Skip to main content

Buying an actual print book

I must confess I don’t often buy print books, as they are pretty expensive.
Buying a trade paperback novel is the equivalent in New Zealand of buying half a dozen flat-whites. But one day, inspired by a blog post I'd read which said you really should support bookstores and buy actual print books, I decided to stop off at one and not to leave that store until I had treated myself to a print fiction book from a new author. Plus I’d given up buying coffee, so, justified.
I walked out with Deborah Moggach’s The Carer.
It’s interesting to analyse why I chose that book when I’d never read anything of hers before, hadn’t read a review, in fact, hadn’t even heard of the book. I guess the cover grabbed me. Homely looking, with its shades of blue. I read the back cover, it appealed, I read the first page. I thought, yep, it looked pretty good.  I put it down and spent another five or ten minutes browsing (I found a cook book based on the food in the Enid Blyton stories, and I am so getting that one day) and then I went back to The Carer and decided, blow it. Don't dither, Jo. Buy the thing.
Did I like it? Yes. Very much. It was wonderfully written, and was a really good story. Had an element of intrigue, and the plot was about caring for an elderly parent, and the lives of the adult children of that parent, and most people my age have an elderly parent.
The only issue I had with the story was near the end when "something" happened that did put a damper on it, but I really liked the book and was glad I’d bought it, and no doubt will buy the next novel Deborah Moggach writes, and go back and read some of her earlier books.  Actually, there was so much in the book that was good, it was a 10/10 in spite of the "bit" I didn’t like, which if you’ve read it, had to do with the letter near the end. I thought it spoiled it.
This past week there was a booksellers' conference, and I followed some of the comments on Twitter. Fiction sales are flat in NZ. Non-fiction sells more. I posit fiction is flat because it costs a fortune to buy a book you might only read once. You can’t justify it on a tight budget but that’s what birthday and Christmas presents are for, right? I love my e-books from my fellow indie romance authors because they’re cheap to buy and there are so many good stories, and I quite like reading books on my phone now, especially on the commute to and from work (when I'm not catching Pokemon.) Spending one cup of coffee on a book you don’t like isn’t the end of the world. Six cups of coffee is a bit of a disaster. 
Anyhoo, that's a recommendation from me. And another trip to the store due real soon.
~ Joanne

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wet weather

It is starting to get cooler, praise be. There was a heap of rain one day this week, and by the time I got to work I was damp, to put it mildly. Soaked is overstating it but uncomfortably wet. Have you ever tried to dry off your trousers with a hair dryer?  I would have been there forever! If only, I thought, I had a spare anything at work, like a skirt even, but no. Nothing to change into. There was only a pair of pantyhose in case I ripped them, although I had stuffed spare socks and boots in my bag so I could have dry feet at work. It is worth noting that the very next day I went to work, I had completely forgotten that thought about spare clothes altogether and did not take spare anything for future weather events. In fact, I only remembered as I was thinking about writing this blog post. Hopeless. Given I’m trying to keep up my walking part-way to work to get in a good 40 minutes/steps, I should take along spare clothes to keep in my locker just in case. It really was uncom...
Post a Comment
Read more

My latest obsession

 I have recently been a bit obsessed with the practice of junk journalling. Junk jouraling! I love it so far. Its been around a few years and seems to have taken over a bit from from the scrapbooking of yore, but the thing I like about it is you use up all your stuff that is lying around. You can use all your rubbishy bits and pieces of paper and things. I like the tutorials of a lady called Leah with a channel called Thrifty Day , and I've had a go at it and I kind of really like doing it. Sometimes I feel a bit out of sorts (I blame hormones... or perhaps it is, rather, the lack of them!) and so I decide to cut stuff up and stick it on a page and I feel better. Therapeutic! I also think that because it is play and there are no rules and you can be as messy as you like, and start again if the page looks like utter rubbish, well, it is just so good for you. It's like being a kid and let's face it... we got to do all the cool stuff when we were kids. Why not , now we're ...
Post a Comment
Read more

An old post

This is a blog I wrote for a now defunct pop culture site I used to contribute to, some years ago.   A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.”   The only Jane Austen I have read is “ Emma .” and it was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, oh my gosh!) but analysing Emily Dickinson was enough to sap the will to live right out of me. Fortuitously, at the end of that semester, I saw the movie Stargate on TV,  and promptly un-enrolled myself fr...
Post a Comment
Read more