by Chuck Moyer

Created on: January 18, 2008

If I wanted to see what this was all about, I knew I had to start at the end. Getting your writing in to the hands of a reader is the goal. In any skill development, they teach that you can work backwards from the end state and understand what it takes to get there. And there is where I was.

I will not patronize one or another, so I will not mention the name but it was one of those looming mega booksellers with the expansive parking lot to match the multilevel cavernous randomization of bookshelves. I was intent on absorbing as much as I could in an hour or two. I always loved to go to bookstores and browse around, see what was new, find some old treasures, but this was different, I was on a mission.

Inside the door, I took a pause. I drew a long inhale with eyes open and ears alert, taking it all in, the enormity of the content. How many books in this place? I considered the variety of the patrons or the similarity of them. This is where writer meets reader. What was the pursuing reader's purpose? What did they seek? Did they leave with the perfect one in hand, or did they settle for close enough?

I thought deeper than the shelves and books that I saw in their stoic patience. I pictured the books arriving regularly, the popular ones more frequently. The shelves restocked. The books presented, which ones showed covers out, which were only allowed to stand binder to binder. What were the categories and groupings of books, why one was placed with another? What did the selection of books by a customer say to a cashier as they rang them up?

Without looking at the jacket, I pictured the writer/author, what they looked like, how they wrote, what else they did for a living, how laborious they felt during the creation. How they knew they were done. How long it took. Who were they appealing to and ultimately what were they trying to say.

They I looked at the books as I had looked at the people in the store. What was similar? What was different? Why this book; why the title; what grabbed my attention as I scanned over the tomes?

I picked up a few that had drawn me closer. I felt their weight, measured their thickness, checked the pages, and roughed the estimated number of words which I still related as effort. I checked the publication date and the number of printings. I visualized the deal that made this a book, the effort after the manuscript was accepted, to turn it to this, to bring it to this place and draw my attention to it.

I was spinning. There were so many things,

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