Bookshops

Good morning.

Today I'm continuing on the route I started last week of talking about annoyances. Just instead of talking about something human rights- or climate change-big, I'm going to talk about something a lot smaller.

Bookshops in Finland.

I'm going to talk about them while drinking tea that tastes vaguely like coffee, because apparently I didn't wash the pot quite as well as I thought before making tea in it.

Anyway. I've noticed this during the last couple of years. It doesn't really matter to most people, because most people don't read fantasy books, and even if they do, they don't read then with the rate of three in a month. Well, I don't read quite that much either, but you get the point.

The problem with the bookshops is this: they don't have fantasy books.

I mean, obviously they do have some, and considering the amount of all other books in the world, the shelf for fantasy books isn't even too small, compared to the size of an average bookshop.

The problem is this: half of the fantasy/scifi bookshelf is filled with A Song of Ice And Fire. Then there's a few copies of Twilight, maybe a couple of books from Terry Pratchett, some Alastair Reynolds (never read any of his books, but for some reason there are relatively a lot of them in the bookshop), JRR Tolkien (frankly, I don't think you can be takes seriously as someone selling fantasy books if you don't have at least a couple of copies of each of The Lord of the Rings in your shelf the whole time. And The Hobbit). Then there's a bunch of books I have never heard of from authors I probably have never heard of, and on top of all the books that happen to be in the shelf are probably second or third books of a series, so if you do happen to find a book that looks interesting, there's no point in buying it, because you'd need the first books first. This is something that happened to me when I spotted The Rogue by Trudi Canavan in a bookshop. I was like "Hey, that's a book I could read. .... Ok, it's the second part of the series. Where's the first one? Oh, you don't have the first one? Well, never mind then. I could have bought both the first and the second, but I guess I'll just leave this here then."

Someone please explain to me how it's good business keeping a copy or two of the second book of a series in the shelf, but none of the first one.

Anyway, I suppose you get the idea behind this. There are too few different fantasy books in Finnish bookshops. And the ones that are there, are probably books that are famous because they've just been made into movies or are on TV Like the whole Song of Ice and Fire -series. I mean, seriously, there's a bunch of copies of each of the five (well, six, cause the third one's in two) books in both Finnish and English, but you can't find a single book from Neil Gaiman, who is a huge superstar in the fantasy circles.

This tells me one thing: they want to sell books to people who watch TV, not to people who read books. Because people who really read fantasy books end up getting their books online, because you simply can't get them in the bookshop. Unless you order it from there, in which case it can easily be at least a week or two or three before you actually get your hands on the book. Anyway, I'm pretty sure people who read books buy more books than people who watch TV.

This has lead me to thinking maybe I should put up a bookshop myself, selling fantasy and scifi books. So that it would be possible for a person to go somewhere where you can find something other than A Game of Thrones.
I'm not actually serious about that, because even though it might be cool to own a bookshop, there's a big bunch of things that I'd like to do in my life that are simply impossible of I'm running a business at the same time. I'm just wishing someone else would do that.

The reason I'm talking about this right now is that The Broken Eye came out today. It's the third book to a series called The Lightbringer by Brent Weeks that I started to read when I was in Australia. So I've been waiting for that book for a year and a half, and now that it's out instead of getting to read it I have to wait for another couple of weeks (at least) to even get that book.

And that sucks.

And it's not even a book I've been waiting super-super-excitedly. It will suck a big deal more when they won't have The Providence of Fire or The Doors of Stone in the bookshop the day they're published. The Winds of Winter I'm almost certain they will have (or then they've screwed something up big time), so that won't be a problem.
But still it seems to me most amazingly good fantasy books just don't find their way into Finnish bookshops.

~matu