Orca Pass – Seattle, Day 1 of 3
The next four entries are from last week in Seattle.
Facilitation Skills training in Seattle, teaching court practitioners how to facilitate training sessions around an online curriculum.
One day of travel.
One day of work.
One day of travel home.
Mockingbird Books
Sue Nevins at Mockingbird Books
I stayed at a hotel in the South Center, near the airport so I had to really work to get downtown. Shuttle to the airport. Light rail to the last stop. A bus and some walking took me to Mockingbird Books.
Sue Nevins was prepared for me, having looked up information about Open Wounds on my website. This has never happened before. I don’t have to pitch. She has questions already ready for me about where to place the book shelf-wise based on language and content. Sue is incredible.
The store is a beautiful bookstore thriving selling children’s books, with a small café and children’s play area. If we lived in Seattle we’d be hanging out at Mockingbird. And Sue knows her books. For almost half an hour she gave me a tour of books that my son might like. I left with four. He got Amulet: Stonekeeper Book 1 (a beautiful graphic novel of mystery, spookiness, and adventure), Sticky Burr: The Prickly Peril (graphic novel about burrs – work with me on this it’s very funny and cute and good for budding artists with graphic novel potential), Merlin (Merlin’s story at the age of 12) and Virus on Orbis One (science fiction to give my son something a little different for him to chew on).
I should do a better job of planning these things out. My publicist (JKS in the hands of Sami Lien who does all the finding of bookstores I should hit and contacts them to see if they’ll take a visit with a smile and calls the fencing salles too) draws a big net. I’m ambitious but come up against the constraints of time and transportation every trip.
Sue told me I should go to Third Place Books also because it was in walking distance – only about twenty minutes – and they had a good pub underneath them. I was thirsty and I needed to eat dinner. The three-hour time difference was knocking me out.
At Third Place I talked to the owner, Michael Ravena, and he seemed pleased both at Sue’s referral and to listen to me talk briefly about Open Wounds. He read a few pages of different parts of the book while I watched, and smiled at a description of Nicolai Varvarinski. “That’s great,” he said. With a handshake and a thank you, I asked for directions to the pub.
The beer (Seattle has a lot of home local brews) was good and the food was even better. The World Series was on the television – no world cup rugby but that can wait until early Sunday morning when France and New Zealand will remake the clash of the titans.
Email from a Voracious Reader
Here’s an email from a young man, 15, who read Open Wounds.
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Dear Joseph,
Not sure if you remember me, but I met you at the Voracious Reader in Larchmont, New York. You told me to write to you how I enjoyed the book, so here it goes…
Open Wounds was an unbelievable, easy read that I couldn’t put down. The path of Cid’s fencing kind of reminded me of mine which is why I think I enjoyed it so much. I really enjoyed how Siggy and Tomic re-entered the book. I was really upset when they both left Cid in the beginning of the book. I thought the whole plot was really interesting and I really liked the characters in the book. I thought Cid’s fencing coach was a really interesting character because of his style of teaching. I also loved reading about how Cid and Lefty’s relationship grew in the book. Plus, Lefty’s relationship with Cid’s mom was a good twist. Overall, this book made me want to keep fencing and a good read during the summer.
Sincerely,
Collin
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Collin, I did remember you and Dude, you made my day. Thanks for the kinds words about my book and let’s keep in touch.
From Ship Breaker to the Lightning Thief
I spent a few hours yesterday writing follow-up emails to all the store owners and booksellers I met on the road trip. There were about a dozen from that many indi bookstores. So here’s what I’ve figured out about this whole marketing thing. If I’m going to sell my books I have to reach four different groups.
The first group is readers. I have to let potential readers know about my book, that it exists. The internet is a wonderful tool for this as are bookstores. You would think reaching all the people who are potential readers would be easy but… it’s not. You have to get their attention and give them a reason to look at and buy your book as opposed to the hundreds of others staring at them in the bookstore or on the online page. Which brings us to group number two.
