I’ve done some shameful things to sell my books. But there’s a line even I can’t cross.

From The Guardian:

Some days I would rather get my bikini line waxed in the window of Dunelm than walk into another bookshop.

Not that bookshops aren’t wonderful places. Of course they are. Bookshops are seething with joy and knowledge and comfort and diversion. They are hideously beautiful to look at, full of like-minded people and ripe with the excitement of discovery. But that, you see, is the problem. Like a stranger holding your childhood toy in one hand and a claw hammer in the other, bookshops have the power to break your heart into tiny shards and then throw the splinters in your eyes.

This week, I watched American Fiction at my local independent cinema. I was with my friend Miranda – also an author – and as well as an audible gasp at the scene where Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright, is offered a $750,000 (£600,000) advance for a book he has written under a pseudonym (I’d classify a $750,000 book advance as science fiction rather than comedy), we also shared a wincing moment of delight at the sight of Monk storming around a bookshop, looking for his own books, complaining about how they had been classified, moving an armload of them to the front of the store and haranguing a shop assistant.

How many times have I, shamefaced, slid up to a twentysomething salesperson in cargo trousers and asked, trying to keep my voice level, if they have any books by, ah, Nell Frizzell? How often have I tried to wrestle my face into something like neutral calm as they click through page after page after page on their computer, as though searching for a hagfish deep in the trenches of the Pacific Ocean? How many times have I shuffled, burning with despair, behind a shop manager as we weave through everything from gender studies to biography, fiction and some section called “new thinking” as they occasionally drop to their knees muttering “Frizzle, Frizzle, hmmmm, Michael Frayn … Stephen Fry … ummmm. Not here, sorry … let’s try floor three”?

To my unending ignominy, how many times have I picked my way through a chain outlet, pushing my books to the front of the display table, or turning them to face out on the shelf, while silently praying that I’m not being caught on CCTV? I’ve done it on holiday, and on my birthday; I’ve even asked a family of tourists to take my photo, beside my book, with my camera, in the Trafalgar Square branch of Waterstones. Worst of all are the days when I don’t dare to walk into a bookshop at all, because the crushing disappointment if it didn’t have a single copy of any of my books would be too much for my withered little ego to handle.

And yet, the very day after watching American Fiction, I found myself behind the counter of a small, independent bookshop, being asked if I could recommend a book for a new mother, the owner having popped out for a minute and left me to stand guard. I could see my most recent book on the shelf behind the customer – full of reassuring stories and written with just this sort of reader in mind. But somehow the idea of recommending my own book, out loud, while posing as a shop assistant, made me cringe inwardly. I took her over to the shelf and sort of passed my hand past the book, like a magician trying to direct your gaze at a rabbit, while chatting about insomnia and breastfeeding and fungal nail infections.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to C. for the tip.

Into the Unknown: Stuck in a Writing Rut? It Might Be Time to Expand Your Comfort Zone

From Writers Unboxed:

Like many writers, I’m an introvert. I’m perfectly content sitting in my office alone, in complete silence, for hours on end doing nothing but reading and writing. Crowds make me anxious. Having to make small talk with strangers at parties and business events exhausts me beyond words. If given a choice between talking to someone on the phone and sending them an email, I always choose the latter.

For the most part, this isn’t a problem. Or at least I didn’t think it was until recently.

At the end of December, my publisher emailed me a report detailing my book sales for the previous quarter. I noticed that every time I attended an in-person event or did an author talk, there was a bump in sales. This is great news, and very useful information. The only problem is that I’d rather get a cavity filled than speak in front of group of people. I don’t do it nearly as often as I should.

About a week after I received the report from my publisher, I was thumbing through a self-help book while waiting for my husband to check out at a local book store. Opening the book to a random page, I stumbled upon this: If you want to grow personally and/or professionally you first have to expand your comfort zone.

The author went on to say that our comfort zones are often cozy traps that prevent us from challenging ourselves in ways that allow us to learn new skills, expand our social circles, and grow our careers.

According to the book, the best way to increase the number and variety of things you feel confident about is to do things that make you feel prickly and awkward—like public speaking—often enough that they begin to feel normal. If you keep it up, the thinking goes, activities that make you anxious will eventually become part of a new, more inclusive comfort zone.

This makes sense if you think about things you’ve likely done in the past, such as learning how to ride a bike or drive a car. With repetition and practice, even the most intimidating activities begin to feel like second nature. Your worldview expands, making it possible to see situations and people from different perspectives. Having an expanded view of the world, or at least a small part of it, can also help foster creativity, help make your writing more engaging, and perhaps even motivate you to give other difficult things a try.

Link to the rest at Writers Unboxed

PG says, it’s the old, old, old story.

Most writers are introverts. That’s one of the reasons they enjoy spending a day — writing.

A spouse or children are usually not terribly stressful so long as they give the author her space, her time, which is not to be violated unless someone is bleeding or the fire alarm sounds.

While not true for all writers, a great many get rejuvenated when they’re writing

The nightmare before Christmas

From The Bookseller:

Last week I spoke at a local secondary school about bookselling and running a small business. One of the questions asked was “What’s the hardest part of owning a business?” “Fear of failure,” I said. What I didn’t say was that, at the moment, things are scary.

We’ve led a fairly charmed life for the five years we’ve been in operation. Even the period during Covid-19 proved successful, once we made it through the first lockdown with sanity just about intact. When our children could go back to nursery in June of 2020, and we could open the shop doors for click and collect, takings rocketed. Everyone who could was working from home, which gave our residential location a huge advantage, and Waterstones was closed. It was this period that gave us the capital to move and expand our Bristol shop and open a second store in Portishead.

Last autumn these moves were paying off. This autumn has been another story. Costs are up, takings are down and the Christmas sales uptick only arrived in December, six weeks later than normal. For the first time since we opened in 2018, nerves are, if not frayed, feeling a little worn.

The cold comfort is that we’re not the only ones. Seeing the stories on Facebook from other bookshops, and hearing reports from the various sales reps that visit us, times are tough for everyone. Other sectors are also feeling the pinch. I met a friend yesterday whose restaurant has grown and grown for the past decade (both in size and profit). As we had lunch he told me his takings are 28% down year-on-year!

