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I love my local library consortium!

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Webster Groves Library

Webster Groves Library

It’s official I love my library. Ok, I love libraries in general, it’s not necessarily that my library is all that much more impressive than most. But I love going to the library and I did so today.

Now, I occasionally write these little library posts so people know why my blog stalls for a week or so. I predominantly read & reveiw indie books, but every once in a while I get a hankerin’ for some traditional publications or to catch up on a series I started and never came around to finishing. This is what pulls me towards my library and away from the ~3,000 indie books I have at my fingertips. But I don’t always bother with reviews for these books. Honestly, if Hachette Publications puts a book out I may read it, but probably not when it’s new and probably not before it has 5,000 reviews. So, unless I have something significant to say, I just don’t bother. As a result, library trips often coincide with a temporary reduction in blog posts. So, let this serve as official warning that posts may lag.

What did I get, today? This year, one of my reading goals is to try clearing off some of the books that have been on my TBR for a long time. With this in mind, I took the time to go through my Goodreads Please-Lend-Me shelf and requested any of the books that were on it and available from my library. There weren’t that many of them, again, I read mostly indie, which my library carries few of.*

I went to the library today

But I did manage to snag John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let Me In (which has been on my list since I joined Goodreads in 2012), Kij Johnson’s Fudoki (also Feb 2012), Jay Kristoff’s Stormdancer (Feb 2013), Liz Williams’ Snake Agent (July 2014) and Ron Rash’s Serena. (The last one because I’ve joined a real-world book club—yes, wine, mojitos, appetizers, chatty well-read women, it’s great—and this is our book of the month). I also requested William Goldman’s The Princess Bride and George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (so I can sample his writing without committing to the Song of Fire and Ice series). These last two however are checked out, so I’m on the waiting list.

It’s a couple thousand pages, all in and I may or may not review them all. So, again, be forewarned that there may be a week and a half or so pause in blogging on my end.

But access to free books isn’t the only reason I love my library. They have a ton of free activities for both kids and adults—classes, book signings, book discussions, movie nights, story time, lego mania, Minecraft events, concerts, etc.— there are just a ton of things happening. (Seriously, if you’ve not checked out your library, you should.)

My favorite of the moment is the summer reading challenge. Granted, I originally only signed up for this to do it with my seven-year-old, who loves books but struggles with reading. I thought if we did it together, she might feel encouraged. And she likes the idea of winning a prize for doing 500 minutes of reading over the summer, sure, but it’s me that’s really taken to the idea.

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I read roughly a book a day…yeah, that 5 book goal was done in the 1st week.

Now, I don’t care about the prizes. I don’t even know what’s on the table, or even if it’s a prize or drawing or something else. What I love is that, as an adult, I have to list the books I read to qualify. And surely, SURELY the library takes advantage of the fact that their members are telling them, in real time, what they are reading and uses this conveniently collected data to determine what sorts of books to order in the future.

And that matters to me. My library is a member of a consortium in which anyone from any of several libraries can request books from other consortium libraries. And at least 2/3 of the books I request come from one branch of that consortium (University City). The members in that community must have reading tastes more similar to mine than my local branch (or at least someone in the ordering department does).

My point is that I’ve taken to the idea of letting my local library know exactly what I’m reading in the hopes that it will encourage them to order more books in the genres I read a lot of. We have a pretty strong fiction and biography section, but other than new releases of popular series, I have a hard time finding much good Urban Fantasy. I enjoy a good PNR and am currently ga-ga over M/M & (to a lesser degree) F/F romance, but am not a fan of contemporary romances, only the last of which my library seems to carry many of. Not to suggest they have none, but I have to work pretty hard to find them. Undoubtedly, this is all the result of the fact that my community has historically, I think, had an older population.

Anyhow, at this point I’m basically just squeeing over my trip to the library. I encourage everyone to get out there and visit their own.