The second group is booksellers. They can be in bookstores or they can be on the internet. But the internet acts as a bookseller all by itself only it’s harder to figure out. On Amazon there are sections like, “People who bought this book also bought the following…” This is cool because I can see that people who bought my book also bought Forever by Maggie Stiefvater, Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi, and once but only once, Rick Riordan’s Lightning Thief. But how does this play out for new people finding my book? Hopefully I’m showing up on other book’s lists. Still, it’s not like you’re in a store and ask a bookseller what they read lately and like or if they can recommend a book for boys, or a new historical novel, or a book with sword fights and suspense with a touch, just a touch of family drama. Which is why as cool and helpful as the internet is, reaching bricks and mortar stores and developing relationships with bookstore owners and sellers is so important. It’s slower, but it builds over time. So far I’ve been to 23 stores (seventeen of which are independent bookstores), in nine states, and I’m just getting to my hometown, NYC this month.
As they say, people can’t buy your book if they can’t find it. It’s available over the internet, yes. But in bookstores… I’m working on that one store at a time.
Discussion of the third group, the business (agents, publishers, film, audio, and all the possible buyers of subsidiary rights) people, and fourth group, reviewers, tomorrow.
Small Moments and Waf Hou
My son hates to write about small moments. They are part of his school work on writing non-fiction. He hates to come up with them and thinks they are a torture made up just for him.
As a writer I appreciate the technique the teacher is trying to teach him. I’m still working on the concept of small moments too in my writing.
Here are small details for small moments from my road trip:
- speed limits in some states on the interstate are 70 mph which means most people are travelling between 75 and 90 mph.
- if the Waffle House sign is broken and only says “Waf Hou” you should probably not eat there.
- a coffee cup is a good thing to throw up in if you have nothing else available though it’s better to stop the car and avoid throwing up instead if you can.
- passengers can do a lot of things on road trips but drivers can do only one – drive.
- an iPad is an excellent travel aid but you do need to get the 3g service or you will be stuck hopping from wifi station to wifi station on the interstate and no matter how fast the iPad drive is it just can’t keep up.
- engine lights will go on only while you are taking short cuts to avoid traffic while you are in the middle of nowhere, travelling in darkness, with your iPad on the 2% battery indicator.
- engine lights will go off while you are not watching and while things are going well.
- you can only drink so many cups of coffee before your hands start to shake.
- when visiting bookstores in the south, smile, show them your book, mention Kelly Justice’s name (thank you Kelly!) and see what happens.
Lucky Day 13: Home and the Field of Dreams
Yesterday we hit traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and finally had to reduce speed down below 65. It’s amazing how little traffic the rest of the world has. Ahhh… New York City. It’s good to be home. 45 minutes going what would normally be 15 to get from the Verrazano to Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights. We travelled half of New Jersey in the same amount of time on the Jersey Turnpike, and twice that in North Caroline on I-95. Did you know the speed limit is 70mph down there?
We’re unpacked and have slept a full night in our own beds and yes, that does feel good. I even have six full days of vacation left so although the day job worries me (looming like a nuclear missile would be the appropriate metaphor I think) I can ease back into life at a slower pace. It was interesting to see the effects of Irene on the land we passed through. I-95 is like a tunnel, trees to both sides for so long, and it’s basically straight, so we only saw downed trees in North Caroline and Virginia. But the sense of being in a sort of time machine was visceral. Overall, the trip back was quick and uneventful – hard on the butt of course, but that goes with sitting for 6-8 hours a day in a car. We didn’t stop at bookstores on the way back because we were all pretty much done in by Universal and the driving. And… we wanted to get home. That’s the sign of a good vacation. It was time to be home. That and my family might have mutinied if I asked them to detour one more time – just an hour to visit one more store… no (imagine the flurry of debris thrown at me from the back seat from my son) … we headed home.
I have a list of stores to follow-up on in Baltimore, Richmond, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Gainesville. I’ll see who has had a chance to read Open Wounds, and who may now order it to have it in-store. I’m going to make list of stores that carry it and direct folks there (people are banging down the doors to get a copy, really). Well, as they say in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. In the case of bookselling, if they’ve read it, they will sell it. For those of you who’ve been following along with me on the trip to Universal and back, I’m going to take off tomorrow from blogging – I have a guest blog to do for a friend to put together which I’ll let you know about over the next few days – and I’ll be back on Friday.
I hope you enjoyed the trip.
I sure did.
Lunievicz 