The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer @ Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer’s permission, it was relaunched on February 15, 2013 by Billy @ Ramblings of a Coffee Addict. Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end the following Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop’s purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog.
Is it hard to find new books in local stores?
(submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)
New releases or new-to-me? I feel like both are different beasts, so I’m going to consider both separately. I admit, I haven’t been in a non-charity book shop in a fair while – having so many books here, I try to stay out of them to avoid the temptation! But when I did used to pop into my local indie bookshop, I regularly left with either a new release there had been a fair bit of buzz around, or a book I had never heard of before.
The main type of book shops I go in now are more specialist in a sense – we took a trip recently to a different part of the city and came across a small market with a book stall specifically for LGBT+ books. This had a wonderful mix of older and newer books. Similarly, if going into the city centre, I’ll usually pop into Queer Emporium, which has a small collection of LGBT+ books and I’ve picked up some from there in the past.
When I think of Waterstones, however, or similar places, I think they make it very easy to find the latest book, however it tends to be the traditionally published, already-slated-to-be-successful books. There have been times I’ve looked for specific books – especially years back when I first started getting more involved in Book Twitter – and not seen them, despite the hype surrounding them. All bookshops can be wonderful places to browse, but unfortunately when I have made trips to them many of the books seem to be the same old names, making it more and more difficult to find new to me authors. For example, every time I’ve wondered over to Horror and Fantasy sections, I see Stephen King, Anne Rice, George R. R. Martin, J.R.R, etc etc. Their books take up a lot of space, and crowd out newer releases, with a lot of space given over to older books you think anyone who is interested would have read by now.
Unwrapping Words 