Last night I got the email meant for Borders Rewards Members saying it was our last week. This morning when I went in no one knew anything other than they, too, had gotten the email. No one told anyone actually at the store anything, which is actually completely typical of our interactions with Borders. I learned pretty quick allowing emails was the only way to actually know what promos were coming up, which is ridiculous. At the very least how can we effectively promote what Borders wants us to when they don’t tell us anything?

And of course, I want to send a big Fuck You out to Borders who couldn’t even have the decency to email us that this was our last week and instead let us find out this way.

Did I mention we also had to cut hours for the next week, which will be our last week, which, yay fun!

The good news is my kids’ Spring Break starts the 4th so after this is all said and done I will get a glorious week full of no work and tons of family time, which right now feels pretty damned awesome.

After months of troubles, including failing to pay royalties, changing contracts without notice, publishing books that hadn’t even had the advance money paid, putting up digital versions of books they no longer owned rights too and more authors formerly or currently contracted to Dorchester (Leisure, etc.) have come out publicly to ask readers NOT to buy from Dorchester.

A number of reviewers are also refusing to review anymore Dorchester books. I don’t necessarily support than one, so I will be encouraging readers to buy used print and including the following note with any review of a Dorchester book I review.

Important Note- 3/24/11: Many Dorchester (which includes Leisure and more) authors have recently announced that Dorchester has been failing to send their royalty payments since mid-2010 and is also selling digital copies of books they no longer own the rights to and haven’t owned the rights to since December 2010. Furthermore they are refusing to release rights to books they aren’t paying royalties on and using you, the reader, as their excuse. More information is available at briankeene.com and while there are many wonderful writers under the Dorchester umbrella I have to, at this time, highly recommend that no one buy new books, print or digital, from Dorchester as the money is NOT going to the authors as it should.

I’ve been discouraging people from buying Dorchester books because of this for months, but now I’ll say it outright. It’s wrong and we are in a position to do something about it. Or rather we can not do something about it by not supporting a publisher who is ripping people off (and furthermore completely disrespecting their customers by refusing to address their concerns.)

Serial Ringleader and all around genre bad boy is keeping track of news and the ripple effects of the movement here.

(Also, I should apologize as it’s been pointed out to me that Dorchester does not own Kensington and I’ve been including that in Dorchester’s imprints.)

I’ve been wondering for th last few days how this liquidation is affecting authors whose books are on the shelves, but are in no position to do anything. We had a local author come in an buy her own books, but she’s “traditionally” published and I can’t help wonder what’s happening to those whose books we have from local or self published authors.

This is exactly why the Borders policy of only taking books that are commercially distributed by places like Baker & Taylor and Ingram is actually a good thing, no matter what the authors I’ve heard throwing fits about it think.

When we went into liquidation the liquidators became the new owners of everything in the stores (save fixtures and equipment which are leases, such as our WiFi equipment and Paperchase fixtures.) At that point also I believe the way it works is Borders declares all that stock loss and if you (as a company) want to be paid for it you have to join the debtors list.

I could be wrong but I’m almost positive that authors will not see a cent of the money for their books currently on the shelves or that have been sold from liquidating Borders in the last month without action on their behalf by their publisher in the legal proceedings.

For those of you not in the other side of publishing here’s a fast and dirty description of what happens: You sell a book and the publisher gives you an advance, that is a lump sum (usually divided into three or four payments paid out at certain key moments, like the signing of the contract and the acceptance of the final version of the manuscript) that is supposed to represent the amount of money they expect to pay you in royalties over your book’s publication life. There’s a lot of debate over advances these days since this front-heavy method of payment is often inaccurate and yet authors traditionally want a big sale up front rather than a bigger percentage from each sale. But that’s a debate for another time.

Publishers then pay all the other costs, like cover art, editing, formating, distribution and printing. They ship the book out through places like Ingram. Ingram takes orders from bookstores who are supposed to guess how many copies of each book they think they’ll sell and order appropriately. (Supposed to is a key term, the truth is stores don’t, and Borders has been known to over order, then return a bunch of books they over ordered to get credit to order more, which has caused some huge problems with smaller presses who simply cannot absorb those kinds of costs.) At this point the only money the author has seen is the advance.

Then the books get put on the shelves. They sell. Or they don’t sell. They are reordered or not. Eventually there is a time to pay up and the bookstore pays for all copies they have actually sold and either keeps the rest on the shelves or sends the extras back–get this–at the publisher’s expense. Sometimes the whole book is sent back. Sometime only the cover. Sometimes those returned books get remainered and sold as bargain. Sometimes they get pulped and go nowhere. But authors do not get paid for books ordered, they get paid for books sold.

(There are a few people at my store who don’t know this, who think that authors have already been paid for all the books when they get to stores. That’s not true.)

