I'm Sandra (she/her). I geek out about bookish things.
My husband and I moved into our van full-time in August 2023, so I also share some travel content, sometimes as part of reading vlogs and sometimes separately.
I'm also writing my first fantasy novel, and sometimes talk about that.
If you're a book lover, this is the channel for you! Hit SUBSCRIBE, get cozy, and let's chat!
My bookish tastes: primarily fantasy & science fiction, but with a little bit of most everything else sprinkled in.
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Land Acknowledgement: Sandra records these episodes from the ancestral homelands of the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Osage peoples. Read books by Native American authors: www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/native-american-authors
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One that I heard not long ago in a podcast -- linear! Don't jump back on time and don't use memories. I know two great writers who do this amazingly. One from my school teacher : never ever use words with similar sound too close. Unless you do it intentionally, but as you don't know how to do it intentionally, simply don't!
I feel like any worrying advice that starts with "don't" or "never" is like.... challenge accepted. 😜
Thank you for doing this video, sharing both sides of the argument about the health of the book industry. Yes, statistics can be skewed to paint a certain picture, but I also believe that there’s a bit of “creative accounting” that is common in the industry - in fact throughout the entertainment industry, such as films and music - to make said industry look less profitable, partly as a way to create leverage in the industry’s favor. You hear similar things in the film industry - how this “blockbuster” movie cost x amount to make, but only raked in < x amount from ticket sales. Yet this is the same industry that pays out a lot of money to execs, stars, and marketing & distribution. How are you making money if everything looks to be in the red? Something isn’t adding up.
I dont buy PAPER books any more. Digital is a different story. The Kindle is great for reading
I recently finished Words of Radiance and absolutely loved it too!! Obsessed with every scene between Kaladin and Shallan and that epilogue made my jaw drop… Also planning to read a new stormlight book every other month until book 5 comes out! 😍
Haha Stormlight twins! ☺️
That's cool!
Hey, I was just there tonight (but at their Cedar Hills location) at a meet the author event. I love that place.
I saw a video about Powell's and had to click on! I visited two years ago and it was the most memorable experience! I absolutely loved it. I also took a Donald Maass writing workshop a few years ago and it was so good! Very eye-opening. Hands down the best writing workshop I've ever taken and I've done quite a few. I hope you get so much out of his book! Thanks for the mini tour of Powell's. It brought back wonderful memories.
I'm an aspiring author currently working on two manuscripts. Yesterday, I heard some of the statistics mentioned in the first article and felt absolutely crushed. But hearing about the rebuttal article, and how it added some much needed context to those statistics, makes me feel better. It gives me hope. It also reaffirms that there are people in the world who care about the same things that I do. People who share my dream of seeing a story they’re passionate about telling on a bookstore or library bookshelf one day. Keep writing @oneforthebooks and never give up. Thanks for this video and sharing your perspective on the matter. Write on!
PRIDE IS ONE OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS. UNSUBSCRIBED.
Most of what I buy is from the 1870’s to the 1960’s although thanks to socio-political changes in the last 15 years I am being forced into fairly new books to an extent. I almost completely switched to non-fiction years ago. The funny thing is that the capability to discover, search for, find, and buy old books is my favorite thing about new technology.
Why is there a pride month celebrating a conduct that is illegal for married couples ( Male and Female ) to perform on each other, Oral Sex and Sodomy?
🤔 I don't know what country you live in, but no sexual acts between consenting adults are illegal where I live in the United States. But also I just want to say LGBTQ+ identities are about who someone loves and/or gender orientation, not sex. Pride is about being proud to be who you are and being proud to love who you love, even in the face of oppression and hate. ❤️
My favorite LGBTQ book (also my favorite book overall) is Under the Whispering Door, also by TJ Klune! I'm definitely going to be checking these books out!
I've heard great things about many TJ Klune books!
Great review.☕️Thank you..
Regarding Hemingway I'd recommend "A Farewell To Arms".
Thank you for the recommendation!
I don't think I have much affinity for David Mamet as a person, but one thing that stuck with me from his book was the assertion that genre is a marketing tool, not a literary one. Which struck me as immediately self evident. Especially since the things that distinguish a Western from other genres is fairly concrete, material things, while other genres are separated by far more abstract, less material things. Few genres are so clearly defined by hats. I must say I would have expected "military fantasy" to be a more "modern" wartime setting. Also is steampunk real? Nobody ever talks about their favorite steampunk books. There's something very charming about when you breakdown and laugh, seems to happen quite a lot too, lol Coming of age feels like a valid genre, if it's the focus of the story. Since again categorization is mostly about "who are we selling this book to?" In that way I can see why publishers used to be so wary of mixed genres. Even now a "coming of age dark academic military fantasy" seems like it's shooting for a very narrow target.
