18 Booksellers Who Blog

A list, care of AbeBooks.

100 Best Blogs for the Modern Writer

The list, care of LiveHacker.

Best Bookish Folks on Tumblr

Galley Cat has a few suggestions (best bookstores, editors, agents, etc), here.

Doodling on Famous Authors

The Tumblr blog.

A Giant List of Literary Tumblr Blogs

The list, care of the Millions.

How to Use Tumblr to Connect to Readers

Poets and Writers offers some suggestions, here. (Have you seen my Tumblr blog yet? It's right here)

From said list...

Choose your content carefully. You can post text, photos, audio, video, and more. “Before hitting that Create Post button, ask yourself, ‘If this post popped up in my dash, would I care about it enough to share the link with a friend on Gchat?’” says Cole Stryker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan’s Army Conquered the Web (Overlook, 2011). “Imagine every post you write will be seen by a powerful editor who could make your career.”

Show your personality. “Tumblr is all about personality,” says Maris Kreizman, creator of the wildly popular Slaughterhouse 90210 Tumblr, which combines pop-culture images with excerpts from books. “Use your Tumblr to share your voice, your particular point of view, with the larger Tumblr lit community. Straight-up self-promotion should be kept to a minimum, unless it somehow involves pugs.” (I must admit that I do post a lot of pictures of little dogs.)

You Chose Wrong

A tumblr dedicated to the bad endings of Choose Your Own Adventure novels. Enjoy!

How Do You Turn a Blog Into a Book?

Writer's Digest offers these seven tips.

From the list...

1. Pick a unique angle for your book.
You may already have blogged a book if you’ve been blogging for a long time and have focused your efforts on one topic. Indeed, your blog may represent the foundation of your book. Even so, you might still need to choose a unique angle for your book based upon competing books. On the other hand, if you’ve jumped from subject to subject with no clear direction as you’ve blogged, your blog may be a repository for nothing other than a jumble of vaguely related posts. In this case, you need to hone your book topic and determining if you have previously blogged even part of a book.
2. Create a content plan for your book.
Begin your project by creating a mind map or conducting a brainstorming session to flesh out the content that needs to be in your book. Come up with a full table of contents or an outline based on the book you want to write and on the most marketable book, not on the blog you’ve already written. Don’t get stuck looking at what you’ve already published on your blog; this may not represent the best or most complete book.

Underground New York Public Library

There's a groovy Tumblr blog that shows what people are reading on the New York Subway.

Check it out, here.

Best Blogs for Writers

A guy not named Bob lists them, here.

Are Bloggers Journalists?

This is the question explored recently by Forbes.

From the article...

On page 9 of a 13-page ruling, Judge Hernandez last month set out these requirements to qualify as a journalist:

Education in journalism.
Credentials or proof of affiliation with a recognized news entity
Proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
Keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
Mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
Creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others
Contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story

‘Without evidence of this nature, defendant is not ‘media,” the ruling says. Obviously, the judge — an Obama appointee — doesn’t understand either media or the First Amendment. His ruling also went much farther than the case before him required. (Cox lost a $2.5 million verdict.)

Bookstores and Bloggers

Publishers Weekly takes note that bookstores and bloggers can be like peanut butter and jelly - a perfect fit.

From the post...

Bloggers bring an energy about books and authors that's unfettered by the day-to-day concerns of running a bookstore. Even the names—Devourer of Books, Bookalicious, the Book Lady—imply a voracious appetite for books. For an employee discount and an opportunity to interview authors who come to the store, many bloggers are willing to create grassroots promotions by writing about bookstores on their blogs and organizing store events.

Bookseller Margie White at Just the Bookstore in Glen Ellyn, Ill., first met Jen Karsbaek (Devourer of Books) in the usual way, on Twitter. "We [both] love books with a passion beyond an ordinary passion," says White, who invited Karsbaek to store events when she found out that she lived nearby. Now Karsbaek helps plan the annual Glen Ellyn Bookfest and reaches out to authors for the store. Last year, Just the Bookstore created blogger bookmarks similar to staff pick cards for Karsbaek and Rebecca Joines Schinsky (the Book Lady), another Twitter friend, and the store links to Karsbaek's blog in its monthly e-newsletter. In addition to expanding the reach of Just the Bookstore, the relationship is helping the store staff become aware of more books. "I get very different books than they get in their white box," Karsbaek says.

Superheroes and Supervillians Have Their Day in Court

The New York Times profiles the creators of a new blog, one in which they discuss law...and comic books.

From the piece...

Is Superman’s heat vision a weapon? If so, would the Second Amendment protect his right to melt pistols and cook hamburgers with it?

You might not have thought to ask these questions. You might have, in other words, a life. But a new blog and the interest it is generating shows that there are people who look at an epic battle between superheroes and supervillains and really, really want to know who should be found liable for the broken buildings and shattered streets.

Those people now have a blog called Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, supervillains, and the law. Kicked off on Nov. 30, it addresses questions like: “What if someone is convicted for murder, and then the victim comes back to life?” And whether mutants are a legally recognizable class entitled to constitutional protection from discrimination.

Law and the Multiverse is the deadpan creation of two lawyers, James Daily, in Missouri, and Ryan Davidson in Indiana. Both are 28; they have only met online but collaborate like old friends.

