Archive for the ‘Libraries’ Category

How will readers find your book?

Posted: Monday, April 2, 2012 in Criticism and Reviews, Ebooks, Libraries, Literary Awards, Publishing
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How do readers find books? Or, more importantly, how will they find your book? According to this poll on the MobileRead forum, readers find books in the following ways (in order):

  •  Recommendations from friends or other readers
  • Recommendations from online forums, blogs, or message boards
  • Bookstore browsing
  • Amazon reviews/recommendations
  • Interesting covers or blurbs
  • Free download or bargain price
  • Library browsing
  • Mainstream media reviews
  • Kobo
  • MobileRead
  • Bestseller lists
  • Author sites
  • Award lists

So, if you want to sell your book, you have to somehow tap into the huge informal system of friends talking to friends, either in person or online. Everything else is secondary.

 

Occupy Wall Street Library Goes Mobile

Posted: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 in Community, Libraries, Writers and Politics
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Excellent article by William Scott in The Nation updating us all on the efforts made to keep the Occupy Wall Street People’s Library going despite two police raids. Click here for the article.

“We’re still accepting donations and lending books just as we always have, but we’ve reorganized ourselves somewhat. We now have three mobile units staffed by OWS librarians, which we can take anywhere we want.”

Plus an amazing tale of poetry’s effect on riot police…

The People’s Library also has a blog–read  more and find out how to contribute books. Click this link.

Status Update on Seized Occupy Wall Street Library

Posted: Wednesday, November 16, 2011 in Community, Libraries, Writers and Politics
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Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg’s office tweeted that materials seized from the Occupy Wall Street Library were safely in storage at a sanitation facility ready to be picked up. Today, intrepid OWS librarians made the trek to the Sanitation Facility only to find a just a fraction of the library materials intact and available. Missing, and presumably destroyed: thousands of books, laptops, wifi devices, stamps, tables and shelves, archival materials, personal belongings and much more. More on this story, including pictures, here. What comes next? Dunno, but never underestimate librarians.

Occupy Wall Street Library Raided, Demolished

Posted: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 in Community, Libraries, Writers and Politics
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The New York Police Department, under the direction of Michael Bloomberg, razed the New York Occupy Wall Street site last night. Part of their work was to demolish the OWS Library and to throw away more than 5,000 donated books and many records that might have made up a valuable cultural archive. Corey Doctorow writes about the raid here. Galley Cat has more news here. More than 150 people were arrested. OWS librarians state that books and other records were destroyed before they were thrown into dump trucks. A sad day. But online OWS-related libraries are springing up. See a list here. Presumably, these libraries, because they are online, cannot be raided and destroyed.

About the Occupy Wall Street Library…

Posted: Saturday, October 8, 2011 in Community, Libraries, Writers and Politics
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Occupy Wall Street is about protest, sure, but the people there are also really interested in modeling a new democratic society. And apparently one of the first orders of business for that society has been to organize a FREE library with donated books.  How cool is that? You can read about it here.

The library not only already has books; they also have a catalog, a scanning operation and they’re up on the web and on LibraryThing. These are proper librarians, ya’ll.

And you know what else they’ve got? A mailing address. They like getting books in the mail. And, hmmm…, so many of you that read this blog are authors and you probably have extra books laying around… Catch my drift?

Twit Lit Heaven: All the Literary Twitter Links You Could Ever Want

Posted: Thursday, March 31, 2011 in Clipping, Libraries, Writers and Social Media
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If you don’t get enough Tweets already, GalleyCat has published a nice set of lists for:

  • Best Book Editors on Twitter
  • Best Literary Agents on Twitter
  • Best Book Reviewers on Twitter
  • Best Book Publicity and Marketing Twitter Feeds
  • Best eBook News on Twitter
  • Best Library People on Twitter
  • Women in Publishing

Check the link:  Best Book Editors on Twitter – GalleyCat.

Of Interest: Five Essential Books; Verse is Math; Library Jeremiads

Posted: Saturday, December 4, 2010 in Clipping, Criticism and Reviews, Libraries, Poems, Poetics
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Five books every book critic should have.

Verse is math: The mathematical secrets of poetry

Three Jeremiads: Robert Darnton on what’s happening with research libraries.

Of Interest: Death of Print, Killing a Personal Library, Write or Die

Posted: Saturday, November 27, 2010 in Clipping, Libraries, Literary Journals, On Writing
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Editors of 15 popular online literary journals talk about the death of print at the Huffington Post.

Why do we keep books? Stuart Walton’s account of getting rid of a 2000 book personal library.

Write or die!