I’m going to be a bit rambly today, I suspect. Sleep last night was elusive and the allodynia is not recommended because ow, and also, there’s nothing really you can do about it but take anti-inflammatories and hope. Although I did discover that a counter-irritant against the nerve, in the form of a cold damp cloth, shut it up long enough to fall asleep, for at least a little bit, until it flared elsewhere on the nerve. Whee. Anyway…

When I’m sick, I binge-read. And since I’m three weeks and counting into this, after a week of huge stress and sh*t that had me getting sick, I’ve been reading. A lot. I generally go back to mysteries for my binging (although not always) and Amazon helpfully suggests ‘you might also enjoy…’ which sometimes is helpful in the form that damp cloth was, as an irritant. I tend to use Kindle Unlimited for said binging, since I can easily read 3-4 books in a day where I can’t sleep, everything hurts, and I just want to escape from the misery. And this last week, I learned why I can’t rely on the public library for this sort of thing any longer. You see, the books have disappeared…

I’d been recommended by the Also-bot (Amazon’s dim but friendly algorithm, like a dog fetching everything but the stick you threw) the first of the Tony Hillerman Navajo mysteries. I have vague but pleasant memories of reading a few of these when I was in my teens, out of order as you did in the era before Amazon and easy access to a whole series (luxuries!). So I got it, realized that at points in the past I’ve bought a few of the ebooks when they were on sale for like $1.99 and settled in to read. Somewhere around book 6 I clicked through to get the next and… what do you mean, it’s $12.99? I looked. Thirty year old books, $12.99 and up, through the rest of the series of twenty-odd books. Oh, well, crud. Hey, we have to go to town, I’ll drop into the used bookstore and pick some paperbacks up…

They know me there. I go in not feeling up to par and actually ask, before wandering around the stacks, where they’d shelve Hillerman. Gen fic, westers, and SFF are all in different places at this store, and I’ve seen him in all of those places before. Scattered across a large building. They weren’t sure, but after the third strike-out the volunteer (this place is run by Friends of the Library) said ‘wait here!’ and headed for the back. Since ‘here’ was classics, military history, and Texiana as well as the Westerns, I was happy to do as I was told. On return, I was told that there is a box of overstock for all the big-name popular authors, and the one named Hillerman is empty. “We had some. Someone must have come in and bought all of them!” I didn’t leave empty-handed. I bought a Wodehouse and Jack London’s Stories of Hawaii, and plotted a trip to the library. Which was the next day because energy levels. At the library, where according to the catalog they had two Hillermans (neither of them in the Navajo mystery series) I struck out again. Went home, ordered four through Thriftbooks (look, I can get them for like $4 each there and Thriftbooks cleverly buys my loyalty by letting me earn free books with purchases). Contemplated the fleeting nature of life, books, and how a mere few decades can erase what was a hugely popular book series.

I understand why the library doesn’t carry them. The library only has so much space, and so much budget. Paperbacks wear out too fast, even if they are (generally) smaller than hardbacks. When a book isn’t being checked out, the decision is inevitable: it has to go. On a series that is decades old? Simple math. Until someone like me comes along, or the series is optioned for a TV or film thing, and even then, these days, the library isn’t going to restock the books until patrons ask. I wasn’t going to ask them to order books – I’ll read a few more, and then stop about halfway into the 28 book series because on Hillerman’s death his daughter started writing them, with a different main character, and I’m actually studying Hillerman’s storytelling, as well as enjoying the stories. I’d say someone is buying them since the publisher has them priced as high as new releases, but I suspect that’s not the case, either. Pricing on backlists is erratic, and I’ve come to think that publishers aren’t actually interested in selling old books.

I am, though. I wrote Possum Creek Massacre several years ago, and it never sold as well as I thought it should. It is darker than my usual, to be fair. However, when the call for the Based Book Summer Sale went out, I submitted it, and set up the sale price at $0.99 because the best way to attract new readers is to give them a low cost of entry (like me up there with the Hillerman Book #1 in KU). Then I thought about it, and thought ‘self, the best way to sell the last book is to publish the next book’ and I went looking. I knew I’d written a novelette as a sequel, and started writing another that would also fit into the bridge between Possum Creek Massacre and the planned next novel in the Witchward series. I took what I had, edited, spliced, edited some more, wrote a couple of thousand words to create a satisfying ending that slots right into the next novel, and set it up for publication. Child of Crows is a novella and it’s now available for preorder. (that link is an affiliate link, and if you buy anything through it, I get a little income which helps).

Will my books be available in forty years? Kind of depends on my heirs, or me if I’m around at age 90. Will anyone care? Well, that’s a whole different question. I doubt it, this is a numbers game and I just don’t have the numbers of a big seller from back in the day… but then again, who knows. I can say that I’ll not have them priced at $12.99!