Although I have only recently become a die-hard fan of the blogs of my fave authors as well as other readers, I can already tell that book pimpage is going to be a serious problem for me.

I had successfully avoided getting too crazy about having to buy every single book that I read a good review about when I got sucked in…

I am not certain if anyone else has had this kind of a moment, but for me it was Luisa Prieto’s favourite Halloween stories in octoberfest. After spending what felt like hours going through all her links to find out more about some of the stories/books that I hadn’t read, the one thought running through my head was ‘but we don’t even really celebrate Halloween in Australia!’

Clearly I was trying to grasp at anything that would save me and it worked (yeah, I know it’s pretty immature, but whatever!)… for a while… and then I read her secret vampire city. Besides being incredibly moved by her post, I became obsessed with trying to get a copy of L J Smith’s Nightworld series. On top of this, Stephanie Meyer on her website recommended a recent read called The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Does anyone have any idea how friggin’ hard it is to get these kind of books in Perth?! *rant*

Let me give you a hint…

me (the teeny red dot)

vs

rest of the world (where the hell is that red dot??)

Beginning to get the idea??

Perth is said to be the most isolated capital city in the world and a number of us affectionately (?) refer to it as ‘wait a while’; eg,

Bookstore: you will have to wait a while to get the latest release of that author
Me: but it has already been released in the eastern states; in Sydney
Bookstore: yes, but Perth won’t be getting it for another two weeks
Me: fuck you then – I’ll order it myself from Sydney (rude, but oh so satisfying when I got it in the mail a few days later)

After failing at all local bookstores and with a list of the US print releases in my hand, I went to the most obvious place to get them – amazon. I was very excited until I found out that not only would it take 3-4 weeks to get them (on the cheapee option so that I could justify getting all 4 of the books that I wanted), but it would cost US$80 in postage. HOLY SHIT! This was triple what the books themselves cost!

Have no fear though, friends. Luckily enough I have a good (= 2yrs of spending lots of $$) relationship with Perth’s only specialist romance bookstore and was able to con/beg them to order some of the books for me, thus no shipping fees. Yay! However this was still reliant on whether the distributor/s that they buy from have the books in their catalogues.

So here I am feeling vaguely ridiculous/embarassed because of course I have had to purchase a few books (such as Ginn Hale’s Wicked Gentlemen – BTW – how glad am I that she just released an ebook via Loose Id) through amazon anyway. At least the shipping cost was not soooo much… *sigh*

And, to top it all off, I have just read Sarah’s top 13ish books on the DIK website (get it here), which means (a) I’m screwed because now I have another list and (b) I’m pissed because I wanna know how the hell she is getting books over the counter in NZ that I can’t get in Perth?! No fair!