124. Listener Email: Clergy in Romance, Library Secrets, and Social Media

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 124 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me is me!  And all of your awesome email.  Today I am answering listener email, and I totally have a cat who wants to be on the audio.  I just started recording, and you’re going to meow?  Really?

Grace:  Meowww.

Sarah:  Okay.  And in addition to email, I have Grace.  Grace is here, and she wants to record the podcast.  Grace is seventeen and a half, so she gets what she wants.

Today I am answering email about what you do with your libraries, what libraries do with the books that you donate, and all these other secret library things.  I have recommendations – really good recommendations – on clergy in romance, and I have recommendations for you of podcasts that you might like.

The music that you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater, and I’ll have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can buy this music for your very own.  Most of this music is produced by, by Sassy Outwater, which I think is really cool.  So whatever we’re featuring is probably an artist that would love to know that you like their music too.

This podcast is also brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Last Hit:  Reloaded, the all-new breathtaking novella in the Hitman series from bestselling authors Jessica Clare and Jen Frederick.  Download it on January 20^th.

We have a lot of email; it’s going to be awesome, unless you decide you really hate the sound of my voice, in which case I’m going to start with the podcast recommendations, so if you’re thinking, I cannot listen to that person talking for 40 minutes, well, these other podcasts might totally rock your world, and I have podcast recommendations too, because podcasts are one of my favorite things, both the doing and the listening, although I don’t listen to my own because I actually can’t listen to my own voice without thinking I sound like I have a never-ending, perpetual sinus infection, but you didn’t know that.  Or maybe you did, but now you do.  Either way, on with the podcast.

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Sarah:  This first email is from Elizabeth W., and Elizabeth writes:

“Dear Sarah & Jane,

“I’m feeling like I’ve moved from lurker to the obnoxious unwanted guest who won’t leave the holiday party.  [S:  No, no, you’re totally not.]  Let me reiterate again how much I love the podcast.  [S:  And that’s why you’re not the obnoxious, unwanted guest, ‘cause if you email and say, I love the podcast, and then sign your name, that’s awesome, so thank you.]  …

“On to the podcast recommendations:

“For the non-academic History lovers – ‘Stuff You Missed in History Class’.  This podcast has been going on for years.  They take topics that interest them or suggestions from readers and just tell you about it.  Pirates!  Ax Murderers!  Famous Women in History you should know more about!  I love it and often close out a podcast thinking someone should write a romance novel based on this character (the interesting women or female pirate podcasts, not the ax murderer podcasts).

“For the food lovers, ‘The Splendid Table’ hosted by Lynn Rosetta Kasper.  She loves food and just conveys it so well.  Great recipe ideas.  Terrific guests.  And her personality just comes through the radio.  You just want to invite her into your kitchen, pop open a bottle of wine and see what you can make with all the crazy shit in your fridge.

“For the aspiring writer or reader, ‘Narrative Breakdown.’  A screenwriter and his friends cover all the various aspects of writing and storytelling.  Regardless of your genre if you’re into writing, or want to think more deeply about your reading or movie watching it’s a good podcast.

“For those fascinated by dating or looking for new themes to write about in romance novels, ‘Single In Stilettos’ It’s a dating coach from New York.  Talking to other dating coaches.  And they’re all really excited to talk to each other.  Some of the advice is interesting.  Some of it will make you want to stab something.  If you listen to more than a few episodes, the themes repeat themselves but if you like analyzing tropes in romance novels it’s an interesting way to look at dating.

“And if you like creative non-fiction or are hooked on This American Life and Serial, try The Moth.  People standing up in front of strangers and narrating a story about their lives.  Fascinating.

“And a final comment to your last podcast, it would be interesting to see romances that feature clergy.  I was raised catholic, and obviously don’t want any romances about catholic clergy, but recently dated a divorced Lutheran pastor.  His approach to relationships was very influenced by his experience as a pastor.  It ultimately drove us apart, but there was a gold mine there to explore in a romance novel that could reach a wider audience.

“Thanks again for the wonderful podcasts!  Happy holiday of your choosing.”

Sarah:  Thank you for all of these recommendations.  This is awesome.  I actually already subscribe to Stuff You Missed in History Class, but now I really want to listen to The Splendid Table because I like food.  And I like podcasts, and podcasts about food are pretty awesome.

I want to add a couple other recommendations because I’ve added a bunch of subscriptions to my own podcast app.  The ones that I’m really enjoying, which I believe one of you recommended to me, is Sex Nerd Sandra.  This is very frank discussion about sex and sexuality, and one of the most recent interviews was with a porn actress named Nina Hartley who had a really interesting perspective on the way in which she conceives of intimacy and the parts of her body that are considered intimate by other people.  It was, it was fascinating.

