I was in the Borders store in Norman, Okla., the other day, browsing the horror shelves like I always do and was thrilled to see my local store carrying Kim Paffenroth’s latest novel Dying to Live: Life Sentence. Then I saw another book from Permuted Press. And another. And another. In fact, that first shelf (of the three) dedicated to horror, the one where they put the trade paperbacks and hardcovers, was very liberally sprinkled with books from Permuted Press.

This is great, right?

Wellllll … yes. And no.

Because, you see, there was not one single title in the store from Scrybe Press, my main publisher. My werewolf books? Nope. Why? This is the question. I just sent an e-mail to my publisher to ask him why. I’m going to return to Borders, hopefully today, and see if they can tell me why.

You may recall some months ago I was in the Hasting’s store in Norman and saw they carried several titles from Eraserhead Press. I asked them about carrying my books and the manager told me she’d be glad to. On consignment. And she’d keep 30 percent of the sales. I’m not in the wholesale business.

Needless to say, the local Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million stores don’t carry my books, either.

Scrybe Press distributes through Ingram and Baker & Taylor. Scrybe takes returns and offers big discounts to retailers. So, I’m not sure what the problem is. Is there something Scrybe isn’t doing? Do you have to pay to get into the Ingram catalogue? Have a sales force that contacts individual stores? What? Does anybody know? Is there anything I can do to get local stores to carry my books?