversation.  And if you’re at the Festival and using Twitter, remember to mark your tweets with the LA Times Festival of Books hashtag #LATfob.

Because we are so excited about this year’s festival, we are running a very special drawing.  We will give away a pair of tickets to ride on our famous book bus to the festival to some lucky reader. To enter the contest, please email us at email at vromansbookstore dot com with the subject line LATFOB. The contest will run until the end of the day Sunday, April 12, with the winner being picked at random next Monday morning.  Vroman’s employees and their relatives are ineligible to win.  Emailing us is the ONLY way to enter the drawing.

This is a $110 value we’re giving away here, folks, but the experience is really priceless.  I rode on one of the buses last year with the very entertaining Christopher Rice, and I had a blast.  On the way home, we did trivia and cookies.  It was way, way better than driving myself.

For more excellent poetry coverage, click over to The Millions (now with snazzy new URL themillions.com!) to read Edan’s introductory post in their “Poetry Month” series:

“I like poets. At Iowa, they wore the best jewelry, they hosted read-aloud Shakespeare parties (alas, I never attended); some of them went shooting (I mean with real guns); many drank too much, fell in and out of love easily, danced well and terribly, talked John Donne. One poet I know kills turkeys for money. Another has impeccable finances and a mythic mother. In my worst days, I think fiction writers are merely diluted poets – heavily, and erroneously, diluted. Why do we need all these words, when a poet, with fewer, can say it better – or best?”

Stick around to read Zach Savich’s post, as well.  Among his insights:  “Poems break into song as days break into rain. What’s the difference between poetry and prose? Prose is the sidewalk, poetry is the rain.”

To hear HarperStudio tell it, this is a very important deal, one of the biggest it has made so far, even considering the imprint’s relatively low advance-higher royalty split model. (President Bob Miller has said that he will not pay more than 100K per book upfront, though some agents have confided he has occasionally bid much higher; the 10-book deal may have been a way to get the total pay-out up to a figure Mr. Vaynerchuk — who says he has been offered more by other publishers — can live with). And in these days of tight budgets that only loosen for the biggest names, it is indeed notable that someone would spend so much on such an untried author.

Indeed, at Winter Institute, Bob Miller was singing Vaynerchuk’s praises as an example of what a small business could do with social media.  I guess now we know how he serious he was about that praise.  You have to see this as HarperStudio putting their money (and a lot of it, in this case) where their mouth is with regards to the power of social media.  I’m very curious to see how they promote the book.  Will they focus on social media or will we see Gary on Oprah and The Daily Show?  This is kind of a unique intersection of old publishing and new media, and it should be fun to watch the results.

I love Vaynerchuk’s enthusiasm and his general attitude, but I have to admit, I’m curious about how it will translate into book form.  In fact, for a guy who keeps up with the ever-changing world of social media as well as anyone, the real question will be can he slow down into the book format.  Or rather, does he need to slow down?  How will he distance himself from the general choir of self-help-ish business books that are out there?  I think his message — that it’s a new world and that everything is wide open — could play very well in a recession economy.  Additionally, his positivity is a welcome reprieve from the doom and gloom of most business news lately.  One place that I think Nelson is slightly off the mark is here:

But is a marketer/blogger, who cheerfully admits he doesn’t read books, going to be able to sell them to other Internet types who probably don’t read much either? It’s one thing, after all, to get your career advice for free, simply by turning on your computer — and another to plunk down $20 for a hardcover book.

My suspicion is that HarperStudio, while welcoming the built-in audience that Vaynerchuk has, is banking on this series of books bringing him into the world of mainstream media, expanding his “platform” beyond the internet, so to speak.  What do you think?  Will these books be successful?  Can garyvee bring his signature style to the printed world?