O Brave New World

Everyone can be an author now!

Stirring words-- noble words--proclaiming a faith in technology and in democracy itself. New ways to self-publish have leveled the playing field. This can only be a good thing, yes?

Well, no. Let me tell you how this looks from a bookstore’s perspective.

There are over 100,000 books published every year by what we call mainstream publishers—by companies as large as Random House or as small as David R. Godine (one of the last great independent houses), and by hundreds of publishers in between. These books are of varying quality. Some are classics. Some are creatures of the season, transitory entertainments that will not be remembered but which are perfectly fine. And a lot of books, sad to say, are complete dreck. D.O.A., or they deserve to be. Sometimes we will hold our noses and stock them, because we believe that there might be local demand, and we are not censors. But a great many we exclude from the store because we can tell, from catalogue copy and in conversations with publishers’ sales reps, that we simply do not want to carry them in the store. We will special order them, but we will not stock them.

We only have room for so many books, you understand. There are, in fact, many classics in various fields that we do not carry because we have no expectation of selling them in a reasonable period of time. We have to make those kinds of choices all the time.

But now, back to the slush pile.

Even the books that we think are awful or that would be redundant in our store have gone through a vetting process that has been developed over decades. They have been judged by publishers to be of sufficient quality to earn a contract. They have been edited and copy edited, their covers designed. Marketing plans have been developed for their release. Sales have been projected, print runs established, pricing determined. They are books and more: they are commercial objects poised for maximum success in the marketplace.

Do you see where I’m going with this? The idea that everyone can be an author now—that new technology allows authors to bypass publishers and bring their books to the public directly—is like a vision of hell to a bookseller.

We already have so many books whose quality we distrust in varying degrees. We do not open the store each morning in the hopes that your Uncle Jack will supplement our stock with the unedited memoir he had printed at Kinko’s last week. Sure, self-published authors may be bringing us the next Moby Dick or Goodnight Moon, but what are the odds? We don’t really have time to read it. We’re already working more than 40 hours per week, believe me.

…Okay, the rant is over. Now to accentuate the positive.

As an independent bookstore, we are eager to feature local authors and local content. This is the kind of thing that can distinguish us from the more anonymous chains. There are lots of books that fit that description from mainstream publishers. But sometimes books are too local to be published by a mainstream house. Sometimes they have to be self-published. And we want to have those books! And if our friends and neighbors—local folks--publish books, we want to have them too, because we are a community bookstore. So we take those books on consignment and try to keep track of them. With the authors’ help, we can.

It’s a real balancing act. It has always been a balancing act, because there have always been vanity presses.

But back to my original point. It’s not a brave new world that technology has brought us. It’s just new to thee. If you or a loved one have a self-published book to show us, take the time to consider the bookstore's position. Work with us to place the book appropriately in our store, drive sales in our direction so that we will reorder, give the book its best life possible life. We want it to succeed as much as you do, we only ask that you maintain perspective and manage your expectations.