I have the weirdest bookstore.

Every week I order the big books--the ones that will be on the New York Time's bestseller lists. For instance, last week it was "Women," by Kristin Hannah. The week before that it was "Gothikana," by Runyx. And so on.

I can tell they're going to be big books by how many copies my wholesaler has available; a pretty sure sign that the book will be heavily promoted. I have a benchmark number that I automatically order.

However...these books rarely sell for me. They certainly don't sell fast, and they don't sell in big numbers.

I know that most bookstores sell the hell out of these books. I often visit Brandon at Herringbone Books here in Redmond (a really great bookstore, by the way) and he sells most of the big new releases by major publishers far better than I do.

And yet...and yet...

I sell hundreds of books a week. We've been on a very healthy streak for years now. We ring up book sales all day. And there sits the #1 book in the country, gathering dust. 

If I had set out to change my store into a bookstore by doing the traditional things, the store would have failed. I'm not sure why--mostly, I think locals have a pre-concieved notion of what we are. 

Instead, I have a regular clientele of people looking for the unusual, the quirky, genre books, and standards; classics, cult books, etc.  We sell to tourists who are looking for something other than the usual Top Ten.

I pay attention to the books that are bestsellers, but with a long tail. I pay way more attention to TikTok books than I do to Publisher's Weekly. So the big book from a few weeks ago was, "House of Flame and Shadow," by Sarah Maas. This is the kind of genre book that will continue selling for me.

Don't get me wrong. When the USA today does their 150 bestsellers of the week list, I'll usually have at least 80% of them. 10% of the uncarried books are books I don't want to carry; 10% are books that I'm waiting to making sure they aren't a blip and are going to be on the list for more than one week. 

But what I try to do is identify books that sell and just keep on reordering them. Ordering them until they stop selling, by which time, I've usually identified another title that can take its place. 

90% of my books every week are reorders of the backlist. I call them "the standards." Kurt Vonnegut will just keep selling. Tom Robbins, Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk, Murikami, and so on. 

I'm good with this. I think it's not a bad thing to have standards instead of so-called bestsellers, which can be hit or miss. 

And I think it makes the store more interesting and unique.

There are story ideas everywhere.

 

Started a story yesterday, realized immediately that it wasn't good enough. Made me wonder how many stories I've started over the years. Hundreds, I'm pretty sure. Thousands? It's not that all of them didn't have potential, it's that I was either in the mode of finishing things or in the mode of not finishing things. 

When I came back to writing a decade ago I had one rule: finish the stories, don't change anything until you're done. 

So for eight years, that's what I did. Some of the stories worked out, some didn't. But most of them were finished.

The story I wrote yesterday made me think of how fertile my imagination is; I'll never not have stories to tell, if I so choose. But I'm waiting for the KILLER idea, and that means waiting a long time. I sat on the "Werewolves + Donner Party" idea for years. I knew it was a winner. But most of the other stories were more spontaneous. I don't know that the spontaneous stories were any worse than the long incubating ideas, but it always felt a little iffy, and most of them didn't get the immediate "That's a cool idea!" response that Led to the Slaughter got. 

But I've decided that I should start a new story every day; in fact, just waiting for inspiration for an hour or two every day, writing the beginning, and then seeing if it has any legs. The proof of concept will be the urge to keep writing. 

Today's idea, which I just now came up with.

Barbra Streisand barely mentions singing in the first chapters of her book. She wanted to be an actress. She spent her first few years in New York auditioning for serious plays, trying to the get into the Actor's Studio. At some point she's offered a job if she'll sing in it. The way she depicts it is, "Yeah, I can sing a little." So her best friends say to her, "Hey, we've known you the whole time you've been in New York and you've never once mentioned singing. Sing something for us."

She says "OK, but I'm going to turn my back on you because I'm embarrassed." She sings a song she's been working on, and when she turns around, her friends are crying. 

Nice story. 

So here's what really happened: She went to one last audition where she is humiliated, comments on her looks, and so on. She meets a well-dressed gentleman as she leaves the stage and he says, "Listen, I can get you parts if you can sing." 

"I can sing a little."