I also really enjoy – although I have to sort of – this is going to sound unkind, but I have to spread out my listening of this podcast.  Now, I use words regularly like “rad” and “awesome.”  I overuse awesome.  I fully own this.  I completely know that this is something I do, but this particular podcaster really likes to use “stoked” in a way that just – nah, man, you can’t be that stoked, and you can’t say it like that.  No, just, there’s too much stoked.  But anyway, Smart Passive Income by Pat Flynn is an awesome podcast if you – see, I said “awesome”!  Are you listening to me?  I am such a hypocrite – Pat Flynn’s website, Smart Passive Income, is all about – wait for it – smart passive income.  Basically, income systems that you set up, and then they kind of run themselves, and then you make income.  Kind of awesome, right?  He has a really interesting podcast that talks about a lot of different aspects of running a business online, and some of it is very applicable to authors.  I know some of you who are writers are thinking, well, you know, I don’t, I’m not running a business online.  Well, you kind of are at this point, and, you know, your retailers for your books are, you know, they’re a part of your business chain, and there’s nothing like passive income than people buying your books while you’re sleeping, right?  Woohoo!  Love when that happens.

He has a new project out called 1-Day Business Breakthrough, and this podcast just started up, but I’m kind of enjoying the two that I’ve listened to because they’re short, they’re about fifteen to twenty minutes, and the first few that they’ve done are answering specific questions from specific people.  The one I was listening to today was all about how to increase a small mailing list and get people to subscribe to the content that you’re emailing to them.  If you’ve never heard me talk about author promotion online, one of the things that I point out is that you should think of yourself as the solar system, and the closest things to you are the areas and online properties, for lack of a better word, that you completely own and control, and those are your website and your mailing list.  Anything you put on Facebook, anything you put on Twitter, that belongs to them, that’s not yours, and they can change it anytime, which is why every time I log onto Facebook, it’s different.  But with a mailing list, those are people who have specifically said, please, bring your most excellent self into my inbox and tell me the things that you are doing, especially when you release a new book, for the love of God, tell me.  So I was really curious about Pat Flynn’s advice on increasing a mailing list, because I have two.  I have one that is the daily content of the website, and I have the Books on Sale newsletter, which I do on Fridays, which rounds up all that week’s eBook sales.  Both of those newsletters are not large; they’re only a couple thousand people, but they grow at such a rate that I want to increase them, so this particular set of podcasts addressing a very specific set of questions is very cool for me, and it’s about the length of half of a walking of my dog, so if I don’t like it, I still have another two blocks and another podcast to listen to.  So that’s 1-Day Business Breakthroughs with Pat Flynn and Chris Ducker.

The other one is just the Pat Flynn Smart Passive Income podcast which is longer and a little bit more involved.  I usually listen to that while I’m driving somewhere like Philadelphia, which is, like, an hour and a half.

So thank you to Elizabeth for podcast recommendations, and if you have other podcasts that you’re really enjoying, especially ones about business, entrepreneurship, efficiency, things that are relevant to all of us who are listening and doing things, I would really love to know what you’re interested in.  I promise you, there is nothing more interesting than someone saying, this is what really makes me excited and I want to tell you about it! because that’s so excellent.  Notice, by the way, that I didn’t say awesome.  I am totally stoked that I didn’t say awesome.

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At the end of her email, Elizabeth had asked about recommendations for clergy in romance, and I have two email messages here with a ton of recommendations.  The first is from Ana, and Ana is on Twitter @anacoqui, and so I talk to her pretty often.  Hi, Ana!  I’m so excited you emailed me.

“Dear Sarah,

“I had to stop listening to this week’s podcast after you finished talking about this question, because my brain was bubbling with thoughts on contemporary romance’s depictions of faith and church-going and the lack thereof.

“My husband is ordained minister and has either been in seminary or serving as lead pastor for the whole of our marriage (going on 17 years).  As result I always perk up a little when I see Pastors, clergy or church-life are depicted in Romance novels.

“I don’t generally read Inspies, because the theology in them tends to drive me a bit crazy, but I grew up reading and loving Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly series, an inspirational family saga, that followed a family of American Pioneers, staring with a romance that develops on a covered wagon train journey across the prairie.  It was all petticoats, bonnets, hardwork and faith.  That series is a staple in Church Library collections everywhere and I think the popularity of that series must in some ways have led to the current fascination with Amish romance.  The Amish are the modern stand-in for those early pioneers, farming, courting along with conservative sexual values.

“This year I read two Erotic Contemporary romances that had wonderfully nuanced portrayals of pastor and pastor’s families.

