As an aspiring writer, I spend inordinate amounts of sitting at home and thinking. And what better thing to do while thinking than to accompany it with cookies and ice cream! Thinking, you know, requires mental horsepower. And sugar is just like rocket fuel for the engines of thought. Unfortunately, after too much rocket fuel, sometimes I don.t feel so hot afterwards! For this reason, its helpful from time to time for a change of scenery: the Greater Victoria Public Library, or GVPL for short. No distractions (besides the people on the cell phones)! No food allowed (besides the people eating potato chips on the fly out of their backpacks)!
The library is a great place for writers. Especially in the evening when it.s quieter. Actually, perfect quiet isn.t the most conducive. I like a sort of white noise. For Glenn Gould, white noise was the vacuum cleaner. He would run the vacuum cleaner so that he could better hear the different voices in counterpoint. For me, it.s coffee shop chatter where if you focus, you can hear the strings of conversations. But otherwise, it.s a background noise. The sound of life around you. On the second floor of the library, there.s a section that overhangs and is open to the circulation desk and main entrance. From there, one can see the courtyard. It.s got the best acoustics in town, so buskers busy themselves there. There.s even a preacher man with fiery red hair that gives a sermon once in a while. The best show ever was a young gypsy couple who dressed the part and played, among other things, Fleetwood Mac covers. The whole courtyard filled up that day. They had ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is. You can hear all this through the windows. There.s also the chatter at the circulation desk and the volunteer Friendshop below. If you.re ever interested in hearing people.s life stories, be a fly on the wall at the Friendshop: for some reason, customers are inclined to unfold their life stories to the patient volunteers. Stories from WWII, nasty separations, contested wills: I.ve heard it all (at the same time assiduously working on the book, of course!).
What caught my eye last time was a little stand just inside of the library.s main entrance. It was a collection of works by local authors: the Emerging Local Author.s Collection:
Emerging Local Authors Collection Launched
Our inaugural Emerging Local Authors Collection is now available! Come down to Central Branch to take a look, or browse the titles right now. Learn more >>
As of today, the collection is 174 titles strong. Last year they launched a collection of music by local artists. The Local Authors Collection must be part of the same plan.
Being myself a soon to be emerging author, I took a look through the display case. Books on yachting, fiction, travel, poetry, history: there was a bit of everything. What interested me was the copyright page (because I.d been reading about this in Baverstock.s The Naked Author). There was quite the range of information on the ISBN, copyright, printing press, and so on from none to the full meal deal. To me, books without ISBN or press seemed like they were self-published: they had that ‘indie’ look to them. There were some that I thought must have been professionally published. But when I googled the name of the press, nothing would show up in a lot of cases. It may be that those were also self-published, but done so to appear otherwise. So there appear to be two options, depending on the type of presentation the writer is trying to make: self-published which looks ‘indie’ or self-published which looks professional.
Colour, paper, and quality also make a large ‘first-impression’ impact. Especially font. Some books just had the right font. This was immediately pleasing and made me want to read. There were a lot of fonts in the books surveyed. Quite a few sans serif fonts. I guess this is the one thing about self-publishing: maybe there.s almost too many options. But that.s one of the advantages of self-publishing as well. A few of the titles that looked professionally put together were from Spica Book Design. When the time comes, I.ll pay them a visit. And quite a few books came from Island Blue Print. The quality of the vast majority of books by Island Blue seemed indistinguishable from books in my own bookcases.
Kudos to the library for involving the community. It.s given me some inspiration. If they can do it, so can I! And if I can do it, so should you! Maybe one day we will have our books on the library.s shelves with a little gold star saying ‘Local Author’! And finally kudos to all the writers who took the time and effort and became published! It must be a happy day for them to see their books being proudly displayed.