by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Several weeks before my first novel The Thin Pink Line was published in 2003, I became involved in an online discussion about book buying. Another writer, already published, passed the curious comment, “I hate libraries.” On the face of it, this struck me as not being so different from someone who says, “I hate that little dog Toto from The Wizard of Oz” or “I don’t like blind people.” (My older brother actually did say the latter once, or wrote it at least, in a job application after college for a position selling cars when the economy was tight. It was what was known in psychology circles as a blind question, appropriately, a control question interviewers bury in a questionnaire knowing 100% of applicants will answer it a certain way. Out of 60 applicants, my brother was the only one to check the box saying, “I don’t like blind people.” Because of his other sterling attributes, my brother, despite his peculiar answer, was one of the pool of people invited back for a second interview, towards the end of which his interviewer asked, “Mr. Baratz, we’re curious, why do you dislike blind people so much?” To which my brother threw up his arms as if the answer must be obvious to anybody. “Hey!” he said. “Because they don’t drive cars!” Needless to say, he got the job. My brother, if not always one in a million, is at least one in sixty.)

My brother’s experience notwithstanding, someone saying they hated libraries struck me as a rather harsh pronouncement and I had to know:

Why?

“Because,” the writer said, “I get no royalties when people take my book out. Sure, I get a royalty when the library buys a copy of my book for their collection initially. But after? Nada.”

Prior to my own publication, I was about as Pollyanna as they come. So I replied to this woman with something that undoubtedly came off as jejune, something along the lines of, “Hey, I’ll just be happy to have someone other than my mother read my book. I’d think any writer would be grateful just to be read widely. It’s flattering and an honor just to be read. Who cares where they read me?”

Now that I’m on the other side of the fence, my perspective has changed somewhat.

Shortly after publication, I engaged in one of those weird things only writers do, like hourly checking Amazon rankings: I scrolled through the WORLDCAT library system to see which libraries in the country were stocking The Thin Pink Line. It by no means gives the whole picture, but I came up with well over a thousand libraries that had it, many of them with multiple copies. I was even more thrilled to see that, in most cases, the book’s status was listed as “checked out.” This was great! People were reading me! But then I started thinking, Hey, wait a minute. If each of these libraries saw the book checked out 100 times over the course of its life on the shelves there, that would be 100,000 less copies that I would actually SELL.

Not that I have anything against libraries. I used to be a sort-of librarian. And, no, I don’t mean that in the same sense that Jane Taylor* used to be pregnant. But I do have a five-year-old who will need to go to college one day – I’m thinking Yale – and I do need to eat and have electricity between now and then. How am I supposed to do those things…if people keep reading my books for free?

Seriously, I really don’t have anything against libraries, any more than my brother ever had anything against blind people. I think libraries are pretty wonderful places. Come to that, I think blind people are pretty wonderful too.

But here is what gets me, here is the demon I would like to slay: Readers Who Don’t Buy Books.

A few examples might help here so that, even if you still wind up thinking I’m the most self-involved and selfish woman who ever lived, you’ll at least have an appreciation of what I’m talking about.

A few months after The Thin Pink Line came out, meaning it was after that three-month post-pub blizzard of excitement and promotion, I got a call from someone in a reading club in Trumbull, CT, informing me that they’d voted on it and had thus decided to invite me to their next meeting. I was flattered, initially. Who wouldn’t be? Immediately, I envisioned a scenario where this lovely group of women would heap praise on my book, begging me to sign their copies afterward. It seemed like such a nice scenario.

But then the woman asked me if my book was easily available.
“Of course,” I said. “You can buy it at any bookstore. If they’re out, they can easily order it. Or you can get it from any online retailer. And, heh, if you do get it from Amazon, don’t forget to leave a review.”

She paused for what seemed like a long time.

“Yes,” she finally said, “but can we get it at the library?”

“I suppose,” I said. “Your local library should have a copy or two if a few members prefer not to buy it.”

She didn’t appear to hear my last words.

“Yes,” she went on, sounding as though she was starting to get annoyed with me, “but will the library have enough copies?”

