But my point is that if you are a bookseller, you should love me. I spend money on books like it’s going out of style. I buy electronically. I buy in print. I buy online. I buy in person. If you sell books, I buy them. I spend more on books in a month as I spend on my dog. And because I’m doing taxes–and because many of my book purchases are tax-deductible–I know how much I spent on books in 2010. I’ll tell you this much: it’s easily four figures, and it’s a lot closer to $5000 than it is to $1,000.

I think the breakdown of where I spent that money is interesting.

35%: electronic
65%: paper

The numbers skew paper because (1) if I do giveaways, I want a paper book; and (2) many research books I prefer to have in paper copy so I can spread them out on the desk as I work, or mark passages or write on the edges. I mix up my e-book purchases so the e-book purchases are spread across Amazon, All Romance eBooks, Books on Board, Powell’s, and eHarlequin.

55%: purchased online
45%: in a retail store

Again, the number skews to online purchases because, for instance, if I want to track down “The Municipal Government of Bristol: 1820-1851″ I usually am going to find it online. The 20% difference between electronic and online purchases is pretty much that: purchases of research books that I’m getting for a specific purchase. But just to give you some idea of how much I spent in retail stores, we’re still talking four figures, and by a good margin.

Here’s the last set of numbers I’m going to give you:

At what retail outlets did I spend my money in 2010? (This is a further breakdown of the 45% figure above.)

Barnes & Noble: 48% (there’s a B&N convenient to the place where I work)
Borders: 34% (I try to spread the love around anyway)
Target: 11% (I end up getting books every time I buy toilet paper, too)

That’s 93% of my purchases. The other 7% are made up by airport bookstores, the occasional purchase of books at conferences, and…

Independent Bookstores: 3.5%

Yeah, that’s kind of surprising to me, too. I like all bookstores. There’s a reason I wrote a webscript that generates automatic links to indiebound and two prominent independents along with the major chains–I believe that a vibrant book marketplace depends upon the health of all bookstores–large chains, discounters, and independent bookstores. I don’t want any piece of that to go away.

But you know what? Even though I spend thousands of dollars on books–in the young adult section, in science fiction and fantasy, in biography and history and memoir–I generally don’t go into indie bookstores because I also buy a metric ton of romances, and there is no indie bookstore near where I live that carries romance. It’s not that I’m boycotting indies, or even that I’m trying to send a message. It’s just that when I feel like browsing for books, I want to do it somewhere that has all the sections I like to browse in. If you don’t carry the primary genre that I read, I’m naturally going to spend my time–and therefore money–elsewhere. I want to love you, indies, but you just don’t have what I need.

When I break that 3.5% down even further, another interesting statistic: 3.3% was spent in person at Powell’s, while 0.2% was spent at other indies.

This is interesting because I don’t live anywhere near Powell’s. But Powell’s has excellent romance curation, and so when I go in I know I can spend three hours and browse every kind of book in the entire world and buy a massive armload of books from all sections. If I lived near Powell’s I would just have my paycheck direct-deposited into their coffers to save time. It’s a giant magnet for me: it has so many books, and I want to walk out with all of them.

I know this might not change any minds. But if you run an indie bookstore and you don’t carry romance, be advised that you’re losing out on more than the dollars you’d make on the romances. You’re losing browsers.

Disclaimer: These numbers are rough. I’m still gathering receipts. They also *ahem* underestimate my spending, because there are some receipts I ended up not scanning at all because the books had no business purpose: cookbooks, for instance.

One of them is this: Usually, in a class action lawsuit, there needs to be a serious effort made to provide all plaintiffs covered by the settlement with individual notice, to make sure that they have heard about it. Typically this is handled by mailing identifiable class members a piece of paper describing the settlement. This is a step that has allegedly not been taken at this point. For instance, Gant never received individual notice–even though he would be one of the unnamed plaintiffs who is easiest to find. If Gant’s allegations (both about the legal requirement and the lack of notice) are true, this is a serious defect.

I conducted a non-scientific survey on RWA-PAN. As of this writing, I’ve received 25 responses from people who I can verify are covered by the settlement (that means, I have affirmatively looked up their book(s) in the copyright registry, or they have a foreign copyright with a country covered by the Berne Convention).  Eight of those people–a little less than 33%–have received individual notification. The remainder have not. Some of the people who have not received notification have addresses clearly marked on the Library of Congress copyright registration; almost all of them are still receiving royalties from their publishers. Edited to read: “have books still in print with their publisher,” as I did not inquire as to royalty status. I can only verify that I can get books through Amazon.  Some of the people who have not been notified are still receiving royalties from have books in print with publishers who are named plaintiffs to the case.

