GROWING UP, my parents owned several Eurotrash/Japanese export stores in Northern Michigan, so I’m completely familiar with the tiny joys and the primal fear of running a small business. Just the simple premise of retail is kinda unnerving: you basically buy a bunch of shit hoping that customers will come in and purchase it. No matter how you shake it, buying merchandise is a gamble because you have to know your customers well enough to anticipate what they’ll buy but also challenge and provoke them into buying things they didn’t even know existed, that they didn’t even know they wanted until they saw it in your store. That’s an art.
I bring this up because bookstores are in the same situation with one major exception I’ll discuss in a minute. So, even if I weren’t a small press author, my sympathy would always be with local bookstores for the things they provide to us and the cultural, literary, and creative space they create for local communities. This is exactly why I’m begging some—but not all—small bookstores to reconsider their policies when it comes to small press authors because some are acting brand new and they have absolutely reason to.
Are we seriously using Nielsen Book Scan stats now to decide whether to host readings at local bookstores?
This essay idea started for me when I was trying to book a reading at a bookstore in the Santa Cruz area and the event manager asked me for my projected book sales and also my sales history. WTF? I was completely taken aback, if not just shook. Are we seriously using Nielsen Book Scan stats now to decide whether to host readings at local bookstores? After taking a look at this bookstore’s event list, I realized virtually all the authors were either A-listers in the literary fiction community or completely unknown big-5 press authors. I can’t think of a more myopic policy than to shut out an emerging LA author simply because my book wasn’t published by Penguin. Not only do plenty of big-5 press authors do absolutely nothing to promote their own books (“that’s what my publicist is for!”), even though that publicist is ignoring them to prioritize the imprint’s best-selling authors in its catalog instead, but even worse, those same authors can and do get blacklisted by the big imprints if their sales are bad, which they will be if their publicist ignores them and they don’t promote their own books!
Tragically, unknown big-5 authors don’t fill bookstores either at the beginning of their literary careers because no one knows who they are and having a publicist, even a good one, doesn’t necessarily change that. I know this for a fact because I’ve gone to readings of numerous friends of mine whose amazing books were published in the best imprints, which they absolutely deserved, but there was no one in the stores! And whereas no one has heard of small press authors either in the beginning, they are much more likely to promote the hell out of their books precisely because they know they won’t get any help from their press’s PR department (assuming it even has one).
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