As the interest rate hikes bite on people’s mortgage renewals, as food prices stay stubbornly high, as the cost of every activity and product has to increase to cover costs (or gauge prices in the case of some of the big brands), shopping habits are changing. People are buying less. Last year our customers may have bought a hardback as a gift, this year it’s a paperback. Last year they may have bought two or three books for one person, this year it’s just one.

. . . .

The increased prices of books haven’t helped. Non-fiction paperbacks have broken the £10 barrier. Big title fiction hardbacks are now £25, up from £20. I will happily argue that this is exceptional value for the lifetime of joy you’re getting, especially in comparison to the £4 coffee that lasts 30 minutes. But to those buying presents while watching their budgets, these price increases, even if just psychologically, are putting people off.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

The Burden and Necessity of Genre

From The Millions:

When you write a book, there are certain questions you can expect: How long did it take you? Will you write a sequel? And—the inevitable—what is it?

What it is: thousands of hours tapping away on a keyboard between swiping student IDs at the Sarah Lawrence gym, months of crippling doubt, dozens of rewrites, maddening rounds of edits, the culmination of years of dreaming and plotting condensed into a 300-page manuscript with which I’ve imbued the emotional vulnerability of a pubescent diary.

No, they will persist. What is it?

I rehearsed this answer in my query letter, tweaked depending on the interest and need of the agent addressed: Complete at 80,000 words, this

Sometimes it was a literary novel. Sometimes a literary commercial novel. Sometimes a literary novel with commercial appeal. Once, upmarket women’s fiction.

It’s adult literary fiction, I tell people. I think of the many times I’ve been prompted to make such unambiguous designations, usually without issue: I am Female. I am White. But something doesn’t feel right about defining my novel, about giving it a genre (a word that has always conjured for me cover images of bursting corsets and rippled abdominals). Something doesn’t feel right about defining novels at all.

As a bookseller, I compartmentalize novels everyday. If it’s not Science Fiction, Mystery, or Romance, then it falls under the catch-all umbrella of Literature. I watch our erudite Upper West Side clientele squint warily at the shelves. The other day, a man held up a novel with a beach on the cover—a cartoon woman sunning herself on a striped towel pictured—and sniffed distastefully. As though a thought bubble appeared above his head, he tossed the novel back on its stack of identical copies in a way that said, You call this literature?

If prompted, I couldn’t say with any tact what distinguishes literary from commercial fiction. Literary fiction values prose over plot, I might say. Commercial fiction is about the story, whereas literary fiction is about the characters. Like an indie flick verses a Hollywood blockbuster, one novel wears a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and the other mirrored Ray-Ban Aviators. A literary agent I once interned for cut to the chase: “We’re looking for new literary voices,” she told me. “Try to find submissions with a mention of an MFA.”

As reluctant as I am to call my novel commercial, to call it “literary” can feel snobbish in its insistence. Who am I to say that I am more Mary Gaitskill than Mary Kay Andrews? Who am I to say what my novel is at all?

That’s the thing I’ve learned: once you release a novel into the world, you relinquish your control over how it is defined. What my “adult literary fiction” novel has become: Coming of Age. Contemporary Women. Romance. Suspense. Genre Fiction. My novel is amorphous, ready to be whatever it needs to be given the audience. What I can’t decide is whether this ability to sit on many different shelves is a benefit or a hindrance.

Claiming multiple genres feels akin to presenting a business card with the title Artist/Writer/Dancer/Freelance DJ—a worse offense, perhaps, than asserting literary value. But in working in a bookstore, in placing books onto their various shelves and thinking, This doesn’t belong here, I’ve come to appreciate what a misnomer and a crutch a genre can be. When I pressed a copy of Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan into a customer’s hand and told her, “It’s a sort of literary science fiction novel,” she stopped me there. “I don’t read science fiction,” she insisted, and I realized not even the modifier of “literary” could combat the negative connotation of genre fiction.

Few books are what they initially appear. I almost didn’t pick up Ben Dolick’s The Ghost Notebooks, put off by the word “supernatural” on its back cover and its placement on the Sci-Fi shelf. When a friend gave me the ARC of Tara Isabella Burton’s Social Creature that the bookstore had received, he said, “You read thrillers, right? This sounds like a thriller,” and I almost felt insulted. I put off reading the copy of Paullina Simons’s The Bronze Horseman that my coworker lent me, its promise of a “historical romance “ enough to raise my skepticism. “I promise, it has literary merit,” she told me. It took me a while to admit what I always knew: that to me, “literary” is synonymous with “well-written.”

. . . .

The question is whether genres need to be abandoned, or if our definitions of genres need to be expanded. Few novels fit snuggly into one category, though there are no doubt novels that do: Science Fiction, Mystery, Romance. It was Octavia Butler and Junot Díaz who allowed me to start to question those classifications in college with Kindred and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, respectively. I hadn’t known that literary novels could have time travel and magic and, knowing this, it didn’t seem fair or even possible that Kindred and Keith Roberts’s The Furies could occupy the same shelf. It only occurred to me then that I’d always thought “literary” also meant taking place in the real world. The Furies is science fiction. Kindred is more complicated than that.

Link to the rest at The Millions

PG says genre is a marketing tool. If prospective customers don’t understand what the title of a genre means, it’s a less effective marketing tool than it could be.

Genre in a physical bookstore is more difficult because if a book is placed in the wrong genre section, customers who would otherwise be interested in reading it may never see it.

PG doesn’t want to be too geeky, but compared with a search engine, discovery in a bookstore is bronze-age.

Is Traditional Fiction Publishing Broken?

From Writer Unboxed:

Today’s post was inspired by a novelist friend of mine who has been having a hard time of it lately, and in their struggle to regain footing in the fiction market, suggested that I address the question of how to keep the faith in today’s challenging publishing environment. What follows are my thoughts and observations about what’s going on and why, and what can be done, and whether there’s any cause for hope. I welcome your thoughts and observations, too.

