John Cline is retracing the Great Migration route from New Orleans to Chicago for his Oxford American column, “Arterial America.” In his latest dispatch, he discovers Jackson, Mississippi’s hip-hop community.
Blues Traveler
Indies Thriving in the Age of Amazon
“While pressure from Amazon forced Borders out of business in 2011, indie bookstores staged an unexpected comeback. Between 2009 and 2015, the ABA reported a 35% growth in the number of independent booksellers, from 1,651 stores to 2,227.” Professor Ryan Raffaelli read this surprising statistic and decided to study what exactly independent bookstores were doing in order to reinvent themselves and thrive. He found it has to do with indies embracing the three Cs; community, curation and convening. The full report will be released in 2018 but you can glimpse a preview here. Three cheers for indies!
Feminist Bookstores Resisting Trump and Getting Stronger Sales
“The feminist bookstores in the nation’s largest cities are experiencing the most significant upticks in sales, as well as in foot traffic.” We love bookstores here at the Millions, especially feminist ones. So we were ecstatic to see this piece in Publisher’s Weekly about the bonanza of feminist bookstores seeing an increase in sales and attention. While there are not many of these bookstores left, the ones that are still alive attribute their increased popularity to the ‘Trump bump.’ Read the story here and be sure to visit all the bookstores mentioned the next time you’re in town.
Where to Begin
“I saw a novel with a mysterious-looking black woman on the cover. That was why I picked it up – because of the African woman on the cover of a book in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section. I read the first page and my eyes nearly popped out.” Book Riot has a killer roundup of posts in honor of Octavia Butler‘s birthday today, including five other sci-fi authors on being inspired by her writing (that’s Nnedi Okorafor above). Pair with our own Edan Lepucki‘s consideration of Butler’s novel Kindred.
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The Paper Trail
What writers are actually earning money? Over at Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel takes a look at the new Author Earnings report, which scours Amazon bestseller lists and extrapolates the data to make claims about the state of publishing and self-publishing. Here’s an older Millions piece by Edan Lepucki on self-publishing as supplemental and influential to the traditional route.
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Atwood in the Twittersphere
I dare you not to be charmed by Margaret Atwood’s account of becoming a Twitter user. “Despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers.” (via kottke)
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