Indie Bookstore

For a while now, I've been plagued by the questions that most unpublished authors have about the writing industry.

1. Traditional publishing?
2. Indie publishing?
3. Self publishing?
4. E-publishing?

There are so many options out there right now. You should know that in the last month alone I have read well over 400 pages (I stopped keeping count after that) of articles about "the industry" and "the craft" of writing. I print out the articles and keep them as a reference, God only knows that I would not be able to keep track of them otherwise.

But, in the midst of all this reading, I started getting conflicting arguments about what technology was doing to our local indie bookstores. So, instead of reading more articles, I decided to go out and find out for myself, from the horse's mouth.

My search yielded 20+ indie bookstores in a 100-mile radius, of those I had only heard of two of them. Notebook in hand, I set out to talk to those who worked and owned these stores. I wanted to know what was really going on. I typed out a list of questions, and I delved into the world of indie bookstores.

The responses that I received blew my mind. I expected to be able to write a simple article explaining the truths that I was able to gain from these bookstore masterminds. But, in the stores I've been to, I've gotten such a wide range of data, that I am not able to write one single article about what's really going on in the indie bookstores in my 100 mile radius. But one thing is clear, from what I've read, they've been misrepresented on the whole.