Times are tough these days for novelists who are not long-established perennial bestsellers, literary luminaries, or aren’t named (for example) Colleen Hoover, Bonnie Garmus, Rebecca Yarros, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Hannah Grace, or Ana Huang.

Fiction sales to consumers over the past three years have been robust in comparison to pre-pandemic years. Yet, across genres, published and aspiring authors alike are finding it especially difficult to get read, whether that be by editors or agents or the reading public. Authors who’ve been in the business for a while (sometimes for decades) can’t get new book deals. Agents are rejecting new authors at even higher rates than usual. What gives?

I should note that publishing always has a component of what I call “eight-year-olds chasing the soccer ball”—wherever the ball is going at any given time, the herd is running after it. Which is to say that when a given genre or sub-genre starts trending, a significant proportion of the publishing ecosystem, from writer to bookseller and all points between, wants in. In years past, this wasn’t especially problematic for those who exist outside of the trend(s); there was demand for and space for all kinds of books. So what’s changed?

Let’s look, first, at space. National media book coverage has shrunk to almost nothing, and where it exists, coverage has in many cases become so clotted with titles that it’s practically meaningless (take for example, EW’s recent list of “The 42 fall books we’re most excited to read”). Bookstore space is also tighter, due to rising rents, the proliferation of eBooks, and online book-buying. What’s more, many physical bookstores, wanting to capitalize on the biggest trending books, are prioritizing that handful of titles by placing even larger orders and creating big, obvious, exclusive displays. Publishing space—meaning the number of publishing imprints as well as the number of books being acquired—has contracted, too.

Now, demand. Demand is a wibbly concept. Seen one way, it’s demonstrated concretely by what readers are buying en mass. The books they’re buying, though, are less a reflection of what, independent of influence, they may desire than of what they see the most of (this is the principle behind advertising; create demand). By the same token, if we don’t know a book exists because we haven’t seen or heard about it wherever we spend our time, we aren’t going to seek it out—and this creates a perception that there was no demand for it. (This is the all-too-common Kiss of Death for authors’ careers.)

These days, the primary, most effective book-discovery resource is TikTok—where nearly 75% of users are younger than 45, and 44% are under 25. During the early phase of the pandemic, lightning struck Colleen Hoover there. Her blaze was astonishing. If I’m recalling correctly, I think that at one point her books held nine of the fifteen spots on the NYT trade paperback list. Nine! This is, to use an overused word, unprecedented. In 2022, she sold more than 14 million books. Let that sink in for a minute. One author, in one year, sold more than 14 MILLION books. Consider what that says about readers’ book-buying behaviors (the book industry certainly is doing so).

But here’s the thing about phenomenons: they don’t last. The brushfire burns hot for a while, but eventually it uses up its fuel and burns out. The problem, though, is that while it’s burning, the herd runs in the direction of the blaze in the hope of catching fire, and this blaze is possibly the biggest publishing has ever seen.

Another component of the problem is occurring on the bookselling side. The competition among publishers for bookseller notice and support, both pre- and post-publication, is fierce. Influential booksellers are besieged with bound manuscripts and advance copies. They sincerely want to help everyone they can, and this puts pressure on them to read and review as many books as they can, which naturally results in them reading much more quickly than they ordinarily would, which creates unintended bias toward high-concept and/or shorter and/or fast-paced, easily digestible stories, and against authors who write denser, more layered work (unless of course those authors are already “names,” cf. Amor Towles, Abraham Verghese, Barbara Kingsolver).

The same is true for those on social media (IG in particular) who are considered to be book-influencers and who are over-relied upon by marketing teams to “build buzz.” Only, unlike booksellers, they are primarily young (under 35) with reading tastes that already skew toward books that, whether “light” or “dark,” move fast and give them what critic Laura Miller, when writing about Colleen Hoover’s books, described as “all the feels.” Though they sometimes gush about a particular book, often they post lovely but largely ineffectual photos of book stacks. Not only are they trying to influence their followers’ tastes, they’re competing with one another—for followers, for publisher favor, for having read the largest number of books. The FOMO factor here is significant. While there are some really wonderful book-folk in this space, thoughtful engagement with and meaningful feature of a book is more the exception than the rule.

We all know that while writing novels is an art and craft, publishing novels is a business, and staying in business requires lots and lots and lots of books to be sold. Risk is discouraged. So although there are still many agents and editors whose tastes and preferences remain outside the blaze, the current reality is that if a given book isn’t likely to be selected by a celebrity or isn’t BookTok Hot, it’s going to be a harder sell at every stage. Readers who are over the age of 45 and/or don’t prioritize social media are difficult for publishers to reach, and no one seems to have fresh ideas let alone answers for addressing that.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

PG’s answer to the question in the article’s title: “Yes. And it’s been broken for some time, but it took a while for most readers to discover that traditional publishing is circling the drain and not coming back.”

As someone once said, “How did I go broke? Gradually, then suddenly.”

Book Business Applauds Government Lawsuit Against Amazon

From Publishers Weekly:

The Federal Trade Commission, supported by 17 state attorneys general, finally filed its long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against Amazon yesterday. In a 172-page complaint, the government alleged that the e-tailer “uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power.” The use of that power, the government continued, allows Amazon “to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.”

The immediate industry reaction to the news of the suit was uniform: “What took so long?” Or, in the words of Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson, that it was “about ******** time.” An industry lawyer, who wished to remain anonymous, gave a more nuanced view in wondering why it took the government so long to act, pointing to the infamous buy button case in 2010, when Amazon pulled Macmillan’s buy buttons in a dispute over e-book terms.

Even with Amazon’s dominant position over the sale of e-books and print books, the suit doesn’t mention books, which, of course, were Amazon’s first line of business. The suit does, however, highlight Amazon’s hold over the companies who use its online marketplace to sell a range of products, including books, to consumers.

Jed Lyons, CEO of Rowman & Littlefield, was skeptical about how the case will play out, pointing to the government’s “sketchy” track record in lawsuits against major corporations. But even though the FTC lawsuit is more about third party sellers, Lyons said, if “it shuts down unauthorized sellers of new books, which we know are not new books, then that will be a win for book publishers.”

