Author Mark Munger (Cloquet River Press)

The other day I noticed a comment my friend, Sally Anderson, the manager of the Bookstore at Fitger’s, had posted on Facebook. Seems Fox News was doing a piece on the status of independent bookstores in our region without bothering to interview the manager  of the only independent bookstore in the region. The post bugged me but I wasn’t bugged at Sally. I was bugged at the state of writing, books, publishing, and bookstores in these United States of America and the fact that, since I started hawking books (a term I love to use; sorry if I’m being repetitious) back in 2000 when The Legacy was first published by Savage Press, we’ve lost so many bookstores in the Northland. Think about it. A little over a decade ago, we had the Bookstore at Fitger’s, Sunhillow Books, Northern Lights Bookstore, a little Indie tucked in the back of DeWitt Sietz (where the fish market is now)in Duluth and J.B. Beecroft in  Superior providing local readers with independent access to great books. All of them, including the very successful and nationally renowned Northern Lights, with the exception of the Bookstore at Fitger’s, are now history. This isn’t a trend that is unique to Duluth/Superior. There’s a great article up at http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/12-stats-on-the-state-of-bookstores-in-america-today/ that chronicles the demise of the little corner bookstores that all readers, myself included, love to spend time in. While the article tries to put a positive spin on the current state of affairs, two statistics leaped out at me when I read the piece.

First, the US had some 4,000 independent bookstores open for business in the 1980s. We now have something over 2,000 stores still in business. And second, as of 2011, Amazon had cornered nearly one-quarter of all book sales, not including eBook sales, in the US. Coupled with this loss of physical bookstore space across our land, and Amazon’s emergence as the largest seller of books in America is the fact that, with the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle, 30% of all adult fiction purchased in 2010-2011 was in the form of an eBook. 30%. That of course means readers who bought the e-version of a novel were unlikely to buy the print version, which means in turn, less sales for brick and mortar bookstores, including megastores Barnes and Noble (BN) and Borders.

Borders, of course, has itself closed its doors. Whether you enjoy the concept of big box retail bookstores like BN and Borders (or Chapters to our north in Canada), the loss of 600 retail outlets selling books and music across the country is not a good thing for authors famous or, as my son Dylan says, semi-famous like me. Every bookstore that is shuttered, whether owned by a corporate giant or your neighbor, is one less place for me, or John Grisham, or Garrison Keillor, or Margaret Atwood to sit behind a table in the middle of a cozy store on a dreary, rainy day, meet folks, chat about our writing, and maybe, just maybe, entice a sale. But even when stores or chains (remember, we once had a Waldens here in Duluth, up at the Mall?) fade away, the stores that remain behind, particularly the remaining BN locations, have, due to decreased sales, changed their retail footprints. Walk into a BN store today. What do you find? A larger area devoted to greeting cards. Space, considerable space, devoted to BN’s electronic reader, the Nook. Aisle upon aisle of toys and games, a sideline that, so far as I can recall, didn’t exist in BN stores ten years ago. Along with BN’s shift in focus from being a book and music store to something more diverse has come an attitude, at least in my mind, that regional authors like me are unlikely to be invited to a book signing. This despite the fact that the industry still insists on its archaic and economically devastating return policy: A BN store may order 10 books. If I show up and sell 5, the other 5 are likely to be returned the next day or maybe a month or two down the line for full credit. Often times, the books returned are dirty and torn from customers fondling (but apparently not buying) them on the shelf. The returned books often become paper in my recycling bin, a loss to my little enterprise. Independent bookstores (Indies) usually order only what they actually want or need and return few books. But sadly, there are so few Indies left, their impact, against the corporate weight of BN and Amazon is slight. Sigh…

Sally’s post got me to thinking, thinking about the economic and promotional ride Cloquet River Press has been on during its 12 years of existence. I’ve had some great experiences meeting folks and talking about my stories from Akron, Ohio to Calgary, Alberta. From Thunder Bay, Ontario to Denver, Colorado and all points in between. My loyal blog readers have followed my travels back and forth across Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Iowa as I attended outdoor craft festivals in an attempt, as independent bookstores have retrenched and as the corporate monoliths, BN and Borders have either reduced their stores or become extinct, to add direct sales to the mix. Remember B. Dalton stores, once owned by Target, and later, part of the BN empire? Bookstores in a shopping mall like any other shop. Walden’s fitting that same model. All gone. My efforts to supplement the closure of smaller corporately owned and family-owned bookstores worked for a while. And then 2008 hit and the whole damn world of disposable spending went in the tank. You’ve read my posts. I’ve given up on that model. It’s been two years since I last set up my EZ-Up and tried to sell books in the rain to strangers. I miss the interaction with my readers and potential readers. But I don’t miss the uncertainty of the skies or the loss of my leisure time that each such event entailed. But back the main point of this post.

