Thursday 15 July 2010

One publisher is standing behind booksellers by opening up submissions to all, so long as you can bring in a receipt from your local bookstore.

Tin House will accept submissions provided they come with a receipt. But you can still be creative with your receipt: “Writers are invited to videotape, film, paint, photograph, animate, twitter, or memorialize in any way (that is logical and/or decipherable) the process of stepping into a bookstore and buying a book to send along for our possible amusement and/or use on our web site.” We want to do interpretative dance.

Wondering what’s on your local bookseller’s mind? The 86th annual Australian Booksellers Association Conference has just finished in Brisbane this week and much of the talk was online.

Angela Myer found herself on a panel about social media looking at how bookshops can use these tools. Myer thought it answered crucial questions around Twitter, Facebook and blogging including “"who in the store might do it (or even a customer); why shouldn’t people use these tools and what shouldn’t you do if you do use them”.

Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, was one of several who used the hashtag #ABAConf10 and concluded “Those booksellers sure know how to put on a shindig. Tip of the hat to you!”

Great coverage of individual events came from Bookseller + Publisher’s tweets – including quotes from Richard Nash’s session including “Reading is solitary but talking about books is social” and “The word ‘book’ appears on Twitter 3 times a second”.

The next event will be held in Melbourne on the 24th-26th July.