Mr. Daily said the inspiration for the blog came, as so many great ideas do, over dinner with his wife and friends.

Indie Booksellers Against Amazon

Moby Lives takes note of a bookstore owner who has launched a blog and campaign against Amazon.com's business practices.

From the piece...

One of the judges of the Best Translated Book Award — which recently announced that although its judging panel included independent booksellers it would be funded by Amazon.com — has launched a new blog called Against Amazon, which is billed as “An online archive to educate consumers about the problems and politics of doing business with the beast.” Bookseller Jeff Waxman of Chicago’s 57th Street Books tells MobyLives that the blog is a “collaborative project” that has issued an open call for submissions to the archive at againstamazonATgmail.com.

It’s not the first time Waxman has issued an in-depth consideration of the impact of Amazon on the culture. After Melville House announced last month that it was withdrawing from the BTB Award as a result of the Amazon funding, Waxman posted a thoughtful commentary on the Constant Conversation blog that considered both sides of the issue, but in the interest of full disclosure it should also be noted that he declared Melville House’s “objection was, almost thought for thought, my objection. Amazon’s money, like Amazon’s business practices, simply isn’t clean money; it’s money that has been wrung, quite violently, from the rest of the supply chain.”

Waxman’s conclusion in that essay: “When we’re forced by good sense and the growth of our enterprises to accept money or help from a company that has unscrupulously raped our culture, we are failing –- failing by every measure of value and pride.”

What Bloggers Owe Montaigne

From a piece in the Paris Review...

The weekend newspapers are full of them. Our computer screens are full of them. They go by different names—columns, opinion pieces, diaries, blogs—but personal essays are alive and well in the twenty-first century. They flourish just as they did in James Thurber’s and E. B. White’s twentieth-century New York, or in the nineteenth-century London of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it.

No end—but there was a beginning. The essay tradition blossomed in English-speaking countries only after being invented by a sixteenth-century Frenchman, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. His contemporary, the English writer Francis Bacon, also used the title Essays, but his were well-organized intellectual inquiries. While Bacon was assembling his thoughts neatly, the self-avowedly lazy nobleman and winegrower Montaigne was letting his run riot on the other side of the Channel. In his Essais (“Attempts”), published in 1580 and later expanded into larger editions, he wrote as if he were chatting to his readers: just two friends, whiling away an afternoon in conversation.

Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. Most of all, he wrote about himself and was amazed at the variety he found within. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he said. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.” His writing followed the same wayward path.

In doing this, he rejected almost every literary virtue the French were to hold dear for the next few hundred years: clarity, rigour, beauty, and elegance. Yet his rebellious style gave him immense appeal to British, Irish and American authors. For more than 450 years, they took inspiration from Montaigne and his meandering charms.

What Sorts of Bookish Folks Should You Follow on Twitter?

According to Media Bistro, these ones.

Oh, bookish or not, you'd be remiss if you didn't follow the Twitter adventures of Steve Martin.

What's with All the Sexy Book Blogs?

Mobylives investigates.

Perhaps, for a wider readership, I will change the name of my blog from "A Writer's Desk" to "A Writer's Desk is Good for Writing and, Perhaps, Doing it On."

50 Really Cool Bookstore Blogs

The list, care of Accredited Online Colleges. Happy (blog) reading!

Meet the Lateiners

They're a family that read and blog together.

From the piece in The New York Times...

The Lateiners work at attracting followers through frequent contests in which they give away a signed book or a Nook e-book reader.

And they show their literary awareness when they urge followers to support Banned Books Week, an annual nationwide celebration of First Amendment rights.

Finally, lest readers think the Lateiners are all books and no play, the family throws in the Sunday Scoop, a weekly column in which people learn of the family’s latest adventures, like the recent addition of Bella, their Shih Tzu puppy.

The Lateiner Gang Book Review Spot has had 34,000 visits this year, from readers as far off as Mauritius, Estonia and Bangladesh. Reviewed authors comment on the posts, and publishers send the family advance copies and review copies. The Lateiners say they average a dozen books a day at their doorstep, and they have been invited to attend the 2010 BookExpo America in Manhattan next month with press credentials.

The Book Industry's Dark Secrets, Exposed

In The Guardian, David Barnett reveals bloggers who are shining lights on the shadowy workings of a book publisher.

From the piece...

But the undisputed queen of the secret agents is Miss Daisy Frost. She runs her own blog, on which she identifies herself thus:

Junior Literary Agent at the very sleepy Edward Cecil Agency in London's Piccadilly (yawn yawn yawn) which is very conveniently placed for the delights of The Wolseley and for Hatchards – although obviously I am so badly paid that my lunchtimes are Pret A Manger and my bookseller of choice is Asda.

Given her place of work is no secret, presumably Miss Frost's identity isn't too hard to uncover (hey, that might even be her real name!), but she shrouds herself in mystique with the aid of some suitably anonymous photographs. She writes weekly for her own column and monthly for Bent's stamping ground the Bookseller, but it's on her Twitter account that Frost comes into her own, like a contemporary Dorothy Parker with her finger on the publishing pulse.

Her often acerbic comments and observations have attracted quite a Twitter following, even bringing a so-called "Mr Daisy Frost" out of the woodwork for a brief spell, which is either charming or creepy depending on your point of view.