Independent booksellers, which were the first physical retailers impacted by Amazon and the steep discounting on books it employed to attract customers, praised the FTC’s long-awaited action. The lawsuit, said ABA CEO Allison Hill, “is good news for indie bookstores and good news for all small business. ABA applauds the FTC and states’ effort to release Amazon’s stranglehold, and we look forward to the transparency this lawsuit will provide into Amazon’s business practices.”

. . . .

Other industry groups, including the AAP and Authors Guild, have also long advocated that the government investigate many of Amazon’s practices.

No bookseller has been more active in attacking Amazon’s book practices than Danny Caine, owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kans., and author of How to Resist Amazon and Why. Caine acknowledged that, “while the suit doesn’t go after Amazon’s book business in particular, it can still do a lot to level the playing field. For one thing, it can prove that Amazon is acting illegally or anti-competitively via tactics like preferencing its own products, placing unfair pressure on sellers who list their products for lower prices elsewhere, and forcing sellers and customers onto their Prime platform.”

The head of one independent publisher, who wished to remain anonymous, said that if the government prevails, “it could be very beneficial to publishers.” She then laid out the many challenges publishers face in dealing with Amazon: “I think [the suit] could affect tactics around the negotiation of discounts and fees, etc., with publishers. This would also be a good thing. The negotiations over the years between publishers and Amazon have been brutal. At first, Amazon got big discounts since they were buying non-returnable. Then, predictably, they started returning books and kept the discounts.”

She continued: “Publishers were simply too fearful and too powerless to stand up to their biggest customer. And then Amazon started added all manner of fees, effectively increasing their discount even further. To the extent that Amazon was able to discount books to lure customers away from other booksellers, publishers were effectively subsidizing Amazon’s growth and dominance while watching their margins erode.”

Melville’s Johnson made many of the same points, lamenting that the government’s lack of action up until now and allowing Amazon to use books as a “loss leader” got the company to where it is today. The government further strengthened Amazon’s hand, Johnson maintained, when it sued the major publishers over their e-book pricing policies. That decision “really pounded Amazon’s suppliers, and thus altered the business of making and selling books, probably irrevocably.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Here are a few questions PG would like to put to the traditional publishers celebrating the FTC’s suit against Amazon:

  1. Do you really want your biggest customer to stop selling your books? That’s an option for Amazon. Traditionally-published books are a minuscule part of Amazon’s total sales, a rounding error.
  2. If Amazon decided to shut down its book business on a temporary or permanent basis, would Americans buy more or fewer books? Would Americans change their behavior and travel to physical bookstores once again (assuming they live within a reasonable distance from a remaining physical bookstore)?
  3. Do you really not care about readers who live a long way from a physical bookstore? Have you ever even visited North or South Dakota? Nebraska? Wyoming? New Mexico? Idaho? Nevada (outside of Las Vegas)? Kansas?
  4. Do you understand that the internet provides endless reading material at no charge to readers, reading material that doesn’t include commercial books?
  5. Do you really think your books are not competing for reader attention against free reading material on the internet?
  6. Do you understand how many more Americans log on to the internet every day instead of visiting a physical store of any sort, let alone a book store?

Booksellers Want Justice Department to Investigate Amazon

From BookRiot:

As the Federal Trade Commission moves towards what looks like a lawsuit against Amazon, several authors, booksellers, and anti-trust activists want Amazon’s bookselling to also be investigated.

The Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, and antitrust think tank Open Markets Institute sent a letter Wednesday to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission requesting that they disrupt the monopoly on the book market that Amazon has.

The retail giant’s influence on the book world can’t be overstated — 40% of physical books sold in the U.S. are sold by Amazon, as are 80% of e-books sold. Amazon’s 2008 purchase of Audible has also helped it dominate the realm of audiobooks. The reason this is an issue for the world of publishing is that, for one, it has resulted in fewer books sold by physical bookstores across the country. And Amazon has a tendency to highlight well-known authors, making it even harder for other, lesser-known authors to get attention on their books.

The letter cites the importance of free-flowing ideas within a democracy as the reason why Amazon’s role as a bookseller should be looked into by the government, “The open access to the free flow of ideas is essential to a well-functioning democracy. The government has the responsibility to ensure that actors with oversized power cannot control or interfere with the open exchange of ideas.”

Link to the rest at BookRiot

PG suggests that it’s difficult to make a case that Amazon is harming consumers with its low prices and the huge variety of books on offer — far, far more than any physical bookstore can stock.

As far as ebooks are concerned, how many ebooks do the members of the American Booksellers Association sell each year and what is the price of those ebooks?

Does anyone know of any evidence that Amazon interferes with “access to the free flow of ideas” with its huge collection of print books, old and new, and ebooks, offered at lower prices than anyone else provides? As PG has mentioned before, being a large and successful business organization is not a violation of antitrust laws.

He further suggests that selling printed and ebooks from a stock far larger than any physical bookstore has for sale at significantly lower prices than the members of the American Booksellers Association routinely charge doesn’t hurt readers or other consumers in any measurable way.

That Cool New Bookstore? It’s a Barnes & Noble

From The Wall Street Journal:

Barnes & Noble was once the enemy of independent bookstores. Now it’s trying to be more like them. And no place better explains the improbable reinvention of the biggest American bookstore chain than the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

That shop in one of the world’s greatest book markets has been a battleground since the day it opened three decades ago. It might be the most iconic of the chain’s 596 locations: It’s the store that helped inspire the mega-store run by Tom Hanks’s character in the classic romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.”

It also has been the site of a grand experiment for much of the past year. The chain invested millions of dollars to rebuild this Barnes & Noble into a model for its other stores to emulate as the company transforms into a bookseller for the modern age.

“You don’t want to go too crazy in a Barnes & Noble because one of the joys of this store is that everybody comes in here,” said James Daunt, the chief executive since the company was taken private in 2019. “But do I think this can be a really interesting bookstore that is much, much more interesting than it currently is? Oh my goodness, yes.”

He would know. Daunt was a respected independent bookseller in London before he found himself running chains in both the U.K. and U.S. He was exactly the sort of person who could make Barnes & Noble interesting.