Recently, you all have been reading announcements (I hope!) on Facebook and on this blog that I have successfully converted all my work, including my novels, into eBook format available on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. Most of you don’t know that the Indies have their own eReader, the Kobo, available at selected independent bookstores or online at http://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/.

The problem for Indies in selling the Kobo is that the store receives some money from the sale of the device but very little thereafter when a customer downloads an eBook. Every eBook sold to an Indie customer is sort of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But given the status of the bookselling industry, little guys like me really don’t have much choice: It’s either go digital, and include the “big boys” (BN and Amazon) in the conversion or starve. I’ve had Laman’s River , the first book I released simultaneously as a trade paperback and an eBook , up on Kobo for over a year. I’ve sold one copy to a Kobo user. One. Now, to be fair, sales of that title and all my other titles on Kindle and Nook are very modest. But I’m at least paying back the conversion costs with those sales. Not so with the Kobo versions of my books. Still, I will continue to include Kobo in the mix due to a sense of fairness and my fondness for the little guy, the independent bookseller.

But there’s another issue facing folks like me. The initial printings of my more recent novels have significantly undersold when compared to my first three books. The Legacy has sold over 3,000 copies. The same is true for Suomalaiset. Pigs, my second novel, has sold over 1,500. Anything over 1,000 copies sold by a self-published, regional fiction author is considered a “bestseller”. My more recent offerings, Esther’s Race and Laman‘s River, while receiving the same positive, critical support from readers as the earlier novels, have not sold as well. Granted, those novels came out in 2007 and 2012 respectfully, during the worst recession we’ve seen since the Great Depression. But for a small company like CRP, the loss of sales has been a troubling circumstance. Unsold inventory is not a good thing when trying to balance the ledger.

Which leads me to this point and the point of the new cover of Pigs you see above and the new cover of The Legacy you’ll find below. Create Space (CS), a tentacle of the Amazon octopus, is a godsend for little authors like me with backlisted (formerly out-of-print) titles. CS has formatting software that makes converting an existing manuscript via PDF into a new book, complete with a new cover. Free of charge. Yes, that’s right: Free of charge. And the cost to print a book through their print on demand (POD) printer is modest, very competitive to what I pay commercial printers to print my books. The main reason for going with CS for my out-of-print books is that I can order them one at a time as customers order them (hence the term “print on demand” or POD). No upfront costs. No inventory. No red ink. There are some technical drawbacks to the process in terms of making the same POD version of my books available to brick and mortar stores like the Bookstore at Fitgers, details that I won’t bore you with here. And yes, I am cognizant that by “feeding the beast” in this way, I am likely hurting, rather than helping, the Indies I love and cherish. But I am an author. I want folks to be able to find and read my books. Given the way of the world, I have little choice in the matter.

With apologies to my friends and supporters in independent bookstores everywhere, it’s a path I need to walk.

Peace.

Mark

Mall of America

The news was expected. Our second son, Dylan, and his long time significant other, Shelly Helgeson, got engaged over the Christmas break. The normally recalcitrant and emotionally reserved young man “popped the question” to his lady on Christmas Eve and presented her a rock the size of a small potato. She, of course said yes. But, as anyone who has gone through the process of modern marrying knows, the engagement is just the “tip of the iceberg”, so to speak. The next decision for the fated couple is: When? Well, the date was quickly set: September 20, 2014. Less than ten months away. Then, of course, come the really, really difficult decisions: Vegas or big wedding? Religious or civil ceremony? Big party or small gathering? The kids have settled all those issues, including where to hold the reception. The actual location of the ceremony (religious, which makes all the assorted parents smile) is still in the wind, though not for lack of trying. Seems the person in charge of such things at Sacred Heart in Duluth is no longer in her position. We’re all waiting to hear back as to whether the date selected by the kids is still available. If not, a change will need to be made. But of course, for the two mom’s involved in the process, more so for the mother of the bride but almost as important for Rene’, the mother of the groom, is this looming question: “What will I wear for the wedding?”

Now we guys, we have it easy. As the father of the groom, I will join my three other sons, Matt, Chris, and Jack, renting tuxedos along with the other guys in the groom’s wedding party. Simply show up, allow someone to tuck a tape measure up your crotch, stand around for a few moments feeling awkward, pay the tab, and the deed is done. All of the lamentations that accompany the decision making the two moms must go through are lacking. The choices are made for we men and there’s no allowance for deviation. I like simple. I like being a guy in a wedding. I wouldn’t want to be girl in this crazed process, bride, bride’s maid, or mom, for anything. Too many choices to be made. Too many decisions about my least favorite thing on the planet Earth: clothing.