I just read a great steampunk last year called The Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark. But yeah, I don't think it's super prevalent. Thanks 😊
As an aspiring author myself, it does look like self-publishing will be my best bet for getting my work out there. While I would love to make a living off it, I know that there's only so much of the pie to go around. Just being able to be published and have something I could possibly batch print for friends or interested individuals would be cool.
I think we as authors need to research and see what best works for us as individuals :) We also need to accept that we’re in 2024 now. We might need to take advertising to social media like Instagram and TikTok. And if the numbers prove that self publish is better then so be it. Amazon is taking things by storm, we either right against the wind or ride the current /:
Movies are no longer the attraction they once were either. So as a screenwriter, I feel your pain. Nice statement on modern society's relationship with reading! I like how you think. I wish I had a sweetheart like you in my life. Natural beauty and brains too... ? Yes, please!
So... Been down this path a bit myself. I write. I have a finished novel and a follow up 7 books with the same character... wait... 8 cause I wrote in-universe fan fiction as well but that is novellea length. ANYWAY - I want to live the dream as an author and want to have my stories on the shelve. So I have gone the path of throwing my self at the mercy of the publishers and been politely knocked back. So sat down and asked myself WHY I wanted to be published and came up with the answer that I wanted to share my stories. Being insanely rich would also be nice, but so would a lot of things. So, if I accept that I are never going to make a living wage off my work but just want to have my books out there then I should self publish and run my mini publishing house as an expensive hobby. The price to get into self publishing isn't THAT scary. If was to get into dirt biking I would need to buy a dirt bike, so again, expensive hobby theory. I have also spoken to some friends who have been published and none of them still believe that traditional publishing is the best/only way to go. One friend had her moderately successful series cut after book 2 because the publisher saw diminishing returns and didn't want to commit to her third book in the series. Another pointed out that the publishing houses now expect you to do a lot of the publicity yourself and don't offer the support they used to. So on that theory if you are going to have to publicity yourself you may as well publish yourself as well. Which led me to the grand plan of self publishing a few years back. Then I had a string of RL issues which... distracted me somewhat, but I have set a deadline objective for later this year and will totally procrastinate at every single opportunity to ensure I screw this up :P But yeah, I think the question any writer with a unpublished novel sitting on their HD has to ask is WHY do you want to be published? If your answer is 'Insanely Rich' then... well... chase your dream and don't let me distract you, but also good luck you will need it. If your objective is just to have your work 'out there' and anything else is a bonus then I say run it as an expensive hobby and go self publishing.
At least audio books are still popular
This was really good, thank you for putting together such a useful overview. LitRPG is certainly a strange, new thing (I think it couldn't be born until Dungeons and Dragons changed the gaming world). My favorite LitRPG is probably Darkworlds London by Tony Walker (he published a great reading of it himself here on youtube: kzread.info/dash/bejne/iol5rdeAhrm6gdY.html ) I would argue that this is a good example of a mostly-fantasy LitRPG. It does have a few sci-fi aspects (the players use some sci-fi VR headgear to join the game), but the game itself is set in fin de siècle London (the late 1800's or early 1900's) and borrows and extends upon the alchemy, occult magic, and otherworldly mythos of Lovecraft. One other thing I'd like to mention is that, when possible, knowing some of the earliest examples of a genre can help to understand it. For instance, William Morris created some intriguing early high fantasy set in invented worlds and based on his appreciation of medieval romance (which ties in fairly well with Arthurian myths), and Lord Dunsany extrapolated on this hugely, creating whole pantheons and dream-realms. The history of New Weird is helpful too -- Shelley, Poe, Dunsany (though mostly fantasy, some of his darker tales are definitely weird), Kafka, ...all the way up through the original contributors to the "Weird Tales" magazine, especially H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard (though, you're right, Howard leaned more toward Sword & Sorcery) and informing later speculative fiction such as Jorge Louis Borges and Harlan Ellison. New Weird works like VanderMeer's "Annihilation" fit right in among these (at the risk of mentioning Lovecraft again: "The one test of the really weird is simply this [...] awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.")
