Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

How Do I Prefer You Buy My Books?

Holy crap, The Cormorant comes out tomorrow.

*vibrates*

Don’t worry, I’ll be jabbering about it plenty for the rest of the week.

(Though I remind: Blackbirds is still free. And Mockingbird is still like, just over a buck.)

For now, I thought I’d get ahead of a question folks ask me with some regularity:

“Where do you want me to buy your books?”

Or, the variant: “In what format do you want me to buy them?”

The genesis of this question is noble and charitable — the reader wants to support the writer with as much advantage going to the writer as possible. It’s a very wonderful thought.

But my answer is, as always:

I want you to buy the book in the way that you want to buy it.

Would I think it’s awesome if you bought the book from your local indie bookstore and kept the money in your local community? That’s always a win, sure. But I recognize that this isn’t always possible. And that books are sometimes cheaper at places like Amazon and who the hell am I to tell you how to spend your money? Maybe you’ll borrow the book from a friend. Or get it from a library. Or, heavens forfend, you’ll nab it off a piracy site.

And maybe you really want the paperback. Or maybe you really want the e-book.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. I love that you’re even thinking to ask this question. But I’m just geeked that you want to check out the book. And I make roughly the same amount per book no matter where you buy it or via what format. (This differs slightly with self-publishing; in that case, I make somewhat significantly more when I sell direct to the audience. Though there again, I encourage you to do what’s easiest and awesomest for you, not what’s best for me. It’s not your job as the reader to carry me. It’s my job as the writer to provide you with stories you find engaging and interesting and enlightening and hope that performing that act of story provision ultimately helps to feed me and my family and my raging porn-and-chocolate addiction.)

It’s a win for me if you check out my books and, equally awesome, tell others about them. Maybe that means face to face. Maybe that means writing a review at your chosen review receptacle.

So, very seriously, thank you for asking the question.

But please: follow your heart and your wallet on this one.