Went over to the Borders over on Woodward in Birmingham today to check out the sales earlier today, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. I’d been hearing that books were discounted up to 40%, but the only thing I saw discounted at 40% was the greeting cards. Most of the books were only discounted by 10 %, which was cool for the majority of the fiction, the genre I’m most interested in, because usually most of the fiction is NOT discounted at all. However, pre-liquidation, new books were often discounted at much 30% but not now. Seemed a bit of a jip, I guess.
Despite my disappointment, I did buy a book, a novel by Douglas Coupland entitled Player One: What is to Become of Us. This novel was pubbed in 2010 but seeing it in the bookstore today was the first I’d heard of it. And there was only one copy so I guess I count myself somewhat lucky. Otherwise I might never have learned of it.
It was kind of depressing. I couldn’t help wondering how this was going to effect the publishing industry — opportunities for writers, especially new, as yet unpublished writers, of which I am one. I suppose that even though I don’t do much writing (of fiction that is) these days I still hold this hope that one day I’ll get my shit together and put together publishable book. For some reason, the closing of Borders seems to make that less likely than ever, although why precisely I couldn’t say.
Of course, even if the likelihood of getting a book published has diminished, that doesn’t mean one can’t continue to write. That’s what I found myself thinking today while wandering the store. It made me think that maybe it’s time to start just throwing up my fiction here on my blog. Why not? So that’s what I’m considering.
In the past, I never wanted to do that. For some reason I thought it would hinder my chances of getting a story a bit of novel pubbed, that publications weren’t going to want to pub a story that had already been thrown up on the web, although I’ve no hard evidence that this is true. Is it? I don’t know.
So I’m thinking that that’ll be goal for this week, to try and get a story up here on my blog. See what happens. Probably nothing. But I don’t see how it could hurt. Do you?
junkdrawer67 