Rick Simonson

THE CALL and THEN WHAT
March 28, 2007

Now I know why the Tattered Cover's Margaret Maupin bid adieu and retired after too short a time and much too young an age. She made other pronouncements, but truth be told she knew this call from Publishers Weekly would otherwise be coming. It may have happened on that little trip she and Cathy Langer took to New York last fall whose ostensible purpose was some official meet and greet with Karen Torres of Hachette. That turned out to be some nice surprise (to Margaret) celebrating and toasting bringing people from many different publishing quarters.How- or wherever, Margaret must have got wind of this notion being cooked up to have someone from west of the Mississippi do a blog based on the bookselling day to day. If anyone could do so - distinctly - it would be Margaret. She has the voice. 'Rick,' she would start out to declaritively say of the star of the 1995 BEA, a then-looming potential presidential contender whom she'd sat nest to at dinner, 'do you know that Colin Powell does not read?' Or closer to home, of a western author whose work we both appreciate and is revered by many of our respective stores' readers: 'Dont you think so-and-so is just a little too full of himself?' Yes, Margaret, now that you say it.

PW didn't, with Margaret's untimely retirement at the end of 2006 - going out in a veritable snowstorm - have her as an option for this. I suspect others were called, but others were no doubt dodging the other kind of calls one gets from PW - the best of the year, the busts of the year. They're lovely enough calls to have if you have more time than spare change - 30-40-minute calls spent looking up sales numbers, being used for a few quotes. As one prone to 'on the one hand, and on the other' kinds of answers, I don't fare well. Saying 'on the one hand we didn't sell that many of x, and that on the other, we hadn't expected to, so for us it wasn't really a bust,' it usually ends up with just the first half of that statement set right against some publishing executive friend's defensive comments about expectations, flux in the marketplace, longer-range audience-building possibilities, etc.

It was back in the misty realms of time - dark winter here, a month or more ago - most likely the day of a cancelled appointment. It was a rare moment in buying season when, feeling my head slightly above water (and in denial about the heap of waiting paperwork and email), I fielded this call from PW's Karen Holt. We were safely past the year-past review subject matter, and this wasn't yet dear Charlotte Abbott calling about galley or advance reading copy prospects for BEA. Maybe she was coming for a visit.

It must have been a giddy state from that day free of appointments that I said yes to trying this. We'll see where it leads. Hopefully it won't freak out the people who have trouble tracking me down either in the store or out - the people not replied to, called or written back promptly enough, the ones who forward along messages sent earlier that haven't gotten a reply. I read some other blogs and online articles, newsletters, reviews, and commentaries, but not enough to keep up. We'll see what this adds.

My own day to day, the reality I'll be trying to write out of, so far as I can tell, is now somewhat unique. As Margaret Maupin was occasionally quoted, she and I were the two people who 'did both buying and events.' I'm sure she included 'crazy enough' in there ( perhaps this is why she stepped down). We both were buying and then, at some opportunistic moment, decided to start presenting authors reading from their work (more on the 'moment' for us another time) as part of a way to draw readers to books and their authors. It seemed easy enough back in the day (this was over twenty years ago). Things were made up as they went along. It's largely a different day now, of course, with much more built into what buying entails and certainly in plotting and carrying out how authors might come and visit. Neither of us was doing what we were alone, either. But now what Margaret did at the Tattered Cover has been more formally divided between Cathy Langer (buying) and Charles Stillwagon (events), so I hear. There is obviously collaborative looking at things, there, and everywhere else where these roles are more delineated. Here, many of us have these multiple, hybrid roles or parts. Others here are totally central, indeed more hands-on with much of what we do, buy, present. But I am still somehow on the frontlines for much (frontlist) buying and reading/event coordinating/presenting/shlepping. As much as possible, there is also working the floor. Having been here thirty years, there is also much getting drawn into things outside Elliott Bay and yet related - literary groups, presses, community groups, local businesses, non-profits - connected in vital ways to the work we do. There are also those larger loops of connection - with other bookstores and publishers - that are also part of this.

Before any of this gets anywhere, it first remains to be seen if this thing even gets 'posted.' Since the early Karen Holt calls there have been numerous others, people trying to set me up with the technical aspects. Log-ins, passwords (how many in life one can have now), various 'tools' on how to blog sent by email. There were also, for a time, some things not sent up, which a normal, technically-adaptive person would have readily spotted and made helpful corrective comments on. The assumption out here was that I was messing up even worse than I thought I could. Presented new things to learn in linear, 1-2-3-4 order, has never been a way for me. I am more prone to being stuck, 1-1-1-1, then getting it and going right to '4.' There has been patience on the far end of some of these calls. Let's see if this will sail.

Posted by Rick Simonson on March 28, 2007 | Comments (0)