"Oh, I can help you with that," the gentleman says, whipping out a contract. She read the paper, signs with a flourish."

"Go ahead," he says. "Sing something."

She starts out hesitantly, but her voice gains power and confidence and she is...well, the diva we all know and love (or hate.)

I know, I know...not a new idea. Completely Faustian. And writing it would be hard; I'm not musical myself. 

But you see what I mean: there are story ideas everywhere. 

Hey, I'm not saying they're all good ideas...

Back issues are up and running.

17 long boxes of fresh back issues; bagged, boarded, and priced.

This first batch are mostly DC and Marvel iconic characters, along with a lot of Star Wars. I have a base price, but didn't have the time to look up every comic online, so winged it as far as pricing goes. I may have gone way under what they actually sell for, or I may have gone slightly higher. I tried to underestimate instead of overestimating. (There is no authoritative price guide, really.)

I didn't have time to separate the variant covers, so they're mixed in there with the regular covers. 

It took a year to get these ready, mostly the bagging and the boarding. I mean, I took long breaks, but it is finally done.

I probably have about three times what I put out still to do. Most of the major titles have been done; Spider-man, X-Men, Thor, Wolverine, Batman, etc. (though I held back some for refills). 

There are lots of good titles I didn't get to yet. For instance, complete runs of Hellboy and BPRD and other indie comics. Those are going to get out there soon, though I'm still trying to figure out how to fit them into the store. 

Anyway, it feels and looks good and it should be fun for some of you to browse through them. 

Thanks to all of you for 45 years of selling comics!

Barbra wow wow..

I've been listening to Barbra Streisand's book, read by her. She's still got that heavy Brooklyn accent (though I suspect she's playing it up.)

Bottom line--I simply can't comprehend that level of ambition. 

I don't usually read autobiographies because I don't think you can trust them. Early on, I read one by a famous entertainer that I subsequently learned was 90% bullshit. 

So I'm listening to Streisand with a huge grain of salt. I'm trying to read between the lines, and trying to figure out what's genuine and what isn't. Funnily enough, the genuineness is at the forefront of her storytelling. 

So I don't really buy her humility and down-homeness. She lays it on a little thick. 

At the same time, she reads off comments about herself from friends and reviews that make her sound fantastic. Fair enough. She's proud of herself and she should be.

So at this point, I'm listening to hear the process of how you create a career like hers. I'm at the point in the book where she's 24 years old, the toast of the town, and about the film Funny Girl.

I'm exhausted just listening to her schedule. Like I said, the amount of effort it takes is almost incomprehensible. 

She's constantly saying she's a loner, but the subtext is that she is surrounded by people all the time. 

It's only the second audiobook I've ever listened to. I heard a snippet of the book read by her and it sounded like something I could listen to and not try to read. 

Ah, well. Only about 30 hours to go.

Restock back issue update #2.

I've finished organizing the boxes, but I want to do a little finessing, so I'm sticking to my February 15 Grand Unveiling.  

My first choice was the put comics under their title but not try to order them by number. It isn't all that hard to search through a batch of comics, and there's always the chance that you'll find something you didn't expect.

Putting them in numerical order would add another week to the organizing (and would probably only last a couple of weeks before they were out of order again.)

I'm also hoping Sabrina can find the time to go through them and see if I missed anything, overestimated or underestimated anything.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I've been making sets of mini-series, and/or the first X number of issues in a series. We've done this in the past, but back then it was mostly comics leftovers. These, on the other hand, are premium comics that are complete within a collection, so qualitatively much nicer. 

It's kind of the last slot in the store that needed to be fixed. I honestly can't think of anything more to do. I'm sure there are things, and they'll come to me, but for now the store feels as complete as the time, space, and money can make it. 

It's been fun to have comics all around me again.

I guess I kind of missed that.  

Me and Clean Gene and Tricky Dick.

Hard to believe I started this blog 18 years ago.

I was young(er) and naive and thought I could say anything I wanted and nothing would come of it. 

Ah, the wisdom of age. It is better to keep my mouth shut and listen. 

But, you know, kind of boring. 

