today's hot book tip

One of the many books out there that look like nothing and sell for (relatively) big bucks.

I used to find copies out in the world with regularity, but the supply dried up once the internet let anyone do a price check. When I started out it was a $40 book. When online book sales were still limited to the proprietary Interloc network we were selling it in the shop for $95. Now, you see where it's at.

It's an anomaly because the internet absolutely crashed the price of most similarly 'scarce' books- suddenly, people could find them and in most cases the new ocean of supply drowned demand in Biblical fashion. The business is full of books that used to sell like hotcakes for fifty dollars plus that I wouldn't price over ten, or even bother buying.

The Face of the Clam just kept going up.
It's a novel about a local Utopian collective called the Dunites who lived in Oceano, a funky little place on the coast that now generates annual ATV-related deaths on the very dunes where the Utopians once squatted.

So very American.

It's a book that breaks one of the cardinal rules of internet bookselling, that any nonfiction title on a given subject is much more salable than any fictional treatment. I see the Dunite book regularly, the copy of Face of the Clam I just moved is the first one I've run across in a couple of years.

My amazon listings are ninety plus percent non-fiction, the few exceptions are either hot of the presses or collectible anomalies like this one.