So what’s up with the snapshot of the carnival at the Mall of America, you ask? Well, typically, I like to stay as far away from my wife and her clothes shopping as possible. After 35 years of marriage, I know the traps that a female on the hunt for a dress to wear at a formal event can set for her significant other. Been there; not falling for that. But sometimes, you just can’t say “no”. Like when your wife wants you to drive down with her to shop for a dress to wear at your second son’s wedding. So, a week ago tomorrow, when my wife proposed that I plop my wide ass in the driver’s seat of the Pacifica and join her in her sojourn to the Twin Cities on her vision quest, I had little choice. I said “yes”.

When we arrived at the Mall of America parking ramp in Bloomington, it was filled to the brim with cars and trucks.

“It’s pretty damn full,” I muttered, still a bit reluctant in my role as supportive husband.

“I wonder what’s up?”

The reasons behind the packed house at the Mall on a below zero Saturday in January became readily apparent as we stood at the railing on the 3rd floor of the shopping center and looked down on a huge crowd gathered in front of the mall’s stage. We’d wandered down from the tundra and walked smack dab into some sort of national cheerleading competition. The hallways were crammed with preteen and teen girls of all shapes, colors, and sizes walking with parents, watching other girls performing routines on the stage, or shopping in between their events.

“I think we found the reason for the packed parking lot.”

My wife nodded.

“I’m starved,” she said, looking around for the nearest eatery.

“Twin Cities Grill?”

“Sounds good.”

That’s one thing about the Mall of America. Whether it’s the Twin Cities Grill, Crave, Tony Roma’s, or a host of other classy joints, the chow is pretty darn good. Far better than the food court at the Miller Hill Mall in Duluth. The Twin City Grill has a bit of something for everyone. Our lunches were perfect. But the delay in the inevitable dress shopping was short-lived.

Mother of the Groom

“Call me if you find something you want me to see,” I offered, standing in the bustling throng of girls in short skirts, shorts, sparkles, and war paint.

“I will. I think I’ll check out Macy’s and Nordstrom’s. Let me guess. You’re going to Barnes and Noble.”

Indeed. We went our separate ways, connected eternally by not only love and vows, but by technology. I wandered around the BN store on the main floor of the mall, reminiscing about the two occasions the store had me come down and do readings and signings of my books. That was a long time ago, when BN was more interested in local authors. With Amazon and eBooks kicking the shit out of bricks and mortar bookstores, it’s nearly impossible for a little regional writer like me to get his face behind a table hawking books in any of the BN stores throughout the state. As I strolled around the store, stopping to peruse a copy of the Qua ran,  a sacred text I intend to read sooner than later, I grew weary of thinking about the status of books in America. I left the store and ambled around, people watching.

Like so many couples today, the message I received from my wife via cell phone wasn’t audible but in the form of a text.

“Frustrated. Can’t find anything. Looking for coffee.”

“Where are you?”

We made plans to meet in the food court for a cup of coffee. I met my wife at the top of the escalator.

“There’s nothing for summer out yet,” Rene’ said as we sat near a railing in the food court and looked out over the carnival atmosphere of the Mall of America. “It’s all winter stuff. Stuff for old women and little girls.”

“Nothing for a voluptuous, mature babe?”

My wife ignored my tainted compliment.

We left the big mall and spent some time at Rosedale, one of the old standbys my wife likes to visit when she is in a serious shopping mood. Again, Rene’ couldn’t find a dress she liked, one suitable for the mother of the groom.

In the end, we headed back north, dressless but happy. We made our ritual stop at Tobie’s in Hinckley for pastries and something to drink. The apple fritter and the cold milk I devoured as I drove home seemed a perfect end to a day with my wife.

Legoland

Peace.

Mark

Shoveling the roof

The photo above was taken before Christmas. It was one of the many below zero days we, as hardy Northlanders, recently endured. -15F that day, to be exact. Since then, I’ve recorded three days colder than thirty below (-34, -32, and -31) on my car thermometer. Here in the Cloquet River Valley, our weather is usually closer to what’s being experienced in Hibbing or Tower or Embarrass (despite the fact we’re only about ten miles as the eagle flies from the airport) than Duluth’s reported temps.