Speaking of young and naive. When I was 15 years old, my mother, Libby McGeary--a liberal, Unitarian, volunteer for good causes, fabulous gardener--decided to start a Eugene McCarthy "Get Clean for Gene" campaign office in Bend. 

So me and some friends went door to door with buttons and stuff. I don't remember much about it, except for the old couple who greeted us at the door and invited us in. And then start attacking us.

An ambush!

I don't remember what we said, or how we got out of there, but I've always remembered the savagery I saw in their eyes. 

The McCarthy people realized they had a shot in Oregon and came along and took over. I went to see Nixon's daughters at the Pine Tavern. They saw I had "L" and "R" inked on the plastic toes of my tennis shoes (on the wrong foot, of course) and they thought that was hilarious.

My friend Wes and I went to see Robert Kennedy at the Bend High auditorium, standing on our chairs and shouting for "McCarthy!" (me) and "Nixon" (Wes,...sorry, man.) But the Kennedy charisma was real and we (or I, at least) followed Kennedy out into the parking lot, shaking his hand more than once. 

I was watching TV the night he was assassinated and woke up the parents. 

Why does this all come to mind? Well, there's a guy in my neighborhood who has a flag up saying "Trump Won."

I'd love to knock on his door, acting innocent, and ask him to vote for Biden. I imagine him and his wife inviting me in, all friendly like, and then ambushing me. And I'd give it right back to them.

But it would probably end up in an old man fist fight, my glasses would be knocked off, and I'd get smacked in the back of the head with a frying pan. 

Like I said, the wisdom of age. Shut up and listen.

World-building is harder than it looks.

Recently, I've gotten bogged down trying to read big fantasy books. I read one recently that was obviously trying to have a "Dune" like approach to world-building, and it didn't quite work. It didn't quite make sense, nor was it satisfying.

"Dune," to me, is the best SF book ever written. (No need to tell me you didn't like it--I get it.) All the parts fit, all the world-building makes sense. 

The thing you find when you try to construct a world is that is very hard to do without contradictions. Or rather, with life-like contradictions. What "Lord of the Rings" and "Dune" have in common is that the worlds feel real. They are one-time triumphs, in a way. Tolkien couldn't top himself, and neither could Frank Herbert. 

It also hard not to create a world that feels somehow simplistic. Even if you get the structure right, most of the time the fantasies I read feel shallow, Potemkin-village like constructions.

This didn't bother me too much when I was younger, but eventually the fantasies lost their appeal. Underneath the particulars, the generalities were pretty much the same. 

When I wrote "Star Axe," "Snowcastles/Icetowers," I was in thrall to Tolkien and R.E. Howard. I used them as a template.

Then the 25 year break from writing. In all of those 25 years I thought that if I ever wrote again, it would be fantasy. Instead, I had an idea of werewolves being part of the Donner Party and wrote that, had a very modest little success with it, found the horror community seemed to appreciate my writing, and off I went.

The one book where I tried to build an entire world completely fell apart. I rewrote it again and again trying to fix it, until it all became a jumble of words.

Truth is, I love telling stories--and I confess that I'm writing those stories to amuse myself. It's much easier to write a story if you already have the background in place, either the real world or a historical version of the real world. All the complexities and contradictions are built-in. No need to convince the reader of their reality. 

I mostly read thrillers these days. Last night I read the new Thomas Perry thriller, "Hero," and it was great fun. I fell right into the story. It felt comfortably familiar, but with enough of the complexity of the real world to feel satisfying. 

I'd love to write a big fantasy, but I'd need to build the world first, make sure that the story fits into the framework of the world, and not vice versa. 

It's a hell of a challenge.

Back issue restock update.

It's happening faster than I thought. I believe we'll have everything up and running by Thursday, February 15th. 

It's been a bit of a trip down memory lane. I spent years doing this kind of thing. At first because when I bought the store I had so little inventory or money that I had to try to scare up business by organizing as best I could, finding hidden gems, figuring out how best to display the product. 

The first comic book show I went to, I bought every X-Men comic I could find.

The second or third comic book shows I went to, I found Swamp Thing and American Flagg and a bunch of other great comic books that forever changed my perception of comics. 

I remember asking some other retailers how they were able to increase their back issues. Someone said, "Don't worry. You'll have more than you'll know what to do with before you know it."

