Friday, April 17, 2009

Buy Indie!

As some of you may know by now, May 1st is International Buy Indie Day. Artists, musicians, and writers are teaming up to support local independent retailers. Numerous authors, from John Scalzi to Jason Pinter, are offering swag in exchange for a May 1st receipt from a local independent bookstore.

As much as I love amazon.com (with the exception of this past weekend), Borders, and Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores remain the premier forum for independent publishers (such as Nuclear Winter Wonderland's publisher Kunati) and need our support, now more than ever given the current economic morass.

My favorite bookstore when I was growing up was a small shop called A Novel Place. The owners had incredible taste and introduced me to authors I would never have found on my own wandering Barnes & Noble. The owners (a father and son) truly loved books, and I owe much of my adolescent reading list to them.

And then they closed.

Don't take your local independent retailer for granted. Buy indie on May 1st. Buy indie as often as you can. And if the book you buy at that independent bookstore happens to be mine...well, there's nothing wrong with that, is there?

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