This was not a scientific survey, and numerous objections to the bare statistics (authors may not remember receiving notice) as well as the legal conclusions (individual notice may not be required) Gant discusses can be raised.  I don’t pretend to represent this as anything other than a set of interesting numbers.

Still, this interesting set of numbers definitely makes me sit back and say, hmm.

And just because that doesn’t quite give you an idea of the shimmery goodness that is the bookmark, try this:

As you can see, the bookmark has a few distinctive features.  It’s die cut.  And it’s not just a die cut with rounded corners or a leaf shape; it’s a die cut with a pattern.  (The pattern is drawn from one of the random dividers that shows up on my website.  This one, to be exact: )

It has my name in gold foil.  Shiny!

And it has accents picked out in spot UV.

There were two parts to getting this bookmark made: the design, and the printing.

The printing was the easy part.  I used 4colorprint.com.  I have had excellent luck with them.  I’ve used them to print both business cards and bookmarks now, and both have turned out beautifully.  There are some places you can go to get bookmarks printed more cheaply, but I haven’t found anywhere else that has the quality that 4colorprint has (in terms of the stock they use to print on, the quality of the printing, and the breadth of finishing options).  All I had to do was mail them a file, and lo and behold, after a short space of time, I had gorgeous bookmarks.  I highly recommend 4colorprint for printing interesting and difficult files.

(Incidentally, I was also moving right around the time when I ordered my bookmarks.  I asked them to get in touch with me to make sure everything went to the right address, and the staff was fantastic about touching base with me about my order to make sure everything was squared away.  So many things could have gone wrong with that.  Not one did.)

The design part was harder.  Much harder.  I started with the idea that I wasn’t going to be scared of spending a little bit more than your every day average bookmark, but I didn’t want to spend insane amounts more.  I also think it helped to start with a goal in mind: I wanted a bookmark that (a) made people want to pick it up; (b) made them want to hold it to look at it; and (c) hesitate for at least a split second before tossing it in the trash.

With that in mind, one great resource I used in trying to figure out what sorts of things appealed to me was this Flickr photoset of business cards.  Some of them didn’t appeal to me.  Some seemed a little too gimmicky for me (and also too hard to store–so they would probably get tossed fairly quickly). Others made me want to reach right into my screen to pick them up and examine them in minute detail.  I also walked through bookstores and looked at book covers that caught my eye.

And then I played around.  For a long time.  You can hire someone to do this for you, but it helps substantially if you have an idea what you’re shooting for, and so don’t necessarily bypass the “looking for things you like” phase.

My critique partner, Tessa Dare, also had gorgeous bookmarks–and you can see them on her site, here.  In fact, she’ll even send you some for free!

A non serial comma-ist would write:  I went to the store and got bread, apples and eggs.

Serial-comma activists insist that the serial comma is necessary to avoid ambiguities such as this:  I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God. Which implies that your parents are Ayn Rand and God.

However, I have noticed that my use of the serial comma on my website creates ambiguity:  Courtney Milan lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, a marginally-trained dog, and an attack cat. Which rather implies that my husband is a marginally-trained dog.  Of course, this ambiguity can be avoided by switching clause order:  Courtney Milan lives in the Pacific Northwest with an attack cat, a marginally-trained dog, and her husband. But I think I’ll keep it the way it is.

Mr. Milan is my favorite marginally trained dog!

One of the extremely practical reasons I decided not to post about politics on this blog had nothing to do with turning people away with my political beliefs, and everything to do with the fact that I handle disagreements more like a lawyer and less like an author who thinks that all viewpoints are valid.  (Although I do think other viewpoints are valid!  Sometimes!  Although definitely not if your viewpoint is on the content of law and is inconsistent with fifty years of Supreme Court precedent.  It is just that I show my, er, appreciation by jumping up and down on other viewpoints, trampoline style, to see what survives, rather than handling them like unique and delicate flowers.)

So this whole Suzanne Brockman thing has me in a bit of an uncomfortable tither–because that could so easily be me.  I would be SO MUCH WORSE than she is under these circumstances.  And yes, I could say that she shouldn’t have said this or shouldn’t have said that.  But my argument style tends to be more along the lines of shoot first, interrogate the bleeding corpse later, and then chop its head off and bury the body in unconsecrated ground if it doesn’t have a satisfactory answer.  It’s not a pretty sight.  And the scary thing is that I have toned myself down SO MUCH over the last ten years.

