New Year | 2011

The beginning of a new year always gives off a feeling of change beyond the basic temporal sense. We all vow to turn that TV off, get running, quit smoking, find a girlfriend/boyfriend, call our Moms more, etc.

This year, in the spirit of things, I’ll lay out my goals:

1. Support local booksellers more often. I recently wrote a term paper for my Publishing Industry class but found that it was nearly impossible to find information on consumer buying trends for self-published titles. Then a light bulb went on. I decided that it would make sense to ask an expert in book-buying patterns: the book seller. But, of course, it is not the large chain store who would give a self-published, often local author a chance (read: one who is not Stephen King, anyway), it is the independent book-seller. These are the retailers who are choosing books based on quality and the desire to foster a literary community. True to form, the people at Sitka Books (on 4th Ave. in Kitsilano) were more than happy to take 10 minutes to answer my questions — silly and otherwise — and were immensely helpful in filling in some of the gaps in my paper that my other research couldn’t.

2. Buy More Magazine Subscriptions. Especially Canadian Mags. Especially British Columbian-based Mags. Magazines are at the core of why I am interested in publishing. For as long as I can remember I have loved magazines. It’s a passion that has stuck from the early days of Seventeen and covering every inch of my walls with advertisements and stories, to the many titles I read — in a much more adult way, I assure you — now. While I have a few subscriptions (Vanity Fair, Vancouver Magazine), there are so many more magazines that I read (I could not list them all).

I need to commit, through thick (The September Issue) and thin (The January Issue) to more of these magazines. There are specific ones, like Bitch, who see far more revenue from their subscriber purchased issues (to be clear: they see less than $0.07 an issue per in-store purchased copy). But really, subscribing to a magazine is kind of like solidifying your membership in that community — score — which in turn shows their advertisers that they are worth investing in.

3. Keep aesthetics&writing going even while knee-deep in Mpub. At the cusp of the next semester, it’s almost possible to idealize the last semester, to forget about the crazy, sleep-deprived, work-up-to-my-elbows experience that Mpub is. But I won’t go into this blind, I know it will be hard. I know there will be times when it is actually impossible to write for pleasure (when “shower” is on your list of things to do, you either have a new-born baby or you are in Mpub). But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to do things, and as an aspiring writer it’s important for me to commit to this craft.