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An imagined conversation between two average bookish dorks:

“So, what’d you do over the weekend?”

“Me? Not much. Went to Superman Jack Sparrow’s Ye Olde Comiques for Free Comic Book Day and got a pretty cool free exclusive Wolverine vs Karl Rove comic, listened to that awesome new Wilco-covering-Janelle Monae-covering-Sinatra 7-inch I picked up during Record Store Day, worked on my YA novel. You?”

“Oh, you know, cooked some vegan food, went to my local independent book store Friday for Buy Indie day, since the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, or SIBA for short, was offering a buy-one-get-one ‘book stimulus package.’”

“Aw, really, man, I heard about that! I can’t believe I missed it!”

I can assure you the above conversation never took place, anywhere, at all. How? Because it’s impossible that one average person, much less two people, had any exposure at all to the blink-and-you-missed-it-oops-there-it-went Buy Indie Day on Fri., May 1, organized by __(I guess) SHOULD FIND OUT FOR SURE


some faction of the (splintered into segments by longitudinal points) American Booksellers Association, that was set to “storm the country”DID SOMEONE ACTUALLY SAY THIS?

last Friday by … encouraging people to go buy books at independent book stores.

In typical book-world fashion (for anything not involving a chaste vampire that sweats body glitter or a boy magician illusionist wizard), the publicity surrounding Buy Indie Day was left to the individual book stores and other book-world types, assuming, as publishing often does, that word would trickle out. For all intents and purposes, if the litmus we’re using is a similar community-rallying shop your indie call, i.e. Record Store Day, Buy Indie Day came and went without a peep. I eat, sleep, live and breathe the book world, and I really wouldn’t have known it was happening if it wasn’t for Chicago author Ben Tanzer’s blog talking about how he saw it over on the BabyGotBooks blog (which I write for, and still missed it).

Why is that? __