I am fairly certain that at some point in my career, I am going to say something I shouldn’t, and then I will dig myself into a hole by trying to explain where I’m coming from.

I am toast.  That is all.

The problem is that habit persists today, even when I wish I wouldn’t.  Well, not the screaming and running away part–today, I am paying someone actual money to take pictures of me.  No; the part that’s still there is the making faces bit.  I don’t know why it is, but I always manage to have the dumbest look on my face when people take pictures of me.

The worst part is when people try to reassure me.  “What are you talking about?” they ask.  “You look perfectly normal in that picture.”

AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!  I look like that all the time?!

It pays few political dividends.  It doesn’t jumpstart the economy or do anything to address the hard problems of health care, education, or energy efficiency.

It just shows integrity and a commitment to the rule of law.  It demonstrates that the oath he swore to preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution had real meaning other than lip service.

Thank you for this one.

I started thinking about this a few days ago, when Kristin posted on her blog about cover consultations.  One of the commenters suggested that someday, a publisher would be sued, and an injunction obtained, over cover consultation.  It might happen one day–but it struck me as such a horribly wrong-headed approach to the matter, that I’ve been thinking about the problem presented for days.

It won’t surprise you to hear that some lawyers advise clients, when faced with a potential lawsuit, to avoid admitting guilt or providing information.  After all, if you say, “I’m sorry, it was my fault,” in court, they will ask you, “Hey, didn’t you say it was your fault?”  And you will have to answer yes, and then you will lose.  But there was a rather startling study produced by the Journal of American Medicine a few years ago that found that in malpractice cases, lawsuits went down if someone sat down with the people in question, told them precisely what went wrong, admitted fault and responsibility, and told them how they’d taken measures to prevent such accidents in the future.

Why?  Personally, I think it’s because most people don’t file lawsuits because they’re trying to get the money or because they honestly believe it is the best step to take in their careers.  Most people file lawsuits because they’ve been hurt, they are angry, and they want to feel vindicated.  They file lawsuits because they’ve stopped seeing the person they care about as human and real, and they see them only as an adversary to be ground into the dust.  Adding that human touch–letting the patients know that the doctors did care, and responded to their pain and wanted to do what was right–made a huge difference.  Ultimately, people know that a lawsuit will never bring Grandma back.  But being treated by the medical professionals as if you are human instead of a walking, talking liability helped them channel their grief and anger in some way other than lashing out legally.

I’m not trying to say that lawsuits serve no purpose.  They do, obviously, and they’ve done great (and terrible) things for our society.  I’m not even trying to say that you shouldn’t sue doctors for malpractice.  If a doctor is incompetent, she should not be treating patients, and I approve of methods that make it impossible for that doctor to earn a living.

But I do think that your life will be happier and more free of stress if you try not to find a lawsuit everywhere you look.  This is especially true of publishing contracts.  Most of what I saw in my publishing contract was about two sides working together.  I’m going to give them a timely product that is the best work I can do.  They’re going to let me know how to make it even better, and I’m going to listen–because we both want the same thing, which is for my books to capture as many readers as possible.

And I don’t see how I could have that relationship if I thought of the contract, and our agreement, as an adversarial one.

Sometimes, this relationship breaks down.  (When it does, it leads to cringeworthy train wrecks on Dear Author that leave me noting to myself that I will never, ever under any circumstances work for a publishing house where managers tell authors to shut up or sue.)  But most of the time, you don’t hear anything about it–except thanks, from authors to editors and publishing house staff, for all their hard work.

As 2009 approached, and I realized I was going to have published material out this year, I realized I wanted a newsletter (shameless plug:  sign up for my newsletter!).  This lead to a site redesign.  Among other things, my site now changes colors every month, and it takes a page from Google–on some major holidays, and on a few very minor ones that you wouldn’t think of as holidays as well, it changes in less subtle ways.

For a limited time, go see my website in the future–as it will look on October 31, 2009.  Spooky!

Beyond the fold, I talk about what I was smoking when I redid my website.

Here’s the problem I faced.  The way my old site was arranged, the side menu fit between those black bars:

old page

You may be able to see the problem even now.  If I wanted to add a link in the sidebar, I had to redo the back graphic.  Which I could do, but it made me realize that the website I had built just wasn’t . . . it wasn’t scalable.  That is, it wouldn’t grow very well with my career.  It was fine when I had one or two books, but when I get up to twenty (and I hope I will), and I have pages–perhaps multiple pages–for every book, and pages that show how the books connect, and printable book lists, and pages for awards that I’ve won (and I hope I will) . . . well, you get my drift.  At some point, the website was going to get downright unmanageable.