“The first was Molly O’Keefe’s Between the Sheets, the third in her Boys of Bishop series.  It is an enemies to lovers story with a great emotional punch.  The heroine is Shelby, the daughter of complete scoundrel of revivalist preacher.  He had abused his wife and terrorized her.  Although he is long dead, he left deep scars.  Shelby had grown up repressed, feels trapped by a good-girl persona that doesn’t reflect her desires, and is completely conflicted about her faith.  She is still a regular church-goer however, accompanying her ailing mother to a different church than the one founded by her father out of duty and habit.  One of the most interesting encounters between Shelby and Ty [the hero] early in the novel occurs when Ty unexpectedly shows up at her church.  Ty is a former Biker & mechanic struggling to raise his troubled new-found son.  Turns out that ever since he straightened out his life, he has been a regular church attender.  While not deeply religious, he looks for churches that ‘don’t preach hate,’ attending church because he finds them great places to find community and support.  O’Keefe did a great job portraying the legacy of a bad pastor/father who used faith as a weapon without condemning all clergy or believers.”

Sarah:  Gracie, apparently, seconds this recommendation.  Gracie has a lot of things to say about clergy, apparently.  I hope you’re enjoying her guest appearance, because she’s literally climbing up my pants with her claws right now.  Ow.  Okay.  Back to Ana’s letter:

“The second book was Shiloh Walker’s Deeper than Need.  The novel is the first of her Secrets and Shadows series.  The series is set in a picturesque Indiana small town, whose most upstanding citizens might be linked to (trigger warning) a ritualized sex abuse ring going back decades.  The hero Noah is a recovering alcoholic ex-youth pastor contractor who unearths evidence of a long-ago crime while restoring the home of his love interest Trinity.  Walker did a great job portraying Noah as someone who entered ministry looking for redemption after a turbulent time in his late teens and twenties but left it once he realized it was it not his true vocation.  He is still a believer, retains the respect of the community, who lovingly still call him ‘Preach’ and has a strong pastoral heart.  The novel is far from perfect as I thought the romance suffered in comparison to the romantic suspense and mystery elements, as Walker spent considerable time on the extremely dark sex-abuse ring/missing person plot that links the series together.

“One of the most interesting portrayals of clergy in recent years however has to Tiffany Reisz’s Original Sinners Erotica series.  One of the leads in this kinky, polyamorous series is Soren, a Catholic priest, who is also a sadist dom.  One of his loves is Nora, an erotic novel writer, and member of his congregation.  When I first ran across this series, my eyebrows nearly popped off my face.  But Reisz is deeply versed in Catholic theology, imagery and ritual (she is a former seminarian and practicing Catholic).  Her characters’ faith journeys and reasons for believing and behaving the way they do are complex and conflicted.  The church is often being both a refuge and oppressor but Soren is devoted to his calling as Priest even if he isn’t celibate.  Reisz doesn’t ignore the conflicts she raises and I have a lot of respect for what she is doing with religion in her books.

“My friend Emily (@emilyjanehubb) another pastor’s wife and fellow romance fan, really liked Noelle Adams’ marriage of convenience story, Married for Christmas, where all that seems to be standing in the way of Daniel a widower, being named pastor of the congregation he grew up in is his lack of a wife.  I haven’t finished it yet because I really struggle with Marriage of Convenience stories in general and as someone intimately familiar with how hard it is to maintain a loving healthy marriage in the semi-public sphere of ministry, a marriage of convenience seemed like a horrible idea, but the initial chapters I read did a very good job portraying small-town ministry life.

“Robyn Carr has novel in her Virgin River series, reissued this year, Forbidden Falls where the hero is a pastor.  Virgin River is one of those strange romance novel towns that is seemingly populated only with giant former military men.  [S:  This is totally true, and they are also all single.]  While the denominational politics that allow Noah to buy a church on e-bay seem really odd, and the theology is sort of vague, I did like the romance between the widowed pastor and his pastor’s assistant, a former stripper, who is desperately trying to regain custody of her kids to be nicely developed.  I also appreciated how many of the other former heroes and heroines starting attending church now that they had kids.

“One writer in whose work I consistently find evidence of faith life/church going is Ruthie Knox.  While her main characters are rarely personally religious, many have grown up in the church or have family members who are active church goers.  In the Camelot series, Amber, Caleb and Katie’s mom is church-lady.  Mrs. Clark we discover through the series converted to Christianity and Catholicism when she married Mr. Clark.  She is far from a perfect mother and wife, but her faith is not something that vilifies her, just one more element that makes up her character.  Amber from How to Misbehave and Making it Last attended a Bible college, and was slightly traumatized when her boyfriend started crying guilty after their first sexual encounter.  Roman from Roman Holiday has a powerful moment of personal insight while confronting another character in a Miami area Catholic church with a large Cuban Virgin Mary mural.  I feel that her characters are often trying to sort of big faith issues around, belonging, acceptance and love in secular ways, but they do so while acknowledging the existence of church going folk is part of what makes her books feel genuine to me.  While I know less and less people are regular church goers especially among millennials, many of them should still have friends or family who do, even if it is just on Christmas or Easter.

