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Unless bookstores can not only acknowledge their role as beacons of culture, but really embrace that role and market themselves as such—as long as they try in vain to compete with one of the world’s largest retailers at its own game—they will slowly lose ground as they steadily morph into increasingly bizarre hybrids of book-music stores, bookstore-cafes, and bookstore–tapas restaurants, until they simply become businesses that sell the latest quirky breakout novel on the side to customers who’d rather pay $15 for a sandwich and a cup of coffee than for a book.

Here in the Boston area, two bookstores have managed to not only survive but thrive: the Harvard Bookstore (not affiliated with Harvard University) in Cambridge and Brookline Booksmith in Brookline.

they also sell a great selection of used titles at lower prices.

I suggest using a few keywords that represent your brand – i.e., genre, interests, business or service, and using hashtags (#) with them. Why? This makes it a hot link (this one goes to #snark) to Search – important for you to have more visibility in Twitter’s internal search engine.Also, this is how you show up on Google.

If you’re using a header for your Facebook timeline, now you can use the same one for your Twitter header. Very cool.

Now is the time to jot down all those people who will want your book, why they’ll want it and how effective they’ll be at getting more people to want it. Know – really know – who your market and readership target is.

No point in writing a book if you don’t know why or if it’s special.

where else might it fit in perfectly?

color represents the core of merchandise

presenting colors to the reader

bette

A Behind-the-Scenes Look. Give us a sense of what it is like to be a novelist. How did you feel when you finally landed an agent? What does a typical writing day look like for you? What’s it like to see your book in print and hold a copy in your hand for the first time?

But if the book is as good as critics are now saying it is, why didn’t it sell more copies before, especially since the rise of online publishing has supposedly made it easier than ever for first-time authors?

Given how difficult it is for first-time fiction authors, especially in a crowded genre like mystery, to find both an agent and publisher, it’s not clear “The Cuckoo’s Calling” would have made it off the slush piles.

An editor there told The Telegraph in London that the book “didn’t stand out.”

"This is a business which has always been driven very much by supply rather than demand factors. Consumer taste doesn't actually change all that much but what does change is the availability of books in different channels. "It is tougher to predict how we will be 12 months from now, as an industry, than pretty much any time that I can remember."