We have always heard that secrets have a way of coming out but Brooke has been able to keep a deep dark secret since high school.

Everything is going great in her life, she has a wonderful family, a beautiful daughter a great husband, and job she loves at the garden center but her husband, Sean, just can’t understand why she refuses to have a second child.  Sean begins to question his wife’s fidelity when her high school boyfriend, Alex, newly divorced and mourning the death of his own child, shows up in town out of the blue.

Brooke begins to realize that everything she has worked to keep hidden for the past 15 years may surface especially with Alex back since he is the only one that knows the terrible secret.  Alex has secrets of his own and while the two are certainly intermingled they are very different versions and he has come to tell his side of the story.

Brooke soon realizes that the only way to balance her own emotional state and hopefully save her marriage that she needs to go home and face the demons of her past.  What she finds though could either destroy everything she has worked for or bring her the redemption she never thought she would find.

Lucy Ferriss will be at Lemuria Bookstore tonight, March 20 at 5 pm signing her novel, The Lost Daughter, and reading at 5:30.

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a discussion with three other booksellers from Mississippi on the future of bookselling at the University of Mississippi. My thoughts on this subject have been constant over the last few years which became more emphasized by the recession. I’m constantly reading and analyzing how to stay open and grow. I’m challenging my old ways, hoping to find new ways to enhance my work and improve Lemuria. As I prepare my thoughts for this session, I’ve decided to reflect on One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of amazon.com.

One Click begins on page one with comments about Richard Howorth, my long time favorite bookseller of Square Books. Richard’s fanatic focus on customer service and his drive to go the extra mile is the emphasis. On September 22, 1994, Richard instructed Bezos about bookselling at the American Bookseller Association’s bookselling school for wanna-be book people. Richard came away with the feeling that Jeff would be successful.

Years later, a realization came  to Richard when he recognized Jeff at an annual trade show, not understanding until then that he had helped train the Godfather of Amazon.

One Click is a concise presentation of the evolution of Amazon. Being very clear about Jeff’s background, a true original, you can begin to understand how the pieces of the puzzle fit together for this driven, brilliant, creative, and narcissistic individual. One Click is essential for any bookseller who wants to understand his or her most competitive foe.

One Click gives the reader a timeline of how Amazon rose from the ground up. By the way, I do respect the hard work Jeff put for over 20 years. However, what I found most interesting was tracking his business timeline during the same years as Lemuria.

Between Amazon’s initial stock offering in 1996 and the end of 2010, Barnes and Noble stock had dropped 29% while Borders stock had fallen 96%. Amazon’s stock had risen 10,320%, all based on end of year 2010. Barnes and Noble was worth $852 million, Borders $65 million and Amazon $81 billion.

Today, physical book readers and bookstores are seriously challenged by the e-book growth. Some people still love their prime time reading experience of real books and enjoy leisurely making their choices at their favorite bookstores.

But not Bezos. He seems ready to kill the industry that made him rich. From Jeff:

“‘I’m grumpy when I’m forced to read a physical book because it’s not convenient,’ he complains. ‘Turning the pages . . . the book is always flopping itself shut at the wrong moment . . . The Kindle is simply a better form of book.. . . We have to build something better than a physical book.'” (135)

For our future, booksellers need to remember Richard Howorth’s advice about dedication to customer service. I feel that Bezos considers the strength of e-book customer service to be the immediate gratification of instant reward through an e-book purchase anywhere in the world.

Real booksellers offer experience and the desire to help readers find their right read. They want to enhance the selection process with a friendly place housing a well edited inventory. Most importantly, they want to make book selections a human experience that is satisfying. That’s my idea of customer service which thus gives me the fulfillment of my bookseller goals.

Above: Newbery winner Christopher Paul Curtis talking about his new book Mighty Miss Malone.

At this time, predicting the future of bookselling is difficult. No one in the industry seems to have a clear answer.

At the present, I  see it as a battle between the publishers and Amazon as to who will be in charge in three to five years. I think Amazon will dominate Barnes and Noble and I hope they don’t beat Lemuria. The key, the way I see it, is how much the publishers will strive to practice good customer service to us, their bookselling customers. I believe Amazon wants to control the publishers and the author guidelines. Bezos wants to rule all bookselling. I don’t think he cares a hoot in hell about the future of the real book or the bookselling experience or brick and mortar bookstores. Who will win remains to be seen.

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One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of amazon.com

by Richard L. Brandt (Portfolio/Penguin, October 2011)

Another essential read for understanding the future of bookselling:

The New Rules of Retail by Robin Lewis and Michael Dart.

Read about it here.

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Lemuria’s Bookstore Keys Series on the Changing Book Industry

Where will e-book sales level out? (June 2) Indie Bookstores Buying from Amazon? (June 1) BEA Roundup (May 19) Lemuria’s Headed for NYC (May17) Barnes & Noble Bankrupt? (April 28) Decluttering the Book Market: Ads on the latest Kindle (April 14) Independents on the Exposed End of the Titantic? (April 6th) Border’s Bonuses (March 30) The Experience of Holding a Book (March15) Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)

Sometimes you pick up books and immediately grasp the idea. I picked up this book and started reading because I couldn’t figure out what it was about. It takes a bit of explanation, but it’s worth it.

The Lifespan of a Fact begins with this note, copied from an internal memo at a magazine, concerning a story submitted for publication by John D’Agata. A story, it’s worth mentioning, that had already been rejected by one magazine because of concerns over factual inaccuracies.

From the Editor:

I’ve got a fun assignment for somebody. We just received a new piece from John D’Agata that needs to be fact-checked, thoroughly. Apparently he’s taken some liberties, which he’s admitted to, but I want to know to what extent. So whoever’s up for it will need to comb through this, marking anything and everything that you can confirm as true, as well as whatever you think is questionable. I’ll buy you a pack of red pens if necessary.

Thanks!

What seemed to be a fairly straightforward assignment became a seven year dialogue between author John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal. D’Agata’s story is picked apart line by line, each claim put on trial by Fingal with D’Agata defending his choices. The center of each page features the original story, and then around the margins the messages from D’Agata and Fingal are arranged in black text (to indicate confirmed statements) and red text (to indicate statements disputed by Fingal).

Some concerns have been raised over the last few years how publishers fact-check books; the James Frey (Million Little Pieces) and Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea) scandals come to mind. The Lifespan of a Fact offers an inside look at this process, but I think it may do more than that as well. It’s not just a practical discussion between author and fact-checker over verifying sources; it seems to be almost a debate on the nature of nonfiction, a battle whose front line is the demarcation between fact and fiction.

The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical – in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. -Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” The Art of the Commonplace

With spring fast approaching, I find myself yearning to shed the many layers of heavy winter clothing and also discover that my palate is craving dishes on the lighter side of the food spectrum.

In an effort to get back to my agrarian roots and avoid being a “victim” in  Mr. Berry’s eyes, I have decided to attempt to grow an organic container garden on my back patio. The key word here being “attempt.”

Since my knowledge of organic container gardens is most definitely lacking, I have enlisted the help of a book: Organic Crops in Pots by Deborah Schneebeli-Morrell. I happened upon this book in the gardening section of the store, and it turns out to be exactly what I needed. This book is full of helpful and encouraging points on organic gardening for small spaces.

The suggestions for containers range from old olive oil cans to a galvanized metal tub-basically any type of recyclable container that suits your taste. There’s also a chapter on herbs, which I found very helpful and a section on tomatoes, which I’ve not had much luck growing up to this point. Hopefully I will be able to turn that luck around and have a bumper crop of delicious, organic tomatoes from my own back yard this summer!

by Anna