*Hey library people, I know funds are limited and books are chosen carefully, but might I suggest some Leigh Parker, Alexis Hall,  Maya Lassiter, Jordan Castillo Price, Michael McClung, C. Lynn Murphy, Sera Ashling, Giacomo Giammatteo, K.J. Charles, Andrea Speed, J.L. Merrow, Vaughn R. Demont, A.J. Aalto, Lindsay Buroker, Rebekah Turner, J.L. Murray,  Angela Roquet, Harper Fox or Mary Holland. These are just some of the ones I’ve read and loved in the last year or two. The list is a bit biased toward genres I read a lot of, but all worthy reads from indie authors.

INDIE AUTHORS OF THE WORLD, PLEASE STOP DOING THIS (part 2)!

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stop-sign

Late last year, I found myself so annoyed at authors who fill the synopsis section of their book’s description with so much praise I can’t decipher what the book is actually about that I wrote a whole post about it. You can read it here.

This morning I had a similar experience, leading me to a similar response. I’ll start with a couple screenshots, see if you can guess my complaint by the common denominator.

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Did you figure it out? Look authors, I realize Amazon stopped using tags and I realize that tags were a useful way to find books, as well as something authors could manipulate and feel like they were doing something significant to work their books up the recommendation chain. I get it, I do. I even tried it once when I was new. But tags do not belong in titles! (This is just my opinion, of course, but I’m pretty firm in it.)

I find it especially irritating in cases like the first and last examples above, when at least one word of each of the tags in included in the title itself. This means that anyone searching those words would get the book even without the tags. (And as an aside, I could write another whole rant on mixing incompatible genres, like in that 3rd example. How can you have a YA, threesome erotic novel? You shouldn’t be able to? It goes against what it means to be YA.)

Let me break this down for you, from a reader’s perspective. I’m scrolling through the list of millions of books available to me as a reader, yes? I’m glancing at covers and titles to see what interests me. If I come across Fantasy: Immortaland: The Greatest Fantasy Kingdom To Exist And That Will Ever Exist (Fantasy Story, Epic Fantasy, Magic Kingdom, Fantasy Adventure) I have to stop and pick through all those extraneous word to find the actual title. Do you know what my reaction to this is? ‘That’s too much trouble’ and I scroll right by. That’s right. This practice is losing you sales in a very real way.

What’s more, it looks desperate. It says to me that this author is so desperate to be noticed they’re attempting to rig the system. Yes, I know how hard it is to be noticed, but getting noticed for trying to get noticed is a little pitiful.

Then there is the fact that sites like Goodreads pull the book’s details from Amazon and thus indiscriminately pull the data from the title line, along with all those tags, into their metadata where it really is useless.

And what if I’m the sort who likes to hide my kinky side? I don’t necessarily want that kink readily apparent in the title. Just because my seven-year-old sees me reading a book called Strictly Business doesn’t mean I want to yet explain what Strictly Business: Gay, M/M, BDSM, Dom/sub, billionaire, CEO, taboo (Courtland Chronicles series Book 2) means. The same argument could be made for someone reading outside their religion, or above their age limit, or in a professional setting, etc.

It’s my further understanding that this is an outdated mode of getting your book found in the first place. According to a 2009 post (that’s right six years old) Google no longer uses metatag keywords in their searches at all.  

And you can guarantee that if Google has given it up the rest of the Web isn’t far behind. After all, there’s surely a reason Amazon removed the tagging option in the first place.

So, this practice of obscuring your title with tags annoys readers (at least this reader), means some kinky readers have to avoid your books, looks ridiculous, and probably doesn’t really do much. So, I’d be interested in hearing why authors and publishers seem to be ramping up the use of the practice. The five examples I used above took me mere moments to find and I could pull dozens more.

How about this one:

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According to the cover, the title of the book is The Barony Letter and the series name is Liath. (You might be tempted to think it’s the other-way around, due to which is most prominently displayed, but you’d apparently be wrong. I was.) But the author has chosen to put the tag Historical Romance, before the actual title, as if the book is called Historical Romance: Liath: The Barony Letter. Sorry, I have no desire to read anything so clumsily titled, or any book that I have to work so hard to figure out the basic information of, for that matter.