Speaking of eagles. It’s 7:35am on Saturday as I type this, listening to Ramblin’ Jack Elliot tell a story on West Coast Live on KUMD. There’s no sunrise to greet me as I cobble, first a book review (see below) and then this blog. It’s a gray, dismal, northern Minnesota January day. But the fact that a bald eagle just flew within fifty feet of my iMac, and that it’s nearly twenty degrees above zero outside, well, those facts alone make it worthwhile to be in this place, in this house, living this life.

Anyway, back to the photo. The roof of our house has one place that’s susceptible to ice dams and the all-too-familiar leaks that follow. You can’t really see it in the photo but just below the freshly shoveled shingles, three roofs meet in one place, creating a niche, if you will, perfect for the formation of ice. Ice that, if permitted to perpetuate, will eventually stop the flow of the melt, which in turn, will cause the water to seek the easiest path, which in turn, will seep into the house. That’s happened twice in our 14 years in this house. I don’t want it to happen again. And so, shortly before the craziness of Christmas (both sides of the family were here on two different days to eat, drink, play the dice game for awful presents, and generally have a pretty good time), I donned my Carhartt insulated bibs and jacket, winter boots, gloves, and stocking hat, pulled out our extension ladder, found a couple of snow shovels, and dragged my tired old ass up onto the roof of the house. Four hours later, I had the suspect areas free of snow. I was dog tired and ornery. But all the snow I’d tossed from the roof loomed up at me from the front sidewalk. I took a short break and then, after another half hour of shoveling, the deed was done. At least until the next big snow.

I love snow. I’m a downhill and cross country skier. I also own snowshoes, though I rarely use them, preferring instead the steady glide of skis to tromping through knee high powder on aluminum and mesh. But the point is, with the temperature hovering close to deadly for most of the holiday season, my opportunities to ski on the trails that run through our land have been limited. Since November, I’ve only been able to get out on my cross country skis twice. I haven’t yet made it to Spirit Mountain to test my knees against gravity.

Kena loves -15!

The photo on the left is from one of my two recent excursion into nearby woods. That’s Kena, our seven-month-old Labrador, looking quizzically at her master, as if to ask, “So why, Old Man, are we stopping here?”

Kramer

General Custer, Survivor of the 1918 Fire

The dog on the far right is Kramer. He’s a rescue dog that my third son Chris brought home one weekend from River Falls, WI, where he was going to school. Kramer’s up there in years and, unlike Kena, who bounds through the snow like Tigger on Quaaludes, Kramer is content to follow behind my cross country skis, ambling patiently from place to place, staying firmly on the trail. The day these photos were taken, it was -15, the warmest it had been in a week. When I stopped at General Custer, my favorite white pine on the place, and laid back in the deep snow to take photos, Kena promptly jumped on my crotch to lick my face. Daisey, the third dog in my “crew”, stood off to one side watching the pup, satisfied to be outside of our heated garage where she and Kramer had been holed up during the deep freeze. The problem with taking photos of the tree? Beyond the fact there’s a dog’s hind end obscuring the bottom right hand corner of the shot is that I laid down on my back in the snow, my skis still on, to take the shot. I also momentarily forgot my age and the stiffness of my joints. It took a hell of a lot of effort to become vertical! I made it, but not before Kena had, in ways too indecent to describe in this family blog, her “way” with me.

Maybe the title of this piece is a bit over the top. I mean, I’ve spent 51 of my 59 years on Planet Earth either in Duluth or here, in Fredenberg Township along the banks of the Cloquet River. I should know that winters come and winters go. Some are cold and snowless. Some are warm and snowless. Some are cold and snowy. And some are just plain cold. Penetratingly, isolatingly, demandingly cold. How this winter will shake out in the next three or four months (one never knows, as last year showed us, what season April belongs to) is left to God and caprice. But though I relish the occasional below zero day; a day full of still, calm, windless moments of intense silence as proof that I am still alive; I’ve had enough cold for awhile. Bring on the snow. I want to slap on the boards and head over to Spirit Mountain for a few hours of night skiing. There’s nothing better than standing above the green, red, yellow, and white lights of the most beautiful city in Minnesota waiting to pounce on a mogul. Maybe I’ll see you there. I think we’ve had enough below zero weather for a while, don’t you?

Peace.