I am really interested in the “Emotional Craft” book. I’ll be looking out for it! Love 20,000 Leagues. Beginning bk 2of Dandelion Dynasty in a couple days ❣️
Me too for book 2! 😊
I’m playing catch up! ❤powell’s ❤
I know, it's a pretty depressing article. Given that it was based on a desperate attempt to defeat an anti-trust injunction, it surely painted the darkest picture possible, although, since it was a legal proceeding, there had to be at least some degree of truth in the assertions. The gloomy forecast does seem to implicitly ignore many genres and formats. It's almost certainly not factoring in e-books, audiobooks, and other more modern formats. Probably not even paperbacks or anthologies. So, Penguin was probably focusing on hardcover, paper novels because it's the section of their business which has been suffering most. People haven't gotten tired of stories -- in fact, they're likely in more demand than ever -- it's just that there are now many more ways to consume the work of an author other than just hardbacks.
On the contrary Covid Brought the industry back and it is now thriving
I don't think publishing is dead. There are publishing companies are still around like Orbit and Tor. A lot of people are buying indie books and original books, but they want to be writers. They can't get a publisher to publish their books, but so they became self-publisher through the apps. I am a writer, too, I do that, too.
Books are where the majority of my “fun money” goes. I’m definitely buying books physically, audiobooks, and e-books.
I’m really glad I’ve wandered across the algorithmic landscape and found you. From Japan, north about 1 hour by train from the skin of Tokyo
Well hopefully publishing is dying. It's gotten so bad that I don't think things can improve unless we reset to 0 first. A factory reset is needed.
Traditional publishing is dying, yes.
I used to do a writers club in 2014 and was advise to never publish with amazon, they don't understand the book industry, dose a publisher or agent consider when I query a book I've written. It seems like unless you have contract with a publisher, you have to weed though endless opinions of what to try and not to try. Another author said on a news show I watch that they keep moving the goal post on what will get you published, then find out it only applies to certain established authors and others are on their own to figure it out.
Desperate to read Houellebecq's last novel Anihilate publication 2022 France simultaneous translation in to Italian German 2 and half years later still not published by Picador in English who are sitting on the rights. The most important novelist of last 30 years and the last book I wanted to read since the West has ended. Will not be reading it. But will deface it if I see it in bookshop
What a cool video concept! I watch a ton of BookTube and have never seen this before. I just checked my own stats, and: In the 1990s, I read at least 3 of the most popular books per year. In my best year I read 8. In the 2000s, I read at least 2 of the most popular books per year. In my best year I read 6. In the 2010s, I had a goose egg in 2015, but otherwise read at least 1 book a year. In my best year I read 3. From 2020-23, I read 0 in 2022, but otherwise snuck in at least 1 book a year.
"no one buys books anymore" translation = I don't read
My friend told me no one buys books anymore while we were waiting in line to check out at barnes and noble. I pointed behind me where there were about 8 people still waiting in line, lol
I'm from a very small country in Europe with a native language that is not spoken anywhere else and the article depicts very well the publishing reality here. For the USA it surprises me but for the country I live is spot on.
Print on demand publishing has to be the future: publishing thousands of copies when you have no idea what will sell must be so inefficient. I think the social side of reading must be encouraged more too. The biggest threats are from the attention-destroying easy entertainment from smartphones etc, and economic pressures on disposable income. I think both of these will be overcome.
Print on demand has very horrible typesetting and AI art on the cover. I never buy them unless there's no where else to buy a copy.
Extremely informative. Thanks for sharing this information. I grew up around books. My grandparents owned a bookstore, I met or have known some of the biggest authors of all time, and I'm a writer as well. I also spent decades working at bookstores, from my grandparents' shop to other independents before working at Barnes and Noble for thirteen years. In all that time I've learned relatively little about the workings of the publishing industry. But I did learn a lot about the reading public and the differences between a big corporate chain and mom and pop bookshops and how different they are in operation.
They should stop teaching kids in school to read and write. We have AI now to do that stuff for us.
Interesting. I self-published a book through amazon. I didn't give a hoot about "status." I just enjoyed writing, wanted to get the information out there, and thought it might help some people. I didn't want to jump through the traditional publishing house hoops - get an agent, all that. I just wanted to get it done and out there, no middleman. I based it on a blog, so I already had some of a reader base - I think that helps. I didn't do any marketing at all, other than announce that it was available on the sites where I typically plugged the blog. I researched how many copies a self-published book typically sells. Answers were all over the map, but the average estimate clustered around a couple dozen for median sales, with many selling zero. I made peace with that before I wrote the book. I figured my blog had already had enough readers to justify the effort of writing, and making a book out of it was just sort of a capstone project. I really expected it to fade into oblivion. Happily, it did better than I expected. I think I'm coming up on about 3000 copies sold so far. It's still selling a modest amount each month, even after three years. I feel good about that. I was relieved when it passed the "couple dozen" mark. I was worried it wouldn't even reach that! Math note: it's important to distinguish between "average" (mean) sales and median sales. "Average sales" will always be skewed high because of the tiny percentage of books that sell millions - those disproportionately pull the average up. Median is a better, more realistic measure. The figure cited in the article - "50% of traditionally published books sell a dozen or fewer copies" - is a median. I too found that a little hard to believe. I can appreciate what the debunker said about the legal context. From what I've heard (not gospel), traditionally published books will sell, on average, a few hundred copies. But again, this is an average (mean), not a median. I don't know what the median sales would be - likely much lower.