His plan to save the company and its bookstores is to combine the power of a big chain with the pleasure of a beloved indie. By shifting control of the process to individual store managers across the country, Daunt is giving local booksellers permission to do things they were never able to do before. They have discretion over purchasing, placement and even pricing. He wants Barnes & Noble locations to feel welcoming but not overwhelming—a chain store should be more inviting and less intimidating than a truly independent shop—and that means he needs the people who run them to make sensible decisions for their markets. “It’s only inexcusable if it’s not interesting,” he said.

. . . .

The Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side was incoherent the first time he showed me around last winter. It was cold and dreary outside and felt that way inside, where he was trying to make sense of an odd assortment of books. Viola Davis’s memoir was next to Franz Kafka’s diaries. Judd Apatow’s comedy interviews sat near a spiritual biography of George H.W. Bush. John le Carré was inches from Geena Davis. 

I thought Daunt might pull the books off the shelf and rearrange them himself, but the whole point of his approach is that the CEO shouldn’t be the one making those calls. A bookstore exists to serve readers—not publishers, not investors and definitely not the bloke running Barnes & Noble. 

Barnes & Noble used scale and uniformity to its benefit in the 1990s and 2000s, but those advantages have since become liabilities. Bookstores don’t have to be the same from one to another. They shouldn’t be, either. The best managers know the books they sell and the customers who buy them—and what works on the Upper West Side might not work in West Des Moines. 

The idea behind the new Barnes & Noble is to make the national chain more like a collection of 596 local indies. The famous one in my neighborhood used to symbolize the company’s past. Now it offers a peek at its future. “If we can do it here,” Daunt said, “we can do it anywhere.” 

Daunt agreed to give me before-and-after tours of the Upper West Side turnaround project, so we met in January and made plans to return when the shop was ready. By the time we met again in June, the vision he described had come to life.

The major renovation was necessary because the mission of bookstores has changed since this one opened in 1993. Back then, someone who wanted a specific book would visit their favorite brick-and-mortar store. Now anyone in need of that book probably visits Amazon. 

This profound shift in consumer behavior prompted Barnes & Noble to reconsider the very purpose of a Barnes & Noble. 

A physical bookstore competing against a $1.4 trillion online everything store must give people the stuff they know they want and the stuff they didn’t know they wanted. 

“We’re here to help people browse,” Daunt said. 

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG much prefers reading to browsing. Perhaps he’s an outlier, but he’s happy to stay at home, read a detailed book review from a source whose opinion he respects, then locate the book on Amazon (where he can read the book’s description, flip through a few pages and, occasionally, consider the opinions of a handful of people who have read the book and left reviews) and start reading the book.

Learning about an interesting book, then going to a physical bookstore to purchase it is simply not one of the options PG considers these days.

After reading the OP, although the photos of the bookstore didn’t look like anything special or dramatically different from a number of other bookstores, PG would be interested to see Mr. Daunt’s Manhattan store in person, but he’s not certain when or if he’s ever going to be in New York.

If visitors to TPV happen to see any follow-up stories about BN that report on actual sales in the Manhattan store after its opening phase that don’t sound like corporate happy talk, PG would be interested in hearing about them via the Contact PG link at the top of the blog.

How To Design For Local Bookstores

From The Book Designer:

If you love books and work as a freelancer, you may want to learn how to design for local bookstores. Graphic design, aesthetics, and something as simple as layout can transform readers’ experiences. 

Local bookstores are diamonds in the book world. With large chain bookstores coming to larger prominence in the last several decades, the feel of intimate, small town stores is a cherished experience. 

You can play a large role in the writing world via engaging in design for local bookstores. Additionally, the more experience you gain in this area the better you will understand how to design for and market your own work. 

How To Design For Local Bookstores: Various Options

When it comes to learning how to design for local bookstores, your options are far from limited. Whether you want to create a modern seating area, make the café more accessible, or create new posters, you’ve come to the right place.

#1 – Seating Area

If your bookstore does not include a seating area, you want to prioritize this. A great way to learn how to design for local bookstores is focus on building a customer-first layout. When readers wander in, seeing a friendly seating space will help them feel comfortable. 

#2 – Checkout Lines

When designed with intention, checkout lines can improve sales, customer satisfaction, and increase traffic. You may want to consider placing special sale books near the counter. This way when customers wait for service they have both more books to look at and affordable purchase options. 

#3 – Shelf Design

The layout of shelves should center on who your audience is and what type of books they like most. Knowing how to design for local bookstores specifically is powerful because you have unique access to your readers. You know what they love and why they love it, and can design for their personal taste.

#4 – Web Design

If you are familiar with Squarespace, WordPress, and other website platforms, your design for local bookstores could take a different angle. Without a standardized brand, it can be difficult for local stores to find their niché. If you understand branding and web design, consider offering your services. 

#5 – Posters and Promotional Material

Along the lines of web services, design for local bookstores can often include graphics such as posters for promos. Authors love coming in for signings in their hometown and these events need promotion. 

Benefits From Engaging In Design

Design contributes to marketing success, and local bookstores can greatly benefit from quality marketing. However, when you choose to learn how to design for local bookstores, it’s a two-way street. You can gain invaluable benefits as well. 

#1 – Experience Talking About Your Book

Spending time in a bookstore eventually opens opportunities for you to talk about your own writing. This is a natural environment to practice discussing your book and can prepare you for future pitching. In addition, talking about your book can help you secure feedback. What do people resonate with? When do their eyes seem to glaze over? 

#2 – Gain The Chance To Network With Local Authors

The design team for a bookstore often gets a type of backstage pass to authors. The publishing world relies heavily on who you know. Networking with local authors can be less intimidating and provide you with connections that will prove extremely helpful later on.

#3 – Learn Tips On Platform Building

Seeing the backend of how a local bookstore runs can give you a multifaceted view of publishing. When do most authors have signings? What months do more attendees seem to show up? Over time, you can find the answers to these questions and set yourself up for future writing success.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

When PG was first starting TPV, he learned a lot about how traditional publishers did their business from Joel Friedlander, the proprietor of The Book Designer. For quite a long time, Joel was a book designer for several New York publishers. If PG’s recollection is complete, Joel’s business was then focused on the interior design of books – making what was between the covers look professional in a style that reflected the nature of the book and its author.

