Austin’s ‘Buy Local’ ethos pays off

CNN recently aired this look inside Austin’s economy. It seems like our local-friendly approach and small business support have paid off. Austin’s unemployment rate is almost 3% better than the national average. Keep buying local, and supporting independent home-grown businesses, it actually works!

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Dave Eggers: Homework is the key

Supply and demand is an important concept for any business, and it is especially important to independent businesses. Local, smaller scale companies must be different from their mega size competition while still keeping in touch with larger trends. It’s hard, but almost forty years into this bookstore experiment, BookPeople is doing well. Thus far we’ve supplied what Austin has demanded from us, but we haven’t done it alone. We’ve received a lot of help, and no individual in the past ten years has been better for independent bookstores than Dave Eggers.

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Author Barry C. Lynn takes a stand on Amazon

In this recent article (via CNN), Barry C. Lynn, author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, calls out corporate giants like Amazon and Wal-Mart for their attempts to control the pricing structure of books and other media. Lynn says the showdowns between publishers and mega-retailers, “should deeply concern anyone who cares not merely about the health of this vital industry, but about concentration of political power in America.”

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Craig McDonald, Print the Legend, on Feb. 21

Craig McDonald is one of those writers like Megan Abbott and Eddie Mueller, who use their knowledge of crime fiction and its history to create great books of their own. He has two published sets of interviews, Art In The Blood and Rogue Males, with the likes of Ellroy, Crumley, and Leonard, and funneled his accumulated study into series character Hector “Lasso” Lassiter; a gun toting, WW1 vet, lost generation member, and pulp crime writer from Texas.

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Mourning JD: A big fuss about a very quiet man

J. D. Salinger would probably not be pleased by this. Not at all. Since word of his death at the end of last month, his name has been plastered all over the news, in magazines, and on countless blogs. Every famous and semi-famous writer of fiction has come out with a reflection on him, on [...]

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Austin Chronicle Short Story Winners Ceremony Feb. 10th

The judges have decided. The Austin Chronicle’s 18th annual Short Story Contest will hold it’s winners ceremony at BookPeople on February 10th at 7 pm. First, second and third place winners will read their award-winning unpublished manuscripts at the event.  Honorable mentions will be announced and refreshments will be provided.  Winners get to collect those [...]

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BookPeople remembers Howard Zinn

Wednesday, January 27th 2010, was an interesting day for the literary world. As the president was preparing for his State of the Union address two literary giants passed away: J.D. Salinger died at 91 and Howard Zinn at the age of 87. Today I would like to remember one of my heroes. Howard Zinn has [...]

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Staff Review: Adam Haslett’s UNION ATLANTIC

So, I thought Haslett wasn’t gonna write anymore? I was told that after writing one of the most well received books of 2002, our good friend Adam would be finishing up at Yale Law, then becoming a lawyer. This was sad for me; don’t these authors know that they owe me something? I’m glad I was mistaken.

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