“Enough…? I’m not sure what you – ”

“What we usually like to do,” she said, “is get enough copies from the library so that each member of the group has one without having to borrow. But I suppose,” she added with a sigh, “if you don’t think they’ll have enough copies of your book, I guess we’ll just have to share.”

I need to stop here and point a few things out. Trumbull is about an hour from where I live now in Danbury. It’s also one town over from the town I grew up in, Monroe, so I know it fairly well. And when she had named the name of her street earlier in the conversation, I recognized it well: probably the most affluent neighborhood in town. And yet here she was asking me to give up a morning’s work, to arrange for a babysitter for my daughter since it was a morning event and my daughter was in afternoon preschool at the time, and drive two hours roundtrip to talk to a dozen incredibly wealthy women who were sharing the two copies they were going to check out of the library.

I told her I’d need to get back to her about it. And when I called her back, I said no. Thank you so very much, but no, I simply couldn’t arrange the babysitting for the date she wanted. What I didn’t explain, but what was in fact true, was that my only daytime babysitting option was my self-employed husband and while I might ask him to take the odd day off without pay so I could attend a worthwhile promotional event, I simply couldn’t justify it for this one.

And don’t even get me started on the woman who wrote, claiming to be a fan, and requested I send her free copies of my next book.

Please don’t get me wrong. If people are poor or financially challenged in any way, I don’t expect them to buy my books or anybody’s. They should get their books from the library and save their money for more important things like, say, their own kids’ college educations. But these were, as I say, incredibly wealthy women.

Of course I don’t expect even wealthy or reasonably well off people to buy every book they read. I certainly don’t. Currently on a self-imposed mission to read 365 books in a single calendar year (See “Confessions of a Compulsive Reader,” the first entry for the day at www.moorishgirl.com on May 24 or go to the guestblogging link there), I simply cannot afford my own insane mission. At the rate I’m reading now, it’d cost me some $140 per week and, don’t forget: Hey! I’ve still got that kid to put through college! So, like many people, I get a fair share of my books through libraries. But I also buy tons of books for my daughter – I swear, I’ve paid for Barbara Park’s kids’ educations with all the Junie B. Jones books I’ve bought – and I buy every single book as soon as it comes out that’s written by a friend or acquaintance, a list that’s grown exponentially due to www.readerville.com and the ChickLit Yahoogroup loop. I buy them in solidarity. I buy them because, quite simply, the only way most writers get to go on having careers is if they sell well enough.

So here, then, would be my plea:

If you love a particular writer – and I’m not talking about me here, although it would certainly be nice if you bought my books too – then support that writer’s career by buying her books. Think about how much money you spend carelessly. Did you go through a fast-food place a couple of times this week? Did you purchase at least four cups of coffee outside of the home? Did you buy that bloody thong that you know you don’t really want to wear anyway? There’s your price of a book for the week. How many minutes did it take you to wolf down that fast food? Even if you lingered over it, how much time did it take you to consume that coffee? And, since we know you’re never going to wear that thong anyway, we won’t even ask how many minutes of enjoyment that silly garment gave you because we already know the answer: 0. But the average book? Depending upon your reading pace, most books should provide you with anywhere from four to ten hours of enjoyment. When you really think about it, when taken in comparison to other forms of entertainment, books are downright cheap. Plus, they don’t make you fat, they don’t make your heart race unnecessarily quickly, and they don’t come with a tiny piece of floss holding them together that feels as though something’s trying to crawl up your butt.

Really, if you love a writer, then do yourself a favor, do them a favor, and say it with me loudly here:

Buy. The. Damn. Book.

OK, group hug.

*Jane Taylor, (anti)heroine of The Thin Pink Line, faked an entire pregnancy, so, nothing “sort-of” about it.

***
Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of The Thin Pink Line and Crossing the Line. Her third novel, A Little Change of Face, was published in July 2005. Her essay, “If Jane Austen Were Writing Today,” is collected in Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece, edited by Jennifer Crusie and due out from Benbella Books on September 1.