If Elected, I Promise Not to Bore You...

Here in mighty Tejas, it's election day. A primary this time, but an especially crucial one. We're not used to counting for much in the presidential primaries. Way too often, the nominee's a done deal by the time we roust our slacker butts to the polls. But this year we've been bombarded with messages telling us that we're important. That our opinions really count...

So I thought I'd take the moment to remind every reader out there, that your vote counts as well. When you love an author's work or take a friend's recommendation and buy a book brand new, you're voting (with your wallet) to let that author keep on writing more books for you to enjoy. When you haunt the used bookstore or skip over to Ebay to picked up a pre-owned copy, you're voting for that author to have increasingly weak sales, which will eventually put him/her out of business.

Now, like a lot of people, you may not think your vote counts. You may leave it up to other people (people with lots of money!) to do the paying and the choosing. But if enough of them choose to click those "Buy Used" buttons (yargh!), download a pirated scanned copy (boo, hiss!), or purchase bags of moldering paperbacks at yard sales (cough! hack!), you have only yourself to blame when bookstores go belly up, reading choices grow more limited, and you're set upon at street corners by packs of starving authors while the Philistines grow fat.

Now for the record, I have nothing against friends or family members sharing a book they've enjoyed, and I think libraries rock! (Note to library book buyers: The path to hell is not lined with mass market paperback genre novels. Not even those with "romance" printed on the spines.) I'm not even against trying out a new-to-you author you never would have tried otherwise at a library book sale or a used book store. But I'm all for supporting those authors I enjoy by purchasing their next books new. And if I really want to show the love, I try to do it in the book's first week of release, when my hard-earned bucks count the most.

So when it comes to authors you enjoy, don't forget: vote early and vote often! Really often, if you're voting for the authors of this blog.