Here’s more: HISTORICAL ROMANCE: The Marriage Was Not The Best Suited For Our Love HISTORICAL ROMANCE Short Story (Historical Romance, Regency Romance, Historical Romance … Romance books, Historical Romance Novel), Mystery: Whispers of Silence (Mystery Books, Mystery Romance Novels, Thriller Romance, Mystery Romance Books, Mystery Romance Series), Ancient Egypt: Discover the Fascinating World of Ancient Egyptian History, Myths, Pyramids and More: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Egypt Fiction, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Egyptian History, Egypt, A Firm Lesson Learned (Hot Neighbor, Alpha Male, Gay M/M Man Next Door, Mind Control Paranormal)

Is it starting to look like gobbledygook yet? I know I can’t tease out the titles from all that other nonsense. (For the record, that’s four books in the paragraph above.) And I can’t even blame it on one author or publisher. These are mostly all different writers crossing genres from gay erotica to mysteries to non-fiction. Though, it does seem most common in the romance & erotic genres.

So, from one serious, several-hundred-books-a-year reader, please authors, PLEASE, stop doing this. It drives me batty and puts me off your books. If you really want that information available to readers, put it in the synopsis. That’s what it’s there for.

Impressed with Amazon’s customer service

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You may not know this about me, but I generally distrust large corporations. I always assume that, with millions of customers, they’d not be bothered with the loss of one. Thus, there’s no real incentive to go out of their way to be helpful. And while this may be true, true even for Amazon (I’ve heard any number of horror stories), it wasn’t at all true of my most recent interaction with them.

About 1:00 Friday afternoon, I had a crisis. I picked my Kindle up off the table and noticed what I thought was a scratch on my screen. That opinion quickly changed, as I noticed it was instead a crack! I had (have) no idea how it came to be. As far as I know, it’s never been dropped or sat on. My Kindle and I spend hours together most days. I treat it accordingly. I gentle it.

The crack was small. I was vexed, but thought I could live with it. However, within half an hour of reading, it grew to two – two and a half inches and was starting to affect the functionality of the touch screen. I sadly accepted that it was done for.

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I set the poor thing aside and contacted Amazon customer services, via the chat option (noticing as I did that the crack was still growing). I was transferred to Charan Teja, who asked me once if the device had been jarred or submitted to any sort of pressure. When I said ‘no,’ they immediately offered to replace the Kindle, as there is no easy fix.

Now, I’ll grant that I order a lot from Amazon and I rarely return items. On the matrix of customers most likely to be trying to pull some sort of fast one, I’m probably pretty low. But I contacted Amazon fully prepared to be told that screens weren’t covered by the warranty or that I must somehow be responsible. I at least expected to be grilled on the subject. I expected to terminate contact angry and impotent feeling. The painlessness with which it all transpired instead was awe-inspiring to me.

I was emailed a return shipping label to send the broken Kindle back for free (in the box the new one arrives in) and told that my replacement Kindle would arrive Sunday the 17th. I actually laughed at this, assuming (perhaps rudely) that Charan must not be American and know that there is no Sunday post.

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Regardless, I expected my new Kindle by Monday and was perfectly satisfied with this. I’d have actually been happy with regular old snail mail and a week-long delivery time. It’s still better than a permanently broken e-reader. Either way, I figured I’d finally get some of the physical books that I’d been meaning to read cleared off the shelf while I waited.

But the unexpected happened. Here I sat at about 8:00 this Sunday morning—unwashed, my hair pulled messily back, still in my pajamas, sipping idly at a cup of decaf coffee (yes, I know, but I’ve temporarily given up caffeine)—when there was a knock at the door and a USPS van in my drive.

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Less than 48 (weekend) hours from contacting Amazon I have a new Kindle in hand!  Any way I slice that it’s impressive. (And have I lived under a rock that I didn’t know there were Sunday deliveries?)

Thank you Amazon and USPS!