Mark

Christ Church Lutheran, Minneapolis, MN 12/14/2013

Light snow fell as I pulled out of my brother and sister-in-laws’ place. My Garmon GPS was tuned to Christ Church Lutheran, an enclave of Finnishness in a Minneapolis neighborhood a stone’s throw east of Uptown. The freeways from Lakeville to the big city were relatively clear. Traffic was light. It wasn’t until I pulled off the Interstate and onto city streets that the significance of the snowfall made it’s presence felt. Throughout the night, a good five or six inches had accumulated on the roads, causing no end of slick intersections and the possibility of collisions. But the all-wheel-drive on my Pacifica acquitted itself admirably. I stepped out of the warm car into winter and shuffled my shoes through the accumulated powder towards a freshly shoveled sidewalk. Two men were working the business ends of shovels with dutiful determination, making ready for Joulu, Finnish Christmas, at the church. I was there as part of the tori, the marketplace, to hawk my best selling regional novel, Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh to folks of Finnish extraction. I was also hoping to sell a few copies of my latest book, Black Water, a recently printed collection of my outdoor stories. I was even optimistic that some copies of Laman’s River (my most recent novel) and Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story (a thick-as-a-brick biography of my legislator-uncle, Willard Munger) might get sold.

I hadn’t done a book event outside of Duluth in nearly a year. I’ve been concentrating my efforts on converting my older novels into eBooks, polishing my manuscript (Sukulaiset: The Kindred; also a novel about the Finns and related peoples), and experimenting with CreateSpace, Amazon’s publishing arm. As I’ve written before, I’m done with outdoor art and craft festivals. My EZ-Up tent is relegated to a storage building that holds tons of household crap looking for a home. The weather. The economy. The time. They did me in, made me realize I had to find a better way, a more efficient way, to promote my writing, than sitting in a tent all summer long trying to sell books to strangers. But I haven’t given up on indoor events and when I read an article in New World Finn promoting Joulu and touting the architecture of the church, I just had to sign up.

Plaque at the Church

Inside Christ Church’s education and social wing, I found my table space in a classroom off a hallway. Venders were already set up along the main corridor of the church’s annex. Outside, across a snowy courtyard, the sanctuary of the faithful sat, empty, waiting for sinners. Entering the classroom, I was greeted by the only other vendor occupying the space, potter Lenore Lampi, whose birch-inspired ceramics are so realistic, you half expect a red headed woodpecker to land on a piece’s surfaces and begin hammering away. We introduced ourselves. Lenore, far more market savvy than I, placed a small table outside the door to our room where she displayed a sample of her work and a copy of Suomalaiset.

“Should help draw folks in,” she said.

Table at Joulu.

We talked a bit about her art and my writing. She hadn’t read any of my books but offered that she might buy a copy of Suomalaiset for her son, a Twin Cities filmmaker. Traffic was light but, as the time for the Joulu buffet, the centerpiece of the church’s celebration, loomed, folks began to trundle in from  the snow. The hallway was soon bustling with hungry Finnish Americans, their spouses, children, and friends. A few passers-by trickled in. I began to sell books. The funk that had plagued me for most of the past year (due to poor sales and seemingly unappreciative customers) lifted.

“Finns buy books,” I said to Betsy Norgard, a member of the local chapter of the Finlandia Foundation I met at Joulu. Betsy wasn’t a complete stranger. She was someone I’d corresponded with in an attempt to drum up support for my application to the national Finlandia Foundation seeking a publishing grant. “I always do well wherever Finns are shopping.”

I learned that Betsy is a book editor. She expressed interest in taking a crack at Sukulaiset. A connection was made with plans to further discuss her fee.

Other patrons stopped and bought more books. Willard and Suomalaiset were the day’s big sellers. Traffic was moderate but steady. I couldn’t help but smile.

During a lull in the action, I wandered off to the basement and found a hot bowl of Finnish sausage soup. Finns insist on putting rutabagas in everything. There were big chunks of my least favorite vegetable (OK, that’s a lie. Brussel sprouts are my least favorite but rutabagas are a close second!), along with carrot and potato floating in brine. It was quite a feat dodging the crowd, an over-filled bowl of soup in my hands, as I climbed the stairs. But lunch was delicious and book buyers continued to stop in.

I received warm greetings from folks who’d organized the event, including Dan Salin, the person I’d emailed about renting space. They were all gracious and kind, wholly unperturbed that a non-Finn had infiltrated their festival. As the afternoon waned and I still hadn’t been inside the sanctuary of the church, I left my table, walked across the open space between the wings of the building, carefully opened the door to the church, and found a place to stand and listen to hymns. Of course, the lyrics were in Finnish. It didn’t matter.

The courtyard.

In the end, I sold more than I’d expected, made a few new friends, firmed up some important contacts within Minnesota’s Finnish American community, and maybe, just maybe, found an editor for Sukulaiset who can correct my misspellings of Finnish words.

Christ Church Lutheran.

Peace.

Mark