If you follow publishing news, you will have read about Indigo expanding into photography. According to Indigo head, Heather Reisman, there is an opportunity here. Sitting here in the backwater of Neustadt, peering out into the world, I cannot help but wonder if, in fact, Heather Reisman isn’t missing an opportunity rather than finding one? Agreed booksales at Indigo have been sliding. But, then again, Indigo have done two things to assist in that sales…
Well, I got excited there for a minute. The day following my Keynote address at the conference in Beverly Hills, my wife took the kids to Disneyland while I worked on some writing. I took a long lunch break, however, to walk around Downtown Disney, the shopping and restaurant district which doesn’t require any admission fee, though you do have to clear security. So walking down the street I spied this sign and thought, “Wowhoo!…
Mark Leslie Lefebvre brought to my attention another nifty indie bookseller in Ottawa, Collected Works. The Ottawa Citizen article sums up the bookstore better than I could, so I’ll leave it to you to click through. While you’re at it, take a gander at Collected Works’ website. Pretty decent. Informative, interactive, even has a link to an online shopping cart. Wonder how they feel about indie publishers? I’m going to find out. For now, I’d…
Reading Lorina’s rankings of Independent bookstores in previous post, I tried to imagine the sort of store I (Robert) would like to see. My vision of the independent bookstore of the future is one with an Espresso Machine, a coffee bar, a flat screen monitor flashing random 30 second shots of coverart/coverblurbs from the available Espresso catalog, and a set of bookshelves filled with ‘staff picks’ off the Espresso machine. Maybe a couple of computer…
Casey Wolf drew my attention to the website that asks the question, “What type are you?”. It is an amusing bit of pop-psychology and well worth 10 minutes of your time. I was particularly pleased that this is a free-standing webpage, not one of those annoying Facebook apps that tells you what character in Avatar you are, or whatever, and then raids your Facebook info to sell to marketers, because you had to allow the…