fastfwd (Pat Cadigan) has a note from Greg Frost about why his latest book won't be in Borders: "A few weeks ago, I found out that my latest book would not be carried by the Borders bookstore chain. Anywhere. At all. Worldwide. Not a single copy. Lest you think that the book did something bad to earn this treatment, the novel, Lord Tophet, is a lead title from Random House's fantasy/science fiction imprint, Del Rey Books, the sequel to Shadowbridge, a novel that Borders did carry. In fact, Shadowbridge received glowing reviews and went back to print twice in its first six months. You might think, “Say, that’s kind of impressive.”You might.
The reason Borders decided not to carry the new book is that, according to them, its predecessor didn't sell “as well as anticipated.” It sold; it just didn't sell enough for Borders. What's enough? I have absolutely no idea. Nobody else seems to, either.
My local Borders bookstore had multiple copies of Shadowbridge, all of which went out the door within the first month. However, no more copies were ordered to replace those once they’d sold, thus making a good case that the bookstore’s order pre-determined the sales numbers of the book, creating its own self-fulfilling prophecy, as well as a fait accompli that allowed them to offer a pre-capped sales figure as reason to reject carrying the book’s sequel. Caveat scriptor..."
gina_stormgrant has a link to the query project: Fourteen writers share queries that got them an editor or agent. ETA: arcaedia talks about what worked for her in a query.Hurricane news: it should be here about noon tomorrow. We picked up everything in the yard we could and crammed it into the garage, stocked up on food, are filling containers with water and I just made a bunch of ice tea. I'm going to make meatloaf and pasta salad for tomorrow, things that will be still be good if we have to eat them cold. We're going to have two human guests and an assortment of kitten guests coming up from Houston.
