On the subject of independent bookstores...

[anghara]

...one of rdeck 's friends, Sherry Gottlieb, who once ran the original "A Change of Hobbit" bookstore, offered some fascinating - if discouraging - insight into the indie-vs-big chain discussion.

A couple of years ago, in response to a similar discussion (it never goes away, does it?) Sherry wrote, in part:

For 19 years, in the '70s and '80s, I was an independent bookseller, owner of A Change of Hobbit [which] grew to become the oldest and largest science-fiction and fantasy bookstore in the world. (When it closed in 1991, CoH [had] 75,000 books and magazines, selling not only to
the greater Los Angeles area, but also to mail order clients around the country and around the world.)

I saw firsthand what the big bookstore chains did to the independents, and Borders is one of the worst. Borders policy has always been, and is still: To find an area where a large independent
is doing well, move in, undercut prices, bring in expensive promotions subsidized by publishers, and drive the independent out of business.

Borders and other big chains ... get preferential discounts from the publishers, a radically better rate than that offered to independents... subsidized advertising, and first crack at major authors on tour.

The only ways that independents can hope to survive amid this onslaught are by:
* Specializing. When the chains began to use their preferential
discounts to undercut independents in the late '70s, early '80s,
almost every general independent in the Los Angeles area was forced
out of business. The ones who hung on were the specialists/genre
bookstores (SF, mystery, travel, children's books, etc.)
* Outstanding knowledge of books. Try to go into Borders and ask
the nearest clerk for a book you read once, but can't remember the
name of, and describe the plot -- chances are, they'll shrug and say
they need the title. Do that at an independent, and the clerk will
make guesses, call over everyone in the store and ask them, and do
their best to identify and find the book for you.
* Special orders and searches....Independents ... will do
searches for out-of-print books -- we even did it for OP paperbacks,
keeping a customer's request in the file until we found the book (our
record was 13 years).
* Selection. You have no idea what [chains] DON'T carry... the
chains have virtually killed any chance of a new author to get
"discovered" or even published. If the chains don't order heavily on
a book, publishers now kill the publication. Used to be that the
independents would "hand-sell" books they liked and develop a
groundswell of word-of-mouth that could make a new career.

..Pretty soon, you will be able to buy only what the big chains think you want.
Sherry Gottlieb

With the ever-shrinking short story market, and the vanishing of even the possibility of the mid-list, new authors are finding it increasingly difficult to break in - and those with even remotely original, unusual or "it is not immediately apparent to the accounting department how we would market this book" ideas are plumb out of luck.

Is it really our inevitable fate to settle into a future of books cloned from known bestsellers, written quite possibly by people hand-picked for their marketability rather than their writing skills or passion or vocation...? Even "Harry Potter" the phenomenon was rejected a number of times, which means that someone somewhere failed to see its phenomenological potential - but it was published anyway, given a CHANCE, and look what happened next. What if the next Harry Potter never gets that chance, because it's just that little bit different, that little bit unusual, considered just that little bit too risky an "investment" for the publishers?...

I would like to hope not. Every year I see a number of amazing books published, some of them by people I am proud to call friends. I am acquainted with a number of stellar editors whom I do not believe capable of being driven by bottom line alone, who would fight for something that they felt deserved fighting for. And yet... and yet.... ALL of this - wonderful writers, great editors - ALL of it bottlenecks in the marketing and publicity and sales department. Even those GIVEN a chance at a debut are given that chance at swordspoint - your first book don't sell, you're out, sweetheart. Forget about building a reputation or an audience. It's publish or perish in a whole new guise.

Writers - readers - booksellers - what think you?

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Which I loathe but which my students love. Would they have read it without the hype? Possibly not? Would they have read another book? I doubt it.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

But who gets to pick which books get hyped, and why...?

It's that person, or those people, who apparently control(s) what the greater reading public reads or doesn't read.

Let me put it this way. I realise that I am not exactly Everyman in this, but I'll wander into bookshops and actually BROWSE. I'll pick up books that are out on the remainder table and have a look at them. If the story appeals,I will buy it. If it doesn't, I will NOT buy it. It matters very little to me whether it's the #1 bestseller this week. But if only the hyped books get picked to be sold, I lose those gems that I might otherwise trip over all unexpected-like when I wasn't looking for them. I lose the authors who are not household names (but who are no less good because of that); I lose older books which are whisked off shelves far too soon to make room for the new big thing; I lose the quirky, the unexpected, the weird and the wonderful because those books won't sell in the millions and will therefore sooner or later get to the point where they aren't published at all because they are deemed "non-viable".

I would regret that.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Except that none of this is true: small presses are growing as fast as the large houses are conglomerating. Amazon and the internet generally have become our generation's book clubs. Publishing houses publish more books, and a wider list of books than ever before. Unfortunately, there are also more people trying to get published.

While the Bestsellers (a genre label, not a numbers description) cost money, if the publishers make money they can puiblish scarier authors. A friend of mine once asked me not to diss Terry Brooks, because publishing Terry Brooks paid for almost his entire sf list.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

All of THAT is true, but it doesn't entirely invalidate what I said above.

"more people trying to get published" = another can of worms entirely - there were always people trying to get published, it's just that it's EASIER these days, or apparently easier, anyway - you pays your money and you takes your chances, after all.

Small(er) presses and more options where to buy and more books getting published = all good. But publicity budgets really aren't keeping up with demand, and this is yet another can of worms - how much of what used to be the province of publishers' publicity offices has been handed down to the authors these days? How much of their own publicity are authors expected to carry themselves? (From personal experience, quite a bit - and I've been the recipient of actual publicity budgets, unlike a friend whose Australian-published fantasy was picked up by a big US publisher and then assigned close to zero in terms of publicity budget so the trilogy came and went almost invisibly, not through lack of merit...)

Am I really so wrong when I say that money makes money, and that - IN GENERAL - more is spent on publicising books which are expected to bring in the MEGAmoolah than on publicising books which, er, might bring in MORE money if they WERE publicised?

Sure, I appreciate that it's a business. I'm in the industry, I know the realities. But publicity still means something. Look at that sorry Frey debacle - after Oprah touted him, after he was outed, after Oprah retracted the tout, THAT book remained on the bestseller shelves of our local bookshops for quite some time. Publicity is a juggernaut - once you put its weight behind something, it will keep it going, no matter WHAT happens along the way.

In some ways it's like the Oscars in Hollywood. Every year there's ONE movie that seems to be the main focus, and in that year THAT movie wins everything important. Other nominated movies, in a nod to the possibility that they too had merit, win awards for cinematography or costume design - all well and good, but who looks at those awards, or remembers them? The categories people look at and want to know about are Best Movie, Best Actor/Actress, possibly Best Original SOng. The rest... is smoke.

SOrry - these replies are getting to be longer than the original post...