“I know there are more contemporary romances with pastors out there, but these are just a few that I have enjoyed.”

Sarah:  Whoa!  Well, if you were interested in clergy romance, Ana has given you, like, 90,000 years’ worth of reading.  Thank you!  Ana also has more things to say about libraries, but I’ll come back to her letter when we talk about that.

I also have another letter about clergy in romance, because apparently, whoever is thinking about clergy in romance right now?  You’re thinking, I’d kind of like to read some.  You are really not alone, ‘cause there’s more.  This email is from Cat, who has passed along some extraordinary links:

“Dear Sarah,

“I have a list of on Goodreads of Clergy in Contermporay Romance:  Devout: Best Clergy Heroes and Heroines in Contemporary Romance.”

Sarah:  And she has a blog post on the topic.  I will link to both of these, but her blog, which is Cat’s Books:  Romance, and she is on Twitter @Catsbookrom.  Her blog post, Men and Women of the Cloth in Contemporary Romance Novels, contains ten different recommendations, a few that we’ve already mentioned, and some that I hadn’t heard of, including Jacquelin Thomas’s The Pastor’s Woman, which is about a preacher and a gospel singer, plus, if that’s not all, she has an entire Pinterest board of men and women of the cloth with ministers, pastors, rabbi, and clergy as romance leads, including books and pictures for inspiration and, this is pretty much the jackpot, if you were thinking, I need some pastor romance, I need some clergy in my romance, Cat is, is here for you.  I mean, she’s here for you in an extraordinary way.  Plus, her Pinterest board has really, really fascinating pictures of various people in history who are clergy, including many women and men of color.  I just lost about, like, six minutes of my life looking at this one Pinterest board.  I have very strict rules about Pinterest.  I can only look at it at night when I am done with work.  I am not allowed to look at Pinterest when the sun is up.  It is a firm rule in my house, but I just broke it for this, ‘cause it’s awesome, so I will link to all of these things, and thank you, Cat, ‘cause this is amazing!

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This email is from Lina, who had some suggestions of epistolary romance from last week’s podcast, and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss out on sharing two more books to tell you about.  Lina says:

“Two of my favorites not on the list are Every Boy’s Got One by Meg Cabot and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple.

“The Meg Cabot book has humor, travel porn, and Italian food.  Told in travel diary form.  It Is actually the story of the heroine’s best friend’s elopement.  The heroine is an established singleton cartoonist who is not looking for love but finds it from then too cool for school writer-hero with a heart of stone.  It was a great book.

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette is the kind of book you recommend to every woman you know.  It’s a portrait of a marriage.  It’s what you hope your daughter feels and knows about you.  Its the confirmation in life that love forgives and that love can understand when we as individuals get sidetracks by our $&@!.  At its core it’s a recounting of a mom who runs away from her extremely misguided husband and the lengths her daughter goes to to find her mom and let her know she understands.  This book has it all.  It is also a really sharp satire of Seattle culture that in and of its self is hilarious!”

Sarah:  Well, thank you, Lina!  Yeah, I don’t think I read Every Boy’s Got One, and I thought I’d read all of the diary form, travel porn Meg Cabot books there are.  I don’t know what it is about Meg Cabot’s travel porn, but when she invokes a faraway setting, I am all over that, so thank you very much!

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And now, drum roll, please – do I even have a drum roll effect?  I don’t think I have a drum roll effect.  It would be better if I didn’t know what effects were on this program, because then it would just get annoying, but either way, drum roll – it’s time to talk about libraries.  I have a lot of email about libraries.

So first, this message is from Molly, who says:

“Thanks in large part to your podcast (and a little bit to my weeping wallet) I resolved to read more library books than purchased in 2015.  I got a library card, and it turns out my suburban library has 12,000 Overdrive titles – incredible, considering what libraries often have to pay for their ebooks.

“I’d say about half of them are romance, though a lot are not the kind of thing I’d usually have picked up (they have about four m/m titles, and only two books by Tessa Dare, just to give some perspective).  I suspect I’ll be reading more of their lit and using my book-buying savings from that for romance, but hey – maybe there are Harlequin or Avon authors I should be giving a chance, and I’ll discover them via horribly titled books like “His Perfect Diamond.”  (Has there ever been a worse title?  Maybe this is my lesbianism talking, but anything that starts with “His” usually ends in me not wanting to read it, if you see what I mean.)

