Journal

Sunday, July 07, 2002
I was hoping that Amazon would have the Publisher's Weekly review of Coraline up. Instead they don't even have their own review of Coraline up any longer, over at Amazon.com: buying info: Coraline. As with so many Amazon things of recent vintage, one can no longer tell if it's a bug or a feature. Over at the Barnes and Noble Coraline page they have their review up, and the Kirkus. We're still in the top hundred on each list, which is heartening. Looking around at the other online booksellers that www.mousecircus.com sends you to, Hedgehog books just lists it as being on order, and you can't buy it, and wordsworth.com has it as not yet published. (Borders just takes you into Amazon.)

Meanwhile, back in the world of physical bookshops we seem to be doing fairly well out there -- although I keep getting strange messages from friends -- one of whom, for example, tried to buy a Coraline at a local Borders and found they only had one copy -- one of the 4000 Diamond "hobby editions" with the glow-in-the-dark cover and the Dave McKean colour frontispiece and so on, in the SF section, and none at all in children's books or anywhere else. I get the impression, anecdotally, that either bookstores are ordering lots and getting behind it, or they don't seem to know what it is, where to put it, or whether they ordered any copies.

And American Gods is on the Booksense 76 this month. This is a good thing. Unfortunately, if you wander around the booksense site for more than a few minutes, you discover that we are still waiting for day 3 of Kelly Link's author tour, and if you're like me, you start to suspect that she's never going to get to day 3. She's still on that reading tour, and every morning it's day 2 all over again.