Joel’s experiences included the book business long before the widespread use of personal computers to format books and design covers.

Joel is now associated with selfpublishing.com, which appears to be an assisted self-publishing company.

PG notes that some people in the self-publishing assistance business have been less than satisfactory in terms of providing useful services to aspiring authors at fair prices.

That said, he had not heard of selfpublishing.com before reading that Joel was involved with the organization.

PG spent a bit of time on the company’s website and watched part of a TedX video about the company featuring its founder.

The website touted self-publishing “packages” that cost $7,000 – $10,000.

This seemed pretty steep to PG.

He also found a few unsatisfied customers who had filed complaints against the company through The Better Business Bureau. While this is not conclusive evidence because some people will complain about almost anything regardless of what the counterparty to an agreement did or did not do, it raises a pale yellow flag in PG’s mind.

PG is not in a position to judge whether selfpublishing.com is providing good service at a fair price or not. To be fair to the company, a lot of people just don’t have the talent and temperament to be an author of a book. Most traditionally-published books are not regarded by their publishers as successful. Most self-published books are not successful by any reasonable standard.

Talents vary from person to person. The list of things that PG could never be good at doing is quite long, much, much longer than the list of things PG is good at doing.

For example, even with the best coaching and assistance in the world, PG could never be a successful ballet dancer. Although he grew up on farms and ranches where he worked when he wasn’t going to school, PG does not have what it takes to be a successful farmer or rancher. Or dentist. Or electrical engineer.

PG would never waste his time compiling a comprehensive list of jobs/occupations/pastimes/hobbies that he could never be good at, that list would be far, far longer than the things PG is or could be good at doing.

Yes, PG has belabored this general topic for too long.

He will end by saying,

1) Never sign an agreement without reading it, especially if you’re giving someone else money in connection with your signature, and

2) If, after reading an agreement, you don’t understand it clearly, show it to someone who can understand it, and

3) You don’t have to read the agreement the hospital gives you to sign when you’ve been brought there in dire condition by an ambulance. If you die in a pool of blood while reading an agreement under such circumstances, there is nothing that the finest attorney who ever lived could do for you.

(Under such dire circumstances, PG would probably sign the document with a wavy line and leave a bloody smear below his signature, indicating that he was unable to read the agreement and in no condition to understand it. PG has never tried that argument with a judge or jury, so can’t assess whether this approach might help or not.)

AI Is About to Turn Book Publishing Upside-Down

From Publisher’s Weekly:

The latest generation of AI is a game changer. Not incremental change—something gentle, something gradual: this AI changes everything, fast. Scary fast.

I believe that every function in trade book publishing today can be automated with the help of generative AI. And, if this is true, then the trade book publishing industry as we know it will soon be obsolete. We will need to move on.

There are two quick provisos, however. The first is straightforward: this is not just about ChatGPT—or other GPTs (generative pretrained transformers) and LLMs (large language models). A range of associated technologies and processes can and will be brought into play that augment the functionality of generative AI. But generative AI is the key ingredient. Without it, what I’m describing is impossible.

The second proviso is of a different flavor. When you make absolutist claims about a technology, people will invariably try to defeat you with another absolute. If you claim that one day all cars will be self-driving, someone will point out that this won’t apply to Formula One race cars. Point taken.

This isn’t about Formula One publishing. I’m going to be talking about “good enough”—about what people will accept, what they’ll buy, and what they’ll actually read. I’m not going to claim that Formula One publishers won’t be able to do a better job than AI on many of the processes described below. But I’ll challenge you to consider exactly where the human touch brings sufficient added value to justify the overhead in time and costs.

Does any of this mean that there will be no future for great novels and fine nonfiction studies? Of course it doesn’t. That’s not my point.

Do I doubt that there will still be fantastic cover designs from talented designers? Of course there will be. We’ll still stumble on new books on bookstore shelves and, humbled by the grandeur of their cover designs, declare that there’s no way they could have been designed with AI. And sometimes we’ll be right.

. . . .

Professional copyediting is the kerning of 2023. The tech is not quite here today. I don’t think that GPT-4 can yet handle copyediting to the standard that book publishers require. But that ability is going to be here sooner, not later. While professionally copyedited books may still be “better” to a refined editor’s eye, you won’t be able to sell more books with the professional human touch. They will already be good enough.

What about developmental editing? You might not let a GPT make the final editorial decisions, but you’d be foolish not to ask it for suggestions.

And ChatGPT will become the patron saint of the slush pile. Its abilities to evaluate grammar and logical expression allow it to make a once-over assessment of whether a book is (reasonably) well written. It might not spot the gems, but it will know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Ah, you will say, recalling one of those manuscripts that were rejected by 100 publishers but went on to become an unexpected bestseller—surely a GPT might miss those, too. Yet so did 100 purportedly well-trained publishing professionals.

. . . .

For the publishing industry, online distribution and advertising have separated writers from readers. Self-published authors have proven that the closer one gets to their audience, the more fans they will get and the more books they will sell. While online resellers aggregate audiences into big broad buckets, AI disambiguates them, enabling writers and readers to forge direct connections.

Amazon has become an overpriced rentier that publishers can ill afford. It can still be a door opener for new authors, but for established publishers it charges too much for what it delivers.

Amazon’s dominant position in bookselling is not going to change overnight, nor even in the morning. But part of the publishing transformation that AI will engender will be a series of energetic attempts to disrupt Amazon’s position in the distribution ecosystem. As media continues to morph, AI seeds new delivery channels. Amazon will try to dominate each new channel via acquisitions, as it did so brilliantly when it bought Audible in 2008 for $300 million. But Amazon is a lesser player in the video and gaming spaces, and, as yet, in the new entertainment channels that AI is germinating. This is shaping up as a classic example of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

But I see a bright future for bookstores. It can be chilly in AI’s uncanny valley, and bookstores will remain singular sources for camaraderie and the human touch.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

The last paragraph in PG’s excerpt raised the question in PG’s mind: “Are people who go to bookstores unable to find “camaraderie and the human touch” anywhere else?