“Love the podcast, and loving all the library talk – very inspiring!”

Sarah:  Okay, Molly?  When I first read – [laughs] – what you wrote, maybe this is my lesbianism talking, I had to stop the recording ‘cause I was laughing too hard, and there’s only a certain amount of my guffawing that people should have to listen to, but that was really funny.  I think that if you are in fact a lesbian, that should be your pretty much go-to introduction to any opinion – maybe this is my lesbianism talking, but [OPINION HERE].  Like, I, this is an enormous privilege you have.  I think it’s very, very cool that you have a library card and are searching their eBook library database.  I know that my library’s eBook buying has continued to get larger because the libraries in my county have hooked up with the libraries in adjacent counties, and they seem to be pooling their resources to cover a lot of genres in eBook.  Unfortunately, Harlequin and Avon authors, as we have discussed, are all subject to HarperCollins’ completely execrable twenty-six checkout limit, and I had a few questions about this on Twitter, so I’ll make sure I explain this one more time, in case people are confused.

There is a previous podcast that we did, podcast number 117, which is an interview with a librarian named Dena who talked at length, and kind of ranted, about buying eBooks for libraries.  The upshot of the HarperCollins rule, which I find completely poo-fested – it is infested with poo, this rule – if someone at HarperCollins who has lots of power is listening to this podcast, I am asking you as nicely as I possibly can, PLEASE, get rid of the twenty-six eBook checkout limit, ‘cause it’s really arbitrary, and it’s hurting you more than you realize.  But that’s not my lesbianism talking, ‘cause I’m not actually a lesbian.  I was Matron of Honor at a lesbian wedding.  Does that count?  No, not really.  I was a matron ‘cause I was married to a dude, which totally eradicates any hope of lesbianism at that particular moment, and also the word “matron” is horrible.  Anyway.  HarperCollins has a limit on the number of checkouts an eBook gets when a library buys it.  So, a library buys an eBook, and they pay something in the range of $25 to, you know, $100 for the book, depending.  They get twenty-six checkouts of that book, and then they have to buy it again.  That’s called a metered checkout eBook, which means that if you, for example, were to borrow an eBook and then not read it and it was a HarperCollins or a Harlequin book, or a Carina Press book, then that checkout has decreased the number of times that book will be available to another patron until the library has to buy another copy.  Believe me, I felt buckets of guilt because I realized that I had done that twice.  I’m really sorry, library.  I feel really bad.  So in, in addition to incredibly inflated prices, which Dena did not like, there’s also the metered checkout, and HarperCollins’s rule of twenty-six is considered to be crap.  Poo.  Putrescent.  I’m going to stop now, because maybe you’re eating, but either way, that is the upshot.

But enough of my ranting; let’s hear from you about you and your libraries, because that’s totally way more interesting.  This email is from Melinda, who writes:

“Hi Sarah,

“I just started listening to your previous podcasts and love them!  The library one is actually one of my favorites so I was happy to hear a little more about this today.  You were asking about our library habits so I thought I’d let you know about mine.

“I grew up in a tiny town, technically a village it’s so small.  They had a library branch and I was there constantly.  I would check out stacks and stacks of books at a time.  My Mom brought me there from the time I was little and I went there every few weeks all the way through when I graduated high school.  The library was a lifeline for me since even with a job in HS I would not be able to afford all I wanted to, I also checked out tons of magazines.  I used my library in college for the same things plus obviously academic materials.

“But unfortunately I moved to a town where the Library literally had One big bookshelf of books – maybe 5 shelves on each side of the big metal bookshelf.  They had a lot of movies and CD’s but nothing else.  I was ridiculously disappointed.  But then my awesome husband got me a kindle and I was hooked immediately!  And spent entirely too much money on books – so much that I had to give myself a budget so I would stop buying so much.  I was voracious and couldn’t believe all the romance and LGBT books I could read and not worry about the covers.  Small towns, small minds sometimes and all that.

“And THEN my library told me that I could get ebooks through them, gave me the website and HOLY CRAP.  I was so excited.  At first I couldn’t get many kindle books from there because they weren’t available which was super frustrating for me, everything seemed to be EPUB.  But then some publishers seemed to change and more and more got available.  So now I keep my wish list on Amazon of books I want, every time I hear about a book or see a new one I might want it goes on the list.  Then I double check it with the library website every week or so, when I find books I can get it makes me so so happy and I delete the book from the AMZ wishlist.

