In honor of October, month of Halloween, here's a guest post from my favorite horror author, Seamus Cooper! (author of The Mall of Cthulhu, which you should totally buy.). Seamus is a well-known curmudgeon and, though I love him, kind of a dick. His opinions are his own, and though I've given him a platform for his rantings, not necessarily mine.
Hey, both people who read Halpin's blog! It's me, Seamus Cooper. with an interesting message about the importance of shopping indie!
I've been reading Big Box Swindle by Stacy Mitchell. It's an excellent book. I knew, of course, that Wal Mart was evil, but the book spells out in pretty clear detail just exactly how all big box retail sucks the life out of communities. (In brief--the money you save on toothpaste by shopping at Wal Mart or Target goes mostly to their corporate headquarters, and the higher price you pay for the same item at a local store allows more people in your town to have a decent standard of living, which means better tax base, more stable families, better schools and services, and a much nicer town for you to live in. Pretty decent bargain for the extra fifty cents you spend on toothpaste.)
My only complaint with the book is that it doesn't address Halpin's excellent theory that the big box stores of the suburbs, their metaphorical wombs burgeoning with cheap made-in-China goods, are the suburbs' gynocentric rejoinder to the phallic skyscrapers of the city.
Still, the book made me think about a couple of things. One is how guilty liberals like Halpin are quick to complain about the evils of Wal-Mart, but they get suspiciously quiet when you bring up Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target, or other stores where they like to shop. (Trader Joe's is so cheap at least in part because they don't have a unionized workforce like your local supermarket does. Whole Foods is about as anti-union as they come. And Target is Wal-Mart in yuppie drag.)
The other is how important it is for us literary types to support independent bookstores.
Here's the problem for me, though: it's damn hard to find my book (The Mall of Cthulhu, published by the good folks at Nightshade books, go buy several copies now) in an independent bookstore. Most independent bookstores have pretty desultory selections of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. It's kind of like, "eh, here's your William Gibson and Philip K. Dick if you must read this trash." And, ironically, it's pretty hard to find speculative fiction from independent publishers at independent bookstores. They seem to deal with Tor (a division of Macmillan, which is a division of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck) and Del Rey (a division of Random House, a division of Bertlesmann AG) almost exclusively, leaving out all the independent publishers of this kind of fiction.
Indies are always asking for our support, and they're right, but here's the thing: they, most of them, ignore a pretty big segment of the book buying public by not having better speculative fiction sections.
They'll tell you it's because this stuff doesn't sell, but I know without any bookscan data that that is crap.
Evidence: The only commercially viable magazines that specialize in short fiction are speculative fiction magazines. (Asimov's, The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction, Analog, Cemetery Dance, and Weird Tales all publish regularly without the support of NEA grants or universities.) (And good luck finding them in your local indie, where you'll probably have no trouble finding every annoying pubication associated with Dave Eggers.)
The chain stores stock tons of this stuff. Say what you will about the chains, but they are not libraries. They don't stock stuff they can't sell.
Let's look at the Amazon top 50 as of this writing, shall we? Here are speculative ficiton titles in the top 50 (Though it pains me, I'm leaving aside the obvious jokes about how books by the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin qualify as either fantasy or horror):
9. A Touch of Dead by Charlaine Harris
12. An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon
28. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Covet: A Novel of the Fallen Angels by J.R. Ward
36. The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
39. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
41.The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
46. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
So of the 23 works of fiction in the Amazon top 50 as of right now, 8 are works of speculative fiction. So much for the idea that these kinds of books don't sell.
But it may well be that they don't sell well at independent bookstores. I posit that this is because many independent bookstores haven't made themselves a very welcoming environment for fans of this kind of fiction. I think this is because many independent bookstores value their position as a center of NPR-listening, New-Yorker-Reading culture, and speculative fiction doesn't quite fit that image.
I'm exaggerating because I'm a dick, but you know what I mean. People devoted to these genres buy a lot of books, and many independents have essentially ceded this market to the chains. Why not go after it aggressively?
So, by all means, book buyers, support your local independent bookstore because it's good for literature and your community. But indies--help yourselves by trying to get fans of speculative fiction into your store! Host a Charles Stross or Cherie Priest signing! Have a steampunk night! Have a Halloween party celebrating the best horror fiction you've got! The NPR people will still come for the literary fiction about guys with writer's block, but you'll be welcoming in a bunch of passionater readers who are fiercely loyal and will tell the entire internet how awesome you are if they have a good experience in your store. Why wouldn't you do this?
