“Excuse me, can you tell me where you keep the books?”

There is great irony in my posting a rant against bookstores, not the least being that I am a writer who wants very much to see my books on the shelves of those very same stores. Thanks to Everyday Hogwash I can vent my irritations here instead of shrieking at helpless sales personnel or their stony-faced managers.

My complaint is two-fold. First, I’m perturbed by the fact that I can’t find the books I want to buy. This is due in part to the fact that bookstores no longer seem to carry … books. In one of my local bookstores, I can stop in for a cup of coffee, buy a calendar, pick up a CD, purchase a DVD—all without having the distasteful task of actually looking at a book in the process. On the way to the cashier I must weave my way around an assortment of cards, candles, key chains, and other such doodads. No books.

Not that books aren’t in the store—they are. It’s just that once I plow my way toward the back, I can’t possibly find the books I am looking for because of the way they are shelved. In one local outlet, youth fiction is positioned behind the foreign language books and in front of the discount shelves. Just where most teens—and those who buy for them—would think to look!

Finding religious fiction is worse. Some hot-selling items have their own display cases up front while a handful of titles are on a back shelf in the children’s section and others are mixed in with the religious non-fiction. This dispersal has enabled me to become more familiar with the store as a whole, even as I fight the desire to start ripping pages from books at random.

I think the real problem lies in the fact that corporations now own so many bookstores. This is the second fold of my complaint. Corporate headquarters don’t know what I want in my bookstore. The big business nature of the “industry” is losing touch with us-ens who read. In some chains, managers can’t even make the simplest decision, such as inviting an author for a book signing or creating a display for books already in the store. I suppose that would generate too much ill will among the other managers if one should actually exceed expectations by selling books.

I guess I should follow my trips to the bookstore with visits to the library to recover. Either that, or making another visit to
Everyday Hogwash

Gotta Start Somewhere

For whatever reason, blogs intimidate me. I suppose it is because, like anyone else, a blogger needs to crawl before walking. I’m at the place where I don’t really want to crawl–I feel ready to zoom ahead and am frustrated at inching along.

So too with novel writing. But since this is my chosen field of expertise–specifically fiction written by someone who looks at life through the lens of Truth supplied by the Bible–I think I need to start crawling along, or at least squirming forward.

My intent for this blog is to discuss what constitutes fiction written from a Christian worldview, take a look at who’s writing it, and specifically who’s writing it well. I hope to get other writers–published and pre-published–to voice their opinions through interviews and perhaps guest blogs. But that will come later, when I’ve at least learned how to walk in the blogsphere.