“So the way I use my library now is that I have all of my hold spots full all the time.  And I have about 5 pages of wish list books there too.  A friend recommended Nalini Singh and I was so happy that they had her so I could try her books.  Then I literally went out and bought every book in both series and eventually bought all of the audibles of them too lol.  So I am definitely proof I buy after I read [at the library]!  I usually have about 2-3 library books on my kindle at any given time.  I also discovered I love audiobooks and belong to audible.com but love when I can find audio books of ones I want to listen [to at the library] so I can use that credit on something else.  But I don’t really go into the library since there isn’t much here in my small town.

“Oh – also I have NO book stores anywhere near me.  The closest is 65 miles away!!  So the library and my kindle are my lifelines!

“Sorry so long, I do love my libraries and books 🙂

“Thanks for the great podcasts!”

Sarah:  Wow.  That is a seriously small library, and I, I mean, I’m very spoiled by living in the New York metropolitan area where I have a lot of bookstores, although I don’t actually go to the big ones because they’re more toy stores than anything else.  I cannot imagine having a library with one bookshelf and no bookstore for more than an hour’s drive.  Yikes!

I do, however, want to make sure, Melinda, that you know about Scribd’s three month free deal that’s going on right now, and I will put a link to this in the podcast entry, but it, right now, for a limited time – actually, no, that’s not actually true.  It’s ‘til October, so there’s plenty of time!  But you should still do this if you’re curious – anyway, since Harlequin has listed all of their catalog with Scribd, there is a coupon code, ScribdLovesHarlequin, for three months free.  Scribd you can access through the online website and then also on a smart phone.  You can’t use it on a Kindle that’s an e-Ink screen, but if you have, like, a Fire or something that has an app installation option, you should be able to get the Scribd app on there.

Scribd has books and documents and audiobooks, and I figure, all right, I was, I wasn’t sure how I was going to like it, but now that I’ve been using it for six weeks, I love it, because all of the books that I really am curious about that are really expensive, like books on entrepreneurship, workplace efficiency, home organization, cookbooks, they’re all in there, which means that I can take a look and see what they’re like and not have to buy them full price, or even buy them on sale.  I’ve gotten to the point where I find out about a book, I find out that it’s on sale, and I look to see if it’s on Scribd, because I’m still within the three-month free window.  Another trick is, if you sign up for something that’s free for a month, put a reminder on your calendar in three and a half weeks to make sure – or in this case, almost three months – to make sure that you want to let it renew and be, you know, charged for it.  My two children, who are both boys and are seven and nine, also discovered that most of their favorite authors are on Scribd, plus there are audio versions as well, so they now have a Scribd app, and we have created a collection that’s just for them of all the things that they want to read, and they think it’s pretty, pretty awesome.  So my sequence is actually a lot like yours now.  I find out about a book, I look to see if it’s in my library, I look to see if it’s on Scribd, and then I maybe will buy it, because I’m trying to impose a budget for 2015 as well.  My pain, I understand, it is the same as your pain.  But I will put a link to the Scribd offer, because three months free is plenty of time to try something out, right?  I mean, I’m really liking it for the expensive books that I never want to pay $29 – I don’t ever want to pay $29 for an eBook, but I especially don’t want to pay $29 for an eBook that I may not find useful, so having this option to read it when it’s not in my public library is pretty rad.  And I’m really glad your library has eBooks, because that’s awesome.

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This next email is from Meg:

“Hi Sarah,

“In podcast 119 you asked how we interact with our libraries, so I thought I’d write in.  [S:  Good!  Glad you did!]

“I grew up using the library all the time.  I’ve always read more books than would be reasonable to keep at home, especially before there were ebooks.

“I absolutely look first to the library for 99% of books I want to read.  There are only 1 or 2 authors/series I go ahead and buy the books before reading them (Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is the only one I can currently think of).  My general rule is I have to read and love a book before I buy it, so the vast majority of books I read come from the library.  This pattern is true for romances and for the other books I read, mostly mysteries.

“I get print books because I would forget to read digital books before they are due; having the physical book sitting around reminds me to Get It Done On Time.  I also get audiobooks via Overdrive or Hoopla to play on my phone when I go on long car trips.

“Generally I look up a book online and place it on hold so I can pick it up at my local library.  I live in a large metro area, so the books I want to read are never checked in at the branch near me.

“I use the library as a meeting place.  I am currently in the process of interviewing high school seniors who are applying to my alma mater.  The library is a quieter, more comfortable place to chat than Starbucks, plus it is free instead of having to buy $5 worth of something for each meeting.

“I also use the library for assistance finding books.  Recently it has been material for a child I tutor.  When I lived in another city there were several great romance-friendly librarians who would help me find books, but I haven’t found that in my current city so I rely on review sites and friends.

“I love getting to hear straight from the librarians – thank you for having them on your show!