So I decided to redo it.  As I started thinking about a redesign (and that other question, whether to implement the redesign myself, or hire someone else to do it), I spent a lot of time looking at other author’s websites, to try to find out both what was eye-catching–and more importantly, which websites I spent time at.

One of the things I discovered was that they were not the same thing.  There are some websites that have a ton of really cool graphics, but . . . how do I say this?  The graphics get in the way of the content.  You spend so much time looking at the graphics, and how neat they are, that what’s on the page.  Conversely, you can have websites where the graphics are so clonky that you don’t want to look at the page, too.  I began to realize that in my first page, the graphics were too central to the website.  The bright yellow and green was eye-catching, but maybe it was too eye-catching.  It made you look away from the text.

The second problem with it, I began to realize, was whitespace.  There was no literal white on the page–but more importantly, the text and the graphics were crammed together, and so once you got there you didn’t want to stay.

Then, as I read the text of the site, I realized that I had been trying really hard to sound professional.  Adult.  Authorial, even.  In other words, it sounded nothing like me.  I wanted someone to come to my website and get a feel for what my books were like, not just from the graphics, but also from the text.  Ultimately, words must sell themselvs, and the words I’d put on the page didn’t sell me.

Finally, I realized that I was bored with my color scheme.  What had seemed fresh and bright when I implemented the new site almost a year before now seemed trite and boring.  Ho hum.  Yellow and black.  The visual interest of the site waned–and I suspected that was true not only for me, but for everyone else.

It was about this time that I realized that if I went to any webdesigner on the planet and told them what I wanted, I would either (a) not get it, or (b) pay them $20,000.  Not having $20,000, I decided to boldly forge ahead and do it myself.

I wanted a site that would scale with my career.  It needed to have a lot of intelligent white space, which would draw the reader’s eye towards text.  I wanted enough graphical embellishments to give the site a minimal level of professionalism without losing a sense of fun, without overwhelming the words on the site–because after all, I am a seller of words.  And that meant the site needed to sound like it was written by me, so if people read it and liked the way it sounded (and not everyone will) they would think it might be fun to read one of my books.  Finally, I wanted a site that would change colors–one that was, in effect, “themeable”–with the months and the holidays.

Now, whether my use of white space is intelligent, whether my site is fun to read, and whether the graphics convey professional fun, is subjective.  I don’t think I did as well as a true professional could have, but the price was right. 

But I do have a scalable site–one where adding whole sections of the site is not only easy but almost automatic.  I have a site that is highly themeable.  Most of the themes are riffs on the January theme you see now: very light, inobtrusive, tasteful colors.

But every once in a while, on a holiday, I decided to have a little fun.  For a limited time only (a few days, until I put the password back, you can jump ahead into the future and see what the site will look like on Hallowe’en.  Check out my test site here. (If you get a message saying you need a password, it is because you checked too late).   Some holidays (like Hallowe’en) just have different (less tasteful) color schemes.  But others (I’m not telling which) have actual limited-time content.  Be sure to visit my website throughout the year–because you’ll never know when it’s changed. 

It somehow, though, seems almost . . . wrong . . . to blog about it as an author.

Why?  It’s what a friend of mine calls “jurisdictional boundaries”–big words that basically mean, if I am wearing my Author Hat, I shouldn’t surprise you all by putting on a big Politics Hat.  You didn’t ask for it.  You don’t care what I think.  If you want politics, you’ll open your OpEd page.  At best, you want to read my books–I hope you want to read my books.  So as an author, politics are not my bailiwick.

Likewise, you shouldn’t care whether your doctor votes Democrat or Republican, as long as she’s a good doctor.  You shouldn’t care if your doctor supports raising the social security age, nor should you switch physicians because you discover that she just doesn’t get what all the fuss is about Harry Potter.  None of that matters to the fine art of doctoring.

But there are small pieces of overlap.  For instance, I would want to know what my doctor thought about the quality of local water.  And, truthfully, no matter how little a writer says about politics, her books inevitably betray at least some of the things that are nearest and dearest to her heart.  So do you disclose it?  Do you admit that it’s been done that way on purpose?  It’s never intended as a lecture, but when an author chooses a “happily ever after,” the way she makes her characters happy often shows what she thinks people need.

Likewise, while I never plan to make this blog political, and especially not overtly so, is it horrible to think about becoming a supporter of my favored person on Facebook?

How much is too much?  I’d love to hear thoughts on this.