PG imagined a book, “The Lonely Lives of Bookstore Customers.”

So why are algorithms still so bad at recommending books?

From The New Publishing Standard:

Over at Book Riot, Arvyn Cerezo takes us through the process and then explains why they will still recommend a book you have absolutely no interest in.

Machine learning systems called recommender systems, or recommendation systems, use data to assist users in finding new products and services … These algorithms, however, need a decent amount of data to choose a recommendation strategy in order to produce meaningful and personalized recommendations. This data may include past purchase histories, contextual data, business-related data, user profile-based information about products, or content-based information. Then, all of these are combined and analyzed using artificial intelligence models so that the recommender system can predict what similar users will do in the future.

All very clever, but…

The limitations of content-based filtering include its inability to comprehend user interests beyond simple preferences. It knows some basic stuff about me, but that’s as far as it can get. What if it recommends a racist book? What if it recommends a book that might trigger readers without some heads-up? What if it recommends a book that is problematic? The keyword is nuance, and algorithms can’t tell the difference between two books that have similar stories.

And don’t we know it? Fifteen or more years buying books on Amazon and it will still recommend books I would eat shards of glass than read.

I always figured that was just Uncle Jeff getting revenge for one of my less complimentary posts about Amazon, but it seems in fact it’s just that the recommendations system is as useless today as it was fifteen years ago.

Cerezo concludes:

“With all the pitfalls of algorithms — and AI in general — it seems like nothing beats book recommendations done by an actual human being. They are more accurate and more personal. Most of all, you can also find hidden gems that you really like rather than the bestsellers (and what everyone’s reading) that these machine learning systems always spit out.”

Two points arise.

First, “rather than the bestsellers (and what everyone’s reading) that these machine learning systems always spit out” is fundamental to the problem. Algorithms – especially for a commercial operation like Amazon – have the sole purpose of selling more books. They and the company do not give a flying fig about our personal preferences.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

BooHoo, Amazon presents books it thinks that the person who signed in will want to buy based on their past buying, browsing and searching habits.

As far as “personal preferences” are concerned, PG supposes that some people have “personal preferences” in books that they don’t want to buy or read or do something with, but is Amazon somehow required or expected to understand someone’s personal preferences that have not been reflected in their previous and current activity on Amazon?

If PG was as concerned about Amazon and his personal preferences, he would open a new Amazon account and be careful not to let anyone else use it. Within a few weeks, Amazon would understand PG’s personal preferences by what he did on the site with the new login ID.

As far as “book recommendations done by an actual human being,” without being a snob about it, PG has never met a person working in a bookstore who would have been likely to give him a good and precise suggestion for a book that PG would like to read. The most PG has ever received is something like, “Our twentieth-century history books are over there,” or “Fantasy and Science Fiction is on aisle three.”

To be fair, if PG in his current instantiation ran into PG at age thirty working in a bookstore, current PG doubts his thirty-year-old self would understand much about PG, the elder’s preferences in books.

If PG was good friends with a bookstore employee and had spent hours talking about books with that person, the results might be better if PG showed up when the bookstore was open and the employee was working at the time.

When the Spoiler Is the Hook

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Handselling a book whose reading experience would be materially diminished by spoilers can be a particularly difficult challenge for a bookseller if the book’s intrinsic strength is related to elements that would be inconsiderate to broach. For example you might ask why reading Sarah Everett’s The Probability of Everything brought up for me the topic of circumventing damaging spoilers, and all I could morally say was that it is an amazing book and you should read it yourself straightway and find out.

Sure, to promote the book one could just elide the dynamic surprise element or go big on description so as to say that its brilliant and novel use of an unreliable narrator is used as a lever to humanize the impacts of inhumanity with remarkable force. By tightly maintaining focus on its insightful and resilient young narrator the story extends from the personal to the cultural and communal with far-reaching effect. And so forth. One might feel more latitude if pitching the book to an adult who is purchasing it for a young reader, but it would still be wrong. Nonetheless, the susceptibility of The Probability of Everything to having its reading experience diminished by spoilage is a tricky but ultimately happy constraint. After all, having a book to share the power of whose impact on the reader would rival that of the earth’s on being struck by a giant asteroid is a rare and desirable responsibility.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

PG tried to remember an occasion on which a book store employee ever handsold him a book and couldn’t remember a single one.

While PG’s reading tastes do not always dwell on the beaten path, he almost never has problems finding a book that he enjoys either online or (citing ancient history) in a physical bookstore.

One of the reasons PG prefers shopping for books online is that there is much, much more information about almost any given book online than there is in any physical bookstore.

For example, PG will likely choose his next non-fiction read about the history of the Byzantine Empire. In some of his non-fiction history reading, PG has finally appreciated what a huge empire it was. The Ottomans controlled a large swath of North Africa bordering on the Mediterranean, Egypt, Greece, Macedonia,the Balkans and virtually all the countries on the bordering the western side of the Black Sea.

PG doesn’t think most employees in most bookstores could tell him a single thing about Bessarabia or Azerbaijan. To be clear, PG is not trying to show the breadth and depth of his knowledge, just what particular twig his historical interest is perched on at the moment.

In a year or two, his historical interest will be perched on an entirely different twig and he probably won’t remember where Bessarabia or Azerbaijan are himself.

What Will the Bookstore of the Future Look Like?

From Book Riot:

The state of bookstores feels shaky: plenty of them have shuttered, failing to adapt to changing times. Aside from ebooks and audiobooks, physical bookstores face competition in other forms of media such as TV shows, films, and music among other things that vie for people’s short attention spans.

Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the United States, has had a long list of setbacks throughout the years. Among them are the closure of some of its stores, its Nook ereader flopping, its revolving door of CEOs — all which definitely resulted in dramatic sales plunges and smaller retail space for books. Amazon Books also entered the scene by trying to stand out. Instead of books’ spines facing customers, covers were shown on the shelves. But even with the backing of the juggernaut that is Amazon, its series of bookstore chains was eventually padlocked. And when Amazon does something like this, it means that there’s no money in the business.