I wonder how well celebrity bios are selling. Yes libraries and independent content creators buy them but I wonder if they make their money back
Im a self published author on Amazon (kindle kdp). I have published 2 books, and anyone who is already an independent author without a huge celebrity-like social following will tell you-- its a struggle. I wouldn't say publishing is dying, but rather converting. Celebrities and big names with an already established fan base and audience are literally their own brand. Their work will sell itself because of name recognition, without regards to the quality of the manuscript. Self publishing is the future because any celeb can be a "best selling author" just by stamping their name on a random manuscript. This eliminates the need for a traditional publisher and also marketing. This hurts potential sales from the small-time unknown author who may have a great manuscript. I would say that if traditional publishing houses want to stay relevant, they would need to start taking chances on new upcoming authors who have great manuscripts. Thats the only way publishing houses will be able to compete with celebrities who can independently publish rubbish and get a quick cash grab. They have to be willing to tap into the true talents that are out there, and be willing to endure the delayed gratification of a work being successful later-- than sooner.
You are lucky that you went to Powell's City Of Books. I read 'The Southerner's Guide To Slaying Vampires,' by Grady Hendrix. Excellent book!
It makes me sad to even think books could ever come to an end... I love to read. I buy lots of books. I wrote lots of reviews. I donate back into the community and my safety plan for when/if things get schwifty... I MAKE ZINES!! One day the big 5 will fight over publishing rights to my personal ZINES. There's nothing more satisfying than keeping a world away from prying eyes, so that post mortem it can arrive as -phenomena! Thanks for the heads up. I will write a zine about this!🎉😂❤
Great haul! Definitely ok to splurge a little when you're going to Powell's. I read Grace of Kings and Justice of Kings last year and thought they were both great. And I almost started reading Rage of Dragons earlier this week when I was looking for a dragon related book, but ended up with Priory of the Orange Tree instead. Hope to get to it soon though. Besides the writing related books, I think every other book you got is on my wish list too.
Ooh you'll have to let me know how you like Priory, I haven't read that one yet either.
I thought I should mention one thing that no one seems to have mentioned. If the book industry is dying then surely your company batons down the hatches, and cuts back on expenditures. And yet here we have Penguin Random House bidding $2.2 billion for Simon and Shuster. If its a dying industry why would you expand like that. People have been saying for years that traditional books are doomed, and yet here we are 25 years after e-book readers have been around, and yet people are still reading the most basic form of communication, words printed on a page. Yes the way people read will change, but they will always read. What I find the most optimistic statistic, is that the biggest growing category of print books sold, is in the Young Adukt section, surely that says a lot for the future, doesn't it.
"No one buys books". Then why am I, as a fellow bookworm, seeing so many book shopping and library haul videos on my Recommended feed? People are definitely still borrowing and buying books to read. And not just physical copies either. While publishing books may be a challenge, it's definitely not dying out. Books are literally being pushed out every year as well as read. So, no. Neither are going away anytime soon. HOWEVER - I will say, I'd love to see it surpass social media use. As reading is so much better for us than spending so much time on our phones. And there are lots of videos in regards to people leaving social media and replacing their screen time with reading time. So all hope is not lost
I bought 120 books just this past year. I guess I am no one.
I own more than 7,000 books, actual books, so I must be No One.
Odysseus, is that you? 🤔😅
@@etepeteseat7424 Yes!!
Great video. Thank you. I have to say I struggled with Children of Ruin as well, personally I found the spiders really easy to identify with in Children of Time, but I really couldn’t get invested in the octopus, their personalities were just so mercurial. That being said I did persist, and while I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the first one, I really, really liked the third book Children of Memory and it absolutely needed the context of Children of Ruin. I’m really in favour of DNF-ing books you don’t enjoy, but if you can persist, book three is a very different story and well worthwhile.