Publishers keep a tally of the author’s cut of the sales. They usually keep a portion of this royalty due back to cover the cost of returns (so they aren’t paying out for books that eventually get returned to them). Authors do not see a dime of royalties until the books has “sold through” or earned as much money as they were given in advance. If you get an advance of $5000 you don’t see anything until you earn $5001.

I want to think that publishers understand and at the very least won’t drop an author for low sales if those sales were impacted by 200 bookstores going into liquidation and not paying up monies due. But I’m not that naive. And they certainly aren’t going to pay the authors if they themselves aren’t getting paid.

By declaring bankruptcy Borders has told publishers, landlords and everyone else that they have no intention of paying their bills unless you take legal action against them. Now consider that once you involve courts, mediators and lawyers you immediately start to cut into what a creditor can actually get (IF, and that’s a big if, the corporation is even in a position to pay at all. It’s completely likely that creditors will get a judgment against Borders but never get an actual payment. If publisher don’t get payment they’re not handing anything over to authors.

Now, it could be worse. Self publishing has become really popular, and while it’s a fight it’s also completely possible for you to self publish your book, get an account with a distributor, call up your local Borders sales manager and get you book in the store. Well, I mean, it was possible. Not so much anymore. But we do have a number of local authors who have self published or small press published books that we have orders and had on our shelves (the Haunted Louisville books have been pretty popular).

There’s been the ongoing question in a world where JA Konrath and so many others can make a better living self publishing whybother with commercial publishers. Well this is exactly why. For a “traditional” author the publisher automatically goes to court (and keeps the records to prove debt, pays the lawyers to prepare the documents, and pays legal fees, not to mention travel fees, etc) on behalf of their authors because their authors’ owed money is their owed money. So a “traditionally” published author doesn’t have to do anything, like learn which papers to fill out or find a lawyer that is on their side, or try to get sales records, etc to have someone fighting in all this murkiness for them.

A self published author might have the distributor fighting on their behalf. They might also not even find out that they have five or ten books on the shelves of a closing store until they walk in and see them pawed over with the other books. There’s a big delay in most things in publishing, so it might take you six months to see that Borders had ordered your book (honestly I’m not sure because I haven’t ever been in the publisher position with direct dealings with Ingram or any other distributor. If anyone else has better information I would love to hear it.)

Of course most people out there having this crazy success with publishing are doing so through Amazon and B&N (which is another reason Borders is falling behind, but that’s besides the point). However B&N isn’t doing as well as a lot of people think. Publishers Lunch reported today that what little interest there was in B&N after it put itself up for sale has waned. And Publishers Weekly has reported that Books-A-Millions’ sales dropped last year. (Not surprising, but it should go to show that the whole spectrum of book sales is changing, not just Borders.) And if you think going through this kind of thing as an author is bad imagine if Borders was the only place to ever carry your books (which is what Amazon is becoming).

What authors have to hold onto right now is the same thing we employees do, that life doesn’t end after this because there are other bookstores, other opportunities out there. And hopefully we can also remind ourselves that we’re not alone in being affected by this.

If you are an author and have ever had a reading or event at a Borders I’d love to hear about your experiences, good or bad.

There’s a rumor going around at we won’t be given ten days notice after all (even though we have the signs sitting in the hallway in the office area) but only five. I’ve talked to my SM and I know why it’s a rumor, but really it wouldn’t surprise me at this point.

We were also audited today, which ended up not being too big of a deal, at least to our faces. The auditor was pretty cool as far as I saw, but then I just met her. I didn’t get lectured by her or anything.

Also our regional manager came in today and I didn’t recognize him at first because he was, like, smiling, and joking and laughing with us. It’s amazing how much a few smiles and actually addressing the grunts instead of leading the managers around like nervous nans can change a person. Really he should smile more often.

Sometimes things trigger every rage vein you have in you, and sometimes they come off so absurd you can’t help just laughing. Like the people coming in asking about applications. We get a lot because being downtown it’s easy for people to walk around, hit a lot of places and fill up their sheets for unemployment or halfway house requirements. Many of the people asking aren’t serious about it at all, they just ask so they can try to get us to sign their sheets.

One guy last week got mad at us. “Are you all hiring?” “No, we’re closing.” “Well will you sign my sheet?” “No, we can’t. And people would laugh at you anyway if they saw you were asking a closing store for a job.” At which point he got real mad and snapped “Well I am looking and I did ask, so you should sign it.”

Today’s applicant was, I don’t know. He asked to talk to someone about his application and didn’t see how us being on a hiring freeze, the store closing and us all losing our jobs meant that he didn’t stand a chance. Two hours later a customer simply could not believe we still have people asking us about hiring when we’re all losing our jobs, at some unnamed point. Also the messages of support have began to change from “Why are you closing? I’m so sorry.” to “You’ll find out there’s something better out there, and clearly they aren’t treating you right anyway.”