Fortunately, there are many establishments that managed to adapt and stay afloat by keeping up with the times. Independent bookstores, though struggling to keep up, managed to get by, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Barnes & Noble has seen a resurgence by taking advantage of BookTook trends: When something blows up on BookTook, the bookstore chain stocks them in their stores and puts “As Seen on BookTok” tag on displays.

That’s just one way to be sustainable, but with all the challenges that the book industry currently faces, how will the future bookstore look like? Hybrid? Digital? Something else? I asked some bookish folks what they think.

Future Bookstores Will Feel Like a Shopping Center

Bookstores in the future will likely be attached to other businesses, such as cafés, museums, and restaurants, among other kinds of stores in order to increase foot traffic. This clever, but not novel, business strategy might work in malls or commercial centers. People will be able to browse shelves while waiting for their hot cup of coffee, their takeout to be prepared, or even after a museum visit. Books will also be paired with products in these establishments.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

About the OP’s mall/shopping center prediction, PG just checked and there are presently 700 shopping malls in the US, down from 2,500 in the 1980s. The same article quoted one industry watcher predicting there may be just 150 malls left in the US in 10 years. On the other hand, online shopping has boomed.

Again, regarding bookstores and museums, every museum PG has ever visited already had a gift shop which included a small selection of books. Is a museum going to permit someone to build a bookshop that connects to the museum, especially if the museum was built in the 20th or 19th century? Of the handful of museum trustees among PG’s acquaintances, not a one would consider adding any sort of bookshop other than the museum gift shop they already have.

PG predicts that online is going to get bigger and bigger. The Covid shutdowns introduced a lot of people who usually went out to physical stores to shop to the ease and convenience of online shopping.

During the later stages of CovidWorld, PG added Walmart, which has a store not that far from Casa PG, to his online shopping destination list (which was pretty much all Amazon previously). For products that Walmart sells, PG can order in the morning and have a person put a Walmart bag full of stuff on his front porch later that same day. Walmart’s delivery service had some rough edges during the first several weeks, but is pretty close to Amazon in reliability in PG’s recent experience.

As a consumer, PG is pleased that Zon has a serious and deep-pocketed competitor. Competition keeps all the parties sharp and constantly innovating to gain an edge over their competitors.

Google Becomes a Client of MVB’s Metabooks

From Publishing Perspectives:

As MVB Books UK marks its anniversary at London Book Fair this week (April 18 to 20), the news today (April 17) is that MVB’s Metabooks has signed a contract to become an official metadata supplier to Google.

The deal guarantees Google receipt of metadata from Metabooks Brasil and Metabooks Mexico, as well as future MVB databases in Latin America. Google and MVB will work in cooperation with a goal of “improving the user experience for people on Google searching for books and authors, using quality metadata guaranteed by Metabooks,” according to today’s media messaging.

Crucially, the program is also expected to boost sales results of publishers, booksellers, and customers who are looking for books to buy and read.

In a prepared statement, Ronald Schild, the international CEO of MVB says, “The constant search for the improvement of our services is one of the pillars of our company.

Ronald Schild

“Bringing more and more benefits and solid results to our customers and book lovers is one of our objectives.

“The partnership with Google represents an important reinforcement for the books on our platform to be—and always remain on—the ‘right shelf’.

. . . .

As Publishing Perspectives readers know, Metabooks provides publishers and bookstores in Brazil and Mexico with an infrastructure for uniform, complex metadata management.

The technological basis of this is the central platform for the automated exchange of product information in the German-language book industry: Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher (VLB). VLB plays a key role in helping to shape international standards, and this is part of what the system then provides to retailers and other buyers with optimized metadata.

MVB essentially makes books visible by surfacing them on major platforms—operating on international metadata standards—to enable publishers and bookstores to promote their products successfully and efficiently in their home markets and abroad.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Ukraine’s Vivat Publishing: ‘An Ambitious Plan for 2023’

From Publishing Perspectives:

One year and one week after Vladimir Putin opened his unprovoked assault on Ukraine, Julia Orlova, Vivat Publishing‘s CEO, echoes the steely resolve of her fellow citizens during the anniversary of the Russian invasion, saying, “We’re proud that despite all the challenges and circumstances, in 2022 we published 350 titles, which is only 12.5-percent less than in the previous year

“And for 2023, we have ambitious plans to surpass the pre-war figures.”

Ukrainian publishers and booksellers still are forced to take extraordinary means to serve local readers, of course. Vivat’s proximity in Kharkiv to military operations forced the company’s team to evacuate shortly after the war began. But the autumn advance made by Ukraine’s military allowed Vivat to reopen its headquarters. Even so, Orlova says, as much as 80 percent of Vivat’s staff still is working from home.

Orlova tells Publishing Perspectives the war’s outbreak triggered an overhaul of the company’s publishing and distribution processes, as well as a switch to remote work to ensure workforce safety.

“With the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine,” she says, “our team evacuated from Kharkiv almost entirely.

“We managed to get 20 truckloads of books out from under the shelling. To keep them safe, we had to open a warehouse in Rivne” in western Ukraine.

“Since the end of May, we’ve almost completely restored our disrupted business processes. And in early June, we published new books.”

Nevertheless, she says, the workplace challenge is a stubborn one. “It’s difficult to keep more than 100 people together in a business process,” Orlova says, “when you haven’t seen each other for almost a year.

“Some employees quit because they moved abroad. Some of those won’t return to Ukraine. And this is the second biggest problem, not only for Vivat, but also for the Ukrainian book publishing business in general: a temporary shortage of qualified personnel.”

That said, Orlova says Ukrainian readers are demonstrating a strong interest in books, as indicated by the popularity of the new bookstores the publisher opened in Kyiv last year.

“In October, despite the war, we opened a new bookstore in Kyiv. About 1,200 people visited the bookstore on the opening day, which we consider an incredible success and evidence that Ukrainians miss live communication and want to join cultural events, even in the face of danger. We’re planning to open another bookstore in western Ukraine and reopen one more in Kharkiv.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives