Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

I’m in a strange mood. Today marks the first Black Friday that I did not have to work or contemplate in retail terms in years. Usually my Wednesday before Thanksgiving has been marked by change-outs and stickering long after the doors closed so that on Black Friday all would be ready for those not suffering from a tryptophan hangovers. Friday morning (early) would be spent stressing over whether the banners were hung and whether or not we had enough copies of the books that were being deeply discounted that year to drive sales. While Friday afternoon would be all about hanging on to that professional retail smile as I uttered for the thousandth time, “Hi, how may I help you today?”

Black Friday is hell—even in bookstores.

But this year is different. It has been ten months since my store closed. Ten months where I wasn’t immersed in the book business eight hours a day, five days a week. Where, when we weren’t worrying about change-outs and impulse buys, we were ordering for the front table, changing end cap displays, and following reports on the latest retail market trends. Any down time (also known as the time that we could probably use to dust, but whatever) we would read Publisher’s Weekly or scour the Willamette Week to see who would be appearing at Powell’s.

For seven years I followed the book business at work and at home, online and off, because my livelihood depended on it, only to have that stop being an issue at the end of January.

The store closing barely dented my book interest, but it did cut down on my access to information. Without the store there was no subscription to Publisher’s Weekly readily available, nor the assorted other magazines that would review books. I no longer knew immediately who was on the cover of the NY Times Book Review because my subscription became limited only to what I could access online. Distributors like Partners had no reason to send their catalogues to my home, so that avenue of information was out, and I no longer had the drive to research every author who would be coming through my town.

I still got the PW, NYBR, and Shelf Awareness emails. I still surfed publisher and author websites, and peeked in on Publisher’s Lunch. My research into the book business shifted from the offline immediate face to face contact with people and objects to collecting my information through more virtual means. Online marketing and its implications on the book business fascinated me, gaining more and more importance in my mind the further I got from my offline experience.

Sure, I would make the occasional comment on my blog about not forgetting the older customers or those who cannot afford a personal computer (both of these groups would often make comments in my store on the unfairness of a discount card that provided all its coupons through email), but in the back of my mind they were an ever shrinking minority. C’mon guys, get the net, my little brain voice would snark. The library’s got computers you can use!

Karma, being the big-eared, psychic bitch that she is, must have heard this snark because my computer began to fail. It began small, overheating and restarting if I tried to watch any streaming video or any cinematographic piece of you tube genius over ten minutes. Not very high on the hardship scale, really. I probably should have been working on resumes anyway.

But then it got worse. The overheating happening faster and faster, the time I could productively spend doing anything shrinking. I cut out reading all but my favorite blogs. I cut down on updating my own as getting Word to stay open and not erase my whole entry before it was saved became a problem. The more frustrated I became, the less I turned it on.

The less I turned it on, the less I read and wrote, and so on and so forth. Until one day I realized it had been several weeks since I blogged a thing about the books business, or even done more than skim my email. The new books out? Didn’t know them at all unless I saw them on the train on my way to work. Newest author or genre drama? Not unless someone brought it up in conversation. Everything I learned was through word of mouth, observation, or through the printed word even as my email box filled with more and more announcements about new books and great author events.

I felt disconnected, but I was also enjoying the newfound time I spent reading not book news, but books. Books I learned about from the paper or from what people were reading on the train. Books that caught my eye when I walked by a bookstore’s window display.

Computers are amazing things. They can allow an author to build a fanbase worldwide without ever leaving homes. It allows authors to market themselves for very little money. They’re amazing…

As long as they work.

As I write this I’m still waiting for my new laptop to show up. One that won’t shut down every ten minutes or make me recheck every word with an O several times to make sure the key registered. One that will let me write again without the frustration that comes from knowing that I can type much faster than I can write by hand. I’ve relearned a lot in my time offline—how much I can get done without the distraction of the internet, how my handwriting isn’t too bad (legible even) if I need to write a note or two—but I want that connection back. When I do, I’ll once again try to combine my offline observations with my online research to better my understanding of the book business. Try to recapture that thing that online/offline connection that was so important when I worked in a bookstore. But I also try to remember that it can be good, healthy even, to turn it off and walk away, to go read a book.

Because it’s is that love of the written word that has driven me all along.