Which, over time, proved true. 

I sold the contents of the basement storage, some 40K issues, a few years ago to another retailer. I just didn't seem to have the time to go through them and try to organize them. 

What's so interesting to me is that I've probably accumulated at least another 20K issues without even trying. But this time I looked at them and I didn't despair. I decided I could deal with them. 

So what's going to be for sale?

So far, it looks like:

Two and a half long boxes Spider-man.

One and a half long boxes of Avengers.

Three long boxes of Batman. 

Two long boxes of Ultimate and X-Men.

Two long boxes of Star Wars, one each of Dark Horse and Marvel. 

The rest of the boxes are assorted titles, mostly DC and Marvel to start with. 

We have plenty of replacement issues for Spider-man, Avengers, Batman, and Star Wars. 

All bagged and boarded, in fresh clean white boxes, priced. 

About the price. 

I simply didn't have time to look up every comic. I set a base price for most of the comics, looked up a few obvious ones, went a little higher on first issues and variants. But most of it was guesswork and I undoubtedly missed a lot of "Key" issues. 

But hey, that gives you all a better reason to hunt for hidden gems. 

For example, I put together a set of the four "Edge of Spider-verse," comics and priced it for $20. Sabrina noticed and told me that it had the first appearance of Spider-Gwen, which was worth more like $400 dollars. It was only happenstance that she caught that.

I'd be very surprised if I didn't miss a bunch of other comics. I'm just not in the loop anymore. But that gives everyone a good reason to look through the boxes and IF we get the base price for most of them, we'll do fine. 

I admit, it still hard for me to transition to the collecting side of things.

 

Replacing and renewing our entire backstock of comics.

I spent about 20 years not buying collections.

Mostly because we are a reader store, not a collector store. In most cases, graphic novels served that need better than maintaining a backstock of comics. After the comic crash in the mid-90s, it seemed like almost all my customers were readers, and collecting was secondary.

Secondly, because our space is limited. 

Thirdly, and most importantly, I really started to become allergic to the process of buying collections. Most collectors expected me to pay top dollar for their collections, but it required a lot of time and space on our part to make the money back. So I just stopped. Dead stop. It was the process of buying collections at an affordable price that stopped me.

Catering to readers first and collectors second worked for about twenty years, and then about eight years ago, collecting started being a thing again. I noticed that back issues were selling more often, and that my competitors were serving that need. Covid seemed to bring collecting to the forefront again. Not sure why. People with time and money on their hands? People having the time to remember when they used to collect?

For whatever reason, I saw that I needed to try to start catering to that market again as best I could. 

About a year and a half ago, I bought two collections.

The first collection was a bunch of pulp magazines and books. I bought these to save them from being dumped, because the owners were discouraged by the number of rejections they'd gotten. If I didn't buy them, no one was.

Technically, these books are worth money. They are in beautiful condition, which is very rare for pulps from the 50s and 60s. But I don't have a customer base for these. Ideally, they should probably sold online. 

So I'm sitting on these books, mostly, and enjoying the art and the vibe of them.

The second collection was a bit of an accident. A longtime customer announced on Facebook that he was going to sell his collection before moving to another house. The price he quoted was more than reasonable, and I immediately called him and offered to buy them all.

See, I don't mind buying collections. I just hate having to dicker for them.

For the last year and a half I've been bagging and boarding and pricing these comics. It's been a massive project.

The comics start from the late 80s up to the time I bought them. Full runs of Spider-man and Batman and Avengers and Wolverine and Ultimates and many, many others. Lots of variants and special covers. Good solid stuff. 

Last week, I finally started organizing them. I'll be able to put out about 18 long boxes of new comics, replacing all the current backstock, which I'll take downstairs and reorganize. We have tons of comics left to deal with, but I'm putting out as much of the good stuff as I can.

It's kind of nostalgic, actually. I have a collector urge as much as anyone, I just got a little discouraged by the boom and bust cycle. This feels like the right thing to be doing. And the right time. 

I'm posting this to put pressure on myself to get this done by the end of February. Hopefully a little sooner than that. I'll keep you all up to date.