I ended up parodying the classic Borders BR/BR+ ad name badge into “Hire me! Ask how today!” and it seems to be getting a lot of positive reaction. No jobs, but more people wishing me luck and sympathizing rather than just assuming we’ll all be transfered. And a woman visiting from Norway who just so happens to own an employment agency took a picture of it and complimented my initiative. Too bad I’m not looking for a job in Norway, though.

Now if I can find a way to hold on to this tired, resolved, almost-positive feeling (and better yet, pass it on to the people around me as well) I might be able to convince myelf that everything really will be okay and I won’t end up spending another few years job hunting.

Yup folks, that’s right. We’ve been doing this for a month now.

First a few updates, the Shelbyville Road store here in Louisville got a last minute save when the landlord caved and agreed to work with Borders. A handful of others did as well. I’m not sure whether I think this is good news or bad. I mean, I’m glad those people still have their jobs. Except they aren’t in the clear yet. And I do know that not knowing is worse than knowing. I mean, that’s why not knowing when our last day is is so hard. I simply can’t make any kind of plans and working how I have been these last few weeks my days off are Sunday, which is rather limited in job-hunting usefulness (I can put a lot of application in, but it’s useless for interviews or street-level hunting) and Thursdays, which honestly have been filled with mundane tasks like laundry, grocery shopping, dentist appointments (and if things continue the way they are in Louisville–yard work.)

I know a lot of you know this already because many people have approached me in real life telling me they’ve been reading along, but some don’t know. My son is autistic and for the last ten years most of my “job” has been managing his needs. I guess I’ve come to depend on scheduling and routine almost as much as he does and not being able to make more than a week to week game plan until the inevitable is ruffling my feathers all on its own.

And speaking of which there were no “10 Days left” signs up when I went in today. The good news is that means the people getting benefits will now officially have them at least to the end of April. I’m not one of those people, but good for them. Any good news is welcome.

I spent the day, much of it anyway, clearing out Paperchase. The fixtures are sailing out sometime this week, and honestly organizing is my weakness. It was nice to get to do something other than ringing for a bit, especially something I like to do. Knowing that’s why I was tasked with it, and knowing that my GM covered my register while I worked are also little squishy moments. Plus my DH took me to lunch, so over all this is one of the best work days I’ve had in the last month.

I have been told that I’m over reacting to this situation, that it’s just a job and I was job hunting when I found it, I can find another. So I’ve tried to be more careful, because I really don’t want to drag down the people around me (not even those of you reading this). But a lot of what I’ve been talking about and bothered by my coworkers, and even many of you commenting or emailing, have agreed with. We’re all bothered by being cut off from what has been our business for years (together, at least). We’re all worried about our future. We’re all demoralized by watching the store disassembled up to torn apart, by dealing with the same few questions from customers, not to mention the pissy ones who tell us [whatever thing we can’t do for them, no matter how outrageous] is why we’re going out of business. We’re frustrated with the liquidator’s lack of information sharing and the “missives” from headquarters we are receiving that say Borders is spending a lot of money to prove we’re all stealing from them.

Furthermore all of us are tired, sore and many sleeping badly, not just from the constant work (be it packing and moving books, putting fixtures together or helping people carry them out, or just standing in one place for three hours until the line is gone) but also from the stress. It’s not just me, and I’m not just whining. We’re all experiencing physical side effects from all of this.

Am I overreacting? Well, yeah, maybe some. I am a writer, and one of the primary skills there is precise use of language. “Guys it sucks, these mean customers are coming in and taking everything and leaving huge messes” doesn’t quite resonate with people like “It feels like I’m dead only I have to sell all my stuff and clean out my house and embalm myself before I can actually lay down and rest.” Both are true, but the latter immediate puts people there, imagining how that really would feel.

But I also had a coworker tell me today they were surprised I’d feel like I was over blowing things, since I’m one of the most consistently cheerful and upbeat people they know. Insert more warm squishies here.

In short, I think that I’m accomplishing what I’ve set out to do with these blogs. That is, venting in a useful way, showing those who haven’t been there what it’s like and reaching out to the people who are there (or have been, or will be) to make sure they aren’t alone. Because you aren’t. And we aren’t over reacting. This is a depressing, demoralizing and even physically stressing situation.

But it will end (eventually) and when it does we’ll be free to find other paths, and I think, almost universally, we’ll find something better

P.S. It could be a lot worse. Whittier Daily News reports that a small town in California struck a deal with a landlord to help pay rental fees in order to get a Borders in their town. Their store is being closed and now the landlord can contractually get $33,932.91 a month from the city for 72 months until the contract is up and the space is available for a new tenant. On one hand it’s great to hear that a city valued having a bookstore so much. On the other this really, really sucks for tax payers and local book lovers.