Hugh Hollowell

Once upon a time, I wanted to start a blog. I had no idea what I wanted to blog about, but over time, it ended up being primarily about bookselling and being self employed. I started my blog on blogspot, like all the other cool kids., and it was a cute little blog.

Then, as I began to get business from the blog, I realized that perhaps I should pay attention to this thing, so I upgraded to WordPress on my own domain. That went swimmingly, and I kept blogging. Then, I noticed that I had 2 sets of readers, and I started another blog for business owners and the self employed, and left my bookselling blog where it was. And that takes us to where we are now.

The problem is the business blog has really taken off. I regularly have over 500 readers a day over there, I have been asked to do guest blogging on other blogs and it has opened up several opportunities that I never would have had without it.

Until now, the bookselling blog has been located at hughhollowell.com; this puts several limits in place, as it ties the blog and the contents directly to me. In other words, it would have been hard to bring in other writers or whatever.

I have wrestled with what to do about it, and here is what I have decided.

Back in December of 2006, I bought the domain book-links.info, with the idea of creating a portal for all the research links we booksellers all use every day. Then a huge number of things happened all at once, and it never got off the ground.

Effective now, my bookselling blog has moved over there. I have moved the “good” content over there (such as posts on shipping, selling on approval and what not., to seed the blog, if you will. But, I want it to be much more than just a blog. I envision more of a magazine sort of format, with editorial posts, breaking news posts, how to posts, reports on book fairs, news about venues such as Abebooks, eBay and so on, a calender of events in the book world, and so on. I will solicit guest writers to both ease the burden and to broaden the perspective. In keeping with the spirit of the original site, I am building a section of links for research that should be live in a few days.

The site will be ad and sponsor supported, but not egregiously so; I want nothing to interfere with the reader experience.

The bookselling community has nurtured me, taught me a trade, feed me and mine and provided me a ton of fun over the years. I want to give something back. I want to build a community where people can come read the trade news, they can contribute, they can have their views published. I think this new site will give us all the opportunity to do just that.

I hope you will click through, look the site over (we are still in beta, so to speak, but are improving it daily), save us in your RSS Feeds, tell all your friends and help this thing to grow into a true resource for the book community.

Note: If you were already signed up for RSS at the old blog, you should still be on the roll, so to speak. Likewise, if you read us via email, you should also still be on the list.