I usually don’t blog on the weekends, but here I am at the fabulous Main Library up the street from my house. I’m working on creating a spreadsheet to help me with my revision process (I’ll share that in an upcoming post).

Anyway, of course the library has Internet access and so I felt the need to “ease” in to my revision process (i.e,. provide myself with a procrastination tactic).

I read some blogs, including the latest This Week in Publishing post on agent Nathan Bransford’s blog. He highlighted a publishing-related article in the NY Times, Book Sales are Down, Depsite Push. Just makes us want to jump up and sing right?

Nathan also pointed to a related blog post, Book Sales and Wails by Miriam Goderich, of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. Here are some things she said in her post that struck a chord with me:

“Readers are becoming used to the fact that they will be able to find the books they want to read either in their originally published form or through used book sites or e-book editions. Just because these people are not in the bookstore the day a book is published doesn’t mean that that audience, if marketed to correctly, can’t make a title a bestseller six months after publication.

Despite this, publishers are still overpaying for a tiny percentage of books and then rolling them out as if the entire business depended on them, and they are invariably disappointed when they don’t sell by the truckload within a couple of weeks.”

I also think Ms. Goderich makes a good point in her post about how the book industry isn’t necessarily like the movie industry where readers are going to bookstores on Tuesdays to purchase new books (okay, maybe I do, but you know what I mean, LOL). Some of the best books I didn’t even know about until several years after publication.

Maybe I’m being naive about this whole thing but I do understand that publishing is a business. But if a book’s survival is based on its sales performance in the first few weeks rather than giving it time to build an audience—these are going to be some tough times indeed for writers.

Okay, back to the spreadsheet and revision.