Not All Lights Are Out!

Not frozen yet

Kathie &Barbara

The last day of our 2018 season, Friday, November 30, was a good day at Dog Ears Books. Many friends stopped in to enjoy cookies, shop the sale, and exchange wishes for a good winter and happy holidays. Serendipitous encounters occurred, also, such as this one between a local reader and this year’s bestselling local author. And about those bestsellers, here are the top-selling titles for the past three years at Dog Ears Books:

Bestsellers, 2016-18

2016 was a tie between Kathleen Stocking’s The Long Arc of the Universe and Jim DuFresne’s Trails of M-22. 

In 2017 Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester came out on top early in the season and stayed there all year.

And for 2018, the #1 book in Northport was easily Barbara Stark-Nemon’s Hard Cider. 

Congratulations to these hard-working and very deserving authors!

As Friday drew to a close and quiet descended over the village of Northport, holiday lights shining against the dark were an irresistible temptation. Though we will not be on hand this year for Christmas and New Year’s, I’m glad we’ve had a chance to enjoy the beginning of the holiday season with local friends. And I also want all my readers to know that there are still  several pockets of lively activity in Northport. One of them (featured in the novel Hard Cider, by the way) is Sally Coohon’s shop, Dolls and More. Stopping in on Friday morning while Bruce took charge of sales at the bookstore, I found Sally providing guidance and support to a local man making a memorial quilt with his beloved late dog’s scarves. 

Working on the backing

Memorial quilt top

Twinkling holiday lights rest on poinsettia quilt

One small corner of Sally's treasure island of materials!

So much going on everywhere!

Sally offers instruction in quilting, knitting, stamping, and holiday crafts, and her shop is warm and cozy and welcoming, a most cheery place to spend time when the weather outside is frightful.

The Artist and I will be spending our winter in a place even quieter than Northport, out in that Arizona ghost town I chronicled in 2015 and again in early 2018. What will winter be like in Cochise County this time around? How will our friends at home in Leelanau fare in terms of snow, ice, and cold? And what exciting books, new and old, will come our way in the months ahead? There again I trust to serendipity and wish a sleighful of it to all of you!

Our Last Week!

Northport was full of holiday-makers on Saturday evening when our big village tree lights were turned on, and before that a fair number of revelers found their way into Dog Ears Books, making for quite a lively day. People seemed to appreciate the sale prices, which I’m continuing through this week. A kind friend, Kirk O’Green, sent me the wonderful photo below of “Christmas horses.” Rides through the village in the horse-drawn wagon are another annual Northport tradition that goes along with tree-lighting. See my building in the background, just behind the driver?

As the northern hemisphere approaches winter solstice, there are a few complaints in northern Michigan about days ending so early, but bright lights hold darkness at bay in our little village. Doesn’t the Garage Bar & Grill (my next-door neighbor) look welcoming?

Following the weekend, Dog Ears Books joined indie bookstores across the country in celebrating CIDER (please, not ‘cyber’!) Monday. We had cookies and the appropriate beverage. That was fun! Now, however, the end of November is at hand, and Friday, November 30, will be the last day of our 2018 season. That’s right, you’ve only got three days left to visit the bookstore in Northport and shop the holiday sale and greet the bookstore dog and share cookies and season’s greetings with us! We’ll re-open in mid-May. For now, I’m both happy and sad to see the year end. 

The Artist and I have had a somewhat grueling summer and fall, and we look forward to our time away from work — our “seasonal retirement,” as I’ve taken to calling it. Still, we will miss friends here at home. But our neighbors the sandhill cranes left long ago, and it’s just about time for us to migrate, as they have already done, to a winter home. “Your last week?” one customer cried out in alarm. “Last of this season,” I hastened to assure. God willing, we shall return in the spring, along with the cranes. 

Meanwhile, keep safe, friends! Stay healthy! Drive defensively, don’t take any falls on the ice, enjoy your winter holidays with family and friends, and keep reading good books!

To Replace or Re-Invent Myself, That Is the Question

We were all younger once.

One day this past September I received an unsolicited e-mail offer that I read with very mixed feelings. I’ll quote the bulk of it here verbatim (omitting the company name and link at the end but including a few editorial comments) so you can see what I mean:

Pamela - If you’re not 100% happy with your blog, you may want to consider trying a new writer!  

The key is to find a great writer that [sic] also has a deep understanding of your industry [!] 

The problem is, finding these writers [now we are looking for more than one?] can be a real challenge.  

To solve this problem, we use our award-winning _____ platform [I omit the name here, as it is no doubt trademarked) to search over 70,000 pro [sic] writers to find a handful of writers that [sic] we think will be a good match for your specific needs. Then, we have each writer write you [awk] the same sample article (title of your choosing).  

This makes it super easy [ugh!] for you to see which writer you like the best. 

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, just click below to schedule a time so we can talk.

Interesting, eh? Here’s some of what raced through my brain in response: 

Why would I not be happy with my blog? Should I be unhappy with it? Is the sender implying that the writing is substandard? There are certainly writers in the world more talented than I am, but I doubt they want to work for me without compensation! Because I can’t afford to pay a writer to write for me, and I can’t afford to hire a company to find a writer to write for me!

And let me just say that I am repelled by the term “industry” applied to the world of books! Anyone who (who, not that) would apply the term “industry” to the world of writers and publishers and booksellers would probably also refer to the books in my store as “product.” 

Finally, who among these 70,000 “pro” writers for hire knows my life and the books I read and stock and my bookstore better than I do? My blog is not about some abstract “industry,” but about my very personal world!

Lest you think, however, that I was sputtering in outrage over this e-mail, I assure you I was more amused than offended. Did a “pro” writer compose the e-mail? My inner editor (who always slumbers lightly with one eye open) would have taken “that” out of “writers that we think would be a good match” and maybe moved “that” up to the previous one-sentence paragraph, using it place of the awkward comma, and that “super easy” claim did not impress me, either. Overall, I found the entire message uninspired and uninspiring.

Okay, I understand it was a sales pitch. But the message I received (besides envisioning a writer reaching way over her head) was that the sender had not spent any time at all reading my blog before trying to sell me her (I’ll use the detested word here) product. Know thyself and know thy market!

On the other hand, I’m sympathetic, I really am. It’s a dog-eat-dog world [No offense, Sarah!], and everyone is seeking an audience, making a pitch, feeling around for a footing and a handhold — in short, trying to survive. And I’m no different. I’m just (and this is probably my Achilles heel rather than any excellence of character) not single-minded about it. My little stories and snippets, travelogues, tirades, and vignettes are all offered at the same price I am paid to write them, and if they help my Dog Ears Books business in any way, so much the better. If not, I’ve had the pleasure of the writing and the occasional pleasure of a kind and/or thoughtful word in response.

Self-invention and self-promotion are touted as what we should all be about these days, and as wages race to an ever-lower and lower global “bottom” (for those jobs not yet lost to drones and robots), there are more and more people of all ages trying to figure out their next moves. I give a lot of thought to the question myself. What next? What if I’ve nearly run out my string with this bookselling gig? 

One thing is sure. I won’t be hiring anyone else to do my writing for me. So if you’re not satisfied with what you find on Books in Northport, you'll have to look elsewhere. At least you’ll have no trouble finding (here comes another buzz word I despise) “content” all over the place. It’s a big, wide, wonderful world out there, and, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s overflowing with words.