Thursday, August 12, 2010

Recession Tactics by Christine Duncan

This recession has been dragging on a l-o-n-g time. But then I'm not one of those folks that put the beginning of it at Dec 2008. If you ask me, and many of the folks that I know, the recession had its roots in the ground a whole lot longer ago than that.

I don't know about you, but I've given up a lot of things during this recession. My family no longer goes out to eat very often, although it used to be a Friday night tradition. We have given up some luxury items that used to be considered fairly standard. My husband and I no longer take wine with dinner for granted, for instance. We use Redbox instead of Blockbuster and we search Craigslist and garage sales for used items before we think of buying new.

And yet, there are some luxuries we have figured out how to keep in the budget. Chocolate is a necessity. And books and reading for instance are not negotiable. Like many, we get more books from the library and although we have a harder time finding a nearby used bookstore than we used to, we also are part of a trend of folks buying used books when we can.

I know, I know. Authors should support their own industry. We of all folks should be out there buying new books, encouraging new writers. None of us get any money off of Amazon's used books or when someone checks our stuff out of the library. I know the arguments.

But you know--if you want to request that the library buys a book--the author would get some money from that. And for me, right now, that's gotta do.

Christine Duncan is the author of the Kaye Berreano mystery series. Book two, Safe House is available now.

4 comments:

Helen Ginger said...

Of course, authors want (and need) the money from book sales, but there are other things they also need. Like people talking about and recommending their books (and if someone likes their writing enough to check out their books from the library or request them, then they're likely to talk about them). If you take a book out to the park or on a plane, someone will probably see it and make note of the title. There are little things like that that can go a long way to help a writer. I had lunch yesterday with some friends and we all talked about what we were reading.

Helen

Marilyn Meredith a.k.a. F. M. Meredith said...

Yes, this is a tough time for everyone. I think that part of the reason e-books are going great guns.

Marilyn

Morgan Mandel said...

I bought a kindle and plan on downloading books on that, although I must confess I still have many print books in my TBR pile.

I never buy hard covers. Those I get at the library.

Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com

Jean Henry Mead said...

A nice thing about Kindle and other ebook readers is that a number of free books are available for download, and now that Kindle has come down in price, it too can go from luxury to necessity. On the other hand, brick and mortar stores need the sales, so what's a writer to do? :)