“Best,

“Meg”

[music]

Sarah:  I have one last email, and this one arrived as I’ve been working on this particular episode, because I said on Twitter that if you had a question that you would like me to answer, you could email me, and so I have two messages.  One I’m saving for Jane, and one I wanted to answer now.  This message is from Lauren:

Dear Sarah,

I saw on Twitter that you were soliciting questions for the podcast, so I thought I’d go ahead and email about something that’s been on my mind.  Not sure if it’s appropriate for the podcast or not, but I enjoy hearing your opinion on the subject.  There seems to be a big push in some ways for readers to engage with authors on various social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, but when authors seem to use these accounts for personal purposes as well as professional ones, it’s unclear to me whether it’s intrusive as a reader to attempt to engage with an author.

For example, there are several authors who I started following on Twitter because it was incentivized through online giveaways, which would lead me to believe that the authors would welcome reader interaction, and I’ve certainly never seen any of these authors, who all seem like lovely, fun, smart, and thoughtful people, discourage interaction with readers, but they seem mostly to use their accounts to engage with other authors with whom they are friends.  As a result, I’m never sure whether to treat social media like a public space – for example, if I saw these authors at a conference, I would consider that a public space wherein they’d be acting in a professional capacity and where it would be totally appropriate for me to approach them and say, hey, I loved your book.  Can you tell me more about what you’re working on next? – or as a more private space – as private as a public social media account can be, which is to say, not very, but still a space where I would be hesitant about approaching people or participating in conversations unsolicited.  Or maybe this question just means I’m old and bad at Twitter.

Thank you for doing the podcasts.  I love listening to them!

From,

Lauren

Sarah:  Okay, first of all, you are not old or bad at Twitter.  You are asking a completely logical and very thoughtful question, and it’s really a good question, and I’m glad that you asked it.  First of all, this is my opinion:  anyone who asks you to follow them on Twitter as an incentive for a giveaway is not actually looking for someone to interact with.  They’re looking to up their follower count.  Following someone because of a giveaway is not a meaningful social media connection, so if you’re an author who’s hosting a giveaway and you want people to like your Facebook page and follow you on Twitter, that’s not meaningful engagement for you or for the person doing it.  That’s incentivizing a giveaway.  Honestly, there are people I know who have separate Twitter accounts, and they use those for the giveaways because they don’t actually want to start following people for a giveaway.  So if you’ve begun following people who incentivized that follow because they were giving away something and you don’t get much out of listening to them on Twitter, then unfollow them.

But if you are following them and you are interested in them, I don’t see anything wrong with saying something to them on Twitter like, I loved your book; can you tell me about what you’re working on next?  I don’t know the author who gets tired of hearing, I really loved your book; what are you working on next?  That’s like, that’s awesome.  That is completely a wonderful thing to say, so the fact that you want to say it at all makes you awesome and definitely not bad at Twitter.

I think that your sensitivity as to whether or not you want to intrude on a conversation is to your credit, to be honest, and it can be very strange to enter a conversation that people are having, but I think that when someone is having a conversation on Facebook or on Twitter, it is public space in a professional capacity, much like a conference where you’re talking about something with the understanding that probably someone is reading it while you talk about it, because if you didn’t want people to read about it, you shouldn’t talk about it on Twitter.  I don’t know the specific conversations that you mention, because you say that authors seem to be talking with other authors.  That is totally something that people do.  I talk to other bloggers all the time on Twitter, because for a lot of us who work in isolated areas as writers, Twitter is, like, where we go and hang out and take a break, much like going to commune around the coffee machine at an office.  But I don’t think it’s uncool to say, hey, I loved your book, and can you tell me about what you’re working on?  And if you want to enter a conversation, you can also just lead off by saying, excuse me.  I do that all the time if I see somebody talking about something that I wanted to add to the conversation.

I think that your question is entirely appropriate and very logical.  I don’t think that anyone who has asked for Twitter followers is looking to avoid conversation with readers.  If they’re not having one with you and you would like to have one with them, start talking to them; see what happens.  But again, if someone has asked that you follow them as part of a giveaway incentive, that doesn’t get you anything; that gives them something, which is a higher follower count, which is a strange metric but is still used as a measurement.  If you’re not getting anything out of following them and you already entered the giveaway, unfollow them.  This also goes for companies like, if you follow us on Twitter, you’ll get X benefits.  Okay, so, follow them, and then, like, the next day, unfollow them.  Get the benefits; don’t clutter up your TweetStream.

I know that I have made friends with people on Twitter who I otherwise would never have met, and I think that Twitter is a wonderful tool for conversation and also for easing loneliness, which if I remember correctly is one of the reasons why it was invented in the first place.  If you feel like you want to interact with people, go for it.  If you feel like your interaction wouldn’t be welcome and you’re not getting out of, anything out of following that person, unfollow them.

There’s a lot of ways to use social media, and you use it the way that works the best for you.  If you’re looking, however, specifically for new release information, a newsletter from that author might be a better option than Twitter.  That said, you’re not doing Twitter wrong, you’re not using it wrong, and you’re entirely correct in asking that question.  Thank you for emailing us.

And you know, if you’re listening and you have questions about how to do stuff on social media and you would like to ask for advice, you are always welcome to email me.  Even if you don’t want me to answer the email on the podcast, I’m more than happy to answer questions about social media, because in my opinion – and I have given a few workshops on social media promotion for authors and for writers, and I swear I’m not making up – okay, that’s not actually true – social media changes all the time, so most of the time, people are making it up.  You should never listen to anyone who says that they are a social media expert or a social media guru, because you can’t be an expert or a guru in something that changes weekly – but I spend a lot of time on social media, and I spend a lot of time listening on social media, so if you would like to ask questions and have them answered on the podcast or privately, please feel free to email me, because one of the things that I do, you know, professionally, for my job here on the Internet, is learn about social media and how it works and doesn’t work.  Here’s a thing that doesn’t work:  tweeting the same thing to a million people over and over and over again, but you knew that right?  Of course you knew that.  You are all very smart people who know everything.

[music]

One more question?  One more question.  I agree.  Why not?  I got email, and y’all are really smart.  So this email is from Jennie:

“Hi Sarah!

“I was just catching up on podcasts and was listening to #119 from the beginning of the month about donations and wanted to go into a bit more depth with how it works at our library.  Your writer, Ashley, really hit a lot of things on the head with everything a book has to go through to be added to the collection but she left out a key point that’s true in our library system – by the time it’s gone through all those steps [of getting a book that’s donated and finding the data, adding it to the database, and then putting it in the collection and all of the other little things that have to happen in the middle] … with the amount of staff time that’s been used, it would have actually been cheaper to buy the book through our regular supplier.  The only time it’s really worth it for us to add a book to the collection is is it’s an additional copy of a book that it insanely popular with a massive holds list (the reasons being that we’re just adding on to a record already in our system and we know it’s really popular so we don’t have to do the research and the math to see if we actually need an additional copy)

“And here’s the other big point I want to stress – I know it’s really disheartening to see your donations end up in the book sale for 50 cents, but that book sale is VERY important.  Our book sale is the main way our Friends of the Library takes in money.  In our library, our Friends of the Library provides 100% of our programming budget.  The summer reading special performer?  Friends money.  (Heck the summer reading prizes?  Friends money.  The Summer Reading log?  Friends money) The author visit?  Friends money.  The puppet used in story time?  Friends money.  The license that lets us show movies?  Friends money.  That book sale money is IMPORTANT.

“But… if you are someone like, well, you, who gets a ton of brand-new new releases of decent stuff, ask at your library who is in charge of collection development.  One of the biggest staff-time issues (in addition to cataloging) is sorting the donations and separating the wheat from the chaff.  This is especially true in larger systems.  If the collection development librarian knows you often have donations of things he or she may actually be interested in, your donations might get flagged as automatic wheat and have a higher chance of being added to the collection.

“Hope that helps shed some light on things!”

Sarah:  Holy crap, yes!  I had no idea that the book sale was so much of a main budget for some parts of the library, though I probably should have realized that, having been to some very small libraries in some very small towns.  That’s really interesting.  Thank you for emailing me, Jennie; I really appreciate the information, and I entirely stand corrected, which I’m totally fine with.

[music]

And that is all for this week’s podcast.  If you’ve sent email, I really appreciate it, because y’all ask really interesting questions and have interesting things to say.  And if you haven’t sent email and you’re thinking, I would really like to email these people, you can email the podcast at [email protected].  We really like email, and we like when you send it, so you should totally send some.

The music that you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is called “Dragons,” and it is by a Parisian group called Caravan Palace.  You can find their album, also titled Caravan Palace, on iTunes or on Amazon or on MySpace or Facebook.  It still gives me complete joy to mention Facebook, and at some point I’m going to find a band that’s on Friendster, and you’re not going to be able to handle how happy that makes me.  But either way, Caravan Palace, pretty awesome.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Last Hit:  Reloaded, the all-new breathtaking novella in the Hitman series from bestselling authors Jessica Clare and Jen Frederick.  You can download that on January 20^th.

Future podcasts will include Jane or me or both talking about romance novels, ‘cause that’s what we do here, but in the meantime, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, on behalf of everyone who emails us, Jane, and myself, we wish you the very best of reading, and